A Life Worth Living

By Aurelius

Despite a challenging beginning of poverty, I eventually broke out and found "success". I had created a life full of love and wonderful experiences. Yet, powerful and unseen forces, habits of my mental health, dragged me into darkness: I survived an extreme suicide attempt. I hope that my book helps inspire you to fight on and to realize that your own story is beautiful, too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurelius
• Release date: Nov 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370727384

Aurelius

I am the author of “A Life Worth Living”, Aurelius Secundus. I currently am progressing my career in IT, with the hope of some day having a place with a yard and a patio. I live with my cat, Athena, in the beautiful state of Colorado.On my free time I enjoy playing video games, drinking coffee, anything that involves being outside, practicing martial arts, and working out.I chose to write under a pen name as I fear that the content of my book might have career repercussions.

Book preview

[Prologue]

I began writing this book in 2006, a time when my career and social life were reaching new heights. I was working for the United States Congress, was doing PhD research for an extraordinary biochemist, and had been on a date with a model. I had just completed the Bataan Memorial Death March with heavy gear. For someone like me, I felt like I was Icarus flying close to the sun.

I come from a deep poverty of dirt floors, born in 1983 in Socorro TX to immigrant parents who don’t speak English. That beginning made every new experience up the socioeconomic staircase an exciting adventure. By 2006 alone, I had met many amazing and deeply inspirational people who I never could have imagined meeting as a Mexican-American peasant from an emotionally abusive childhood. Treasuring these people was how this project began. It would morph into a record of grief, joy, loss, and love.

On May 1st 2012, I made the decision that the relentless struggle that was my life was something I could no longer justify. I put a 9-mm weapon to my head and pulled the trigger—a suicide attempt, as it’s better known. I lost part of my brain and fractured my skull. I should have bled out, yet somehow, I survived—a miracle that I still don’t understand to this day. Lying on my deathbed made me realize just how much I had felt and lived in such a short time. It made me want to share my story and its message: Life is beautiful, for all of us—if we can see past the filter of our mind—and its expectations.

In sharing this book, the risks I take are outweighed by the hope that anyone with a seed of doubt and anger about who they are and what they’ve accomplished will listen to a message from someone who has been to the edge of the afterlife and back; the message is this: you are enough.

I don’t pretend that any of my life has been an adventure, or that it is grand and worthy of retelling. My tale is important to me because I love and care deeply about people and I love and care deeply about this beautiful and unknown experience of life that we all share. My hope is that by reading some—or all—of this book, some person trying to decide what path to take will be inspired to consider college. That someone completely down on her luck, feeling like there is no hope, will take a deep breath, plan a small step forward, and take it; that some wealthy person disconnected from life will remember what it means to value it at its most basic level. Shit, if all you get from this is that you appreciate your coffee a little more the next morning, then I’ll have wildly succeeded.

Be kind; first to yourself, then to others. Seek help when you know you need it. Never give up.

I’ve either omitted the full names of people and locations or have changed them entirely to protect their privacy.

This was never a book. It was a peasant’s journal. It was a journal that grew wiser as the years passed. I hope that I’ve compiled it enough to make you laugh a little; that I’ve compiled it enough to inspire you to fight the good fight, if only a little.

Book 1:

Beginnings

It wasn’t until I made it out to The University of Texas that I started to realize just how poor I was. I had experienced situations of deep poverty for years, but it all seemed normal because I never had access to the rest of the world around me; only to my own little microscopic world of my neighborhood, Campestre, in Socorro TX. I couldn’t ever imagine that anyone alive could have a life routine different from my own. Even the imagination needs some experience to feed it.

Being dirt poor allows you to focus on the richness and depth that life has in its bare state, free from wealth and possessions. It allows you to learn that the connections and experiences you have with those around you are the true currency of life. It’s the human element that binds us all and it is invaluable.

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[Hearth]

I was very small when we came to live in Socorro. My dad had bought a tract of land and started building a house. He had a degree in la ley de la vida, which translates into the law of life. There are many people—from many walks of life—who have a similar phrase. It simply means that you do whatever is necessary to bring food to the table. It means that you pick a craft and learn it as best as you can and then improve it through trial and error, never embarrassed, always determined. My father had friends who were electricians or plumbers, but building our home was mostly a learn-as-you-go effort. To avoid calling it a wreck, I choose the word shoddy to describe its completed craftsmanship. When my family moved in, we all slept in the living room. Our house had a hard-packed dirt floor, we didn’t have windows, and a plastic sheet served as our roof, covering a cinder block exterior and sheet rock framing for walls. There was no running water. Instead, our family would receive 5-gallon water donations from the local church. To bathe, my mother would heat water for hours until it was mild and then dump it into a large tina (tin tub). We’d get in and then use empty Blue Bunny Ice Cream gallon containers to pour water over ourselves. We didn’t have electricity.

My mother would cook on a tiny iron stove fueled by wood. It had a little grate door you had to open to put the wood in. Sopa de repollo (cabbage soup) was often on menu: water, cabbage, spices. Sporadically, people in the neighborhood would donate or barter items like potatoes and vegetables. We would have a piece of chicken once a month. A few times, Mom fed us dirty little catfish she would catch in the canal behind our home. My siblings and I each had one or two pairs of jeans. If we outgrew them, too bad; when clothes got torn up, my mother would sew them back together or put a patch on them. Mom sewed a few dresses for my sister which my sister would recycle and reuse for middle and high school. My shoes were too small for me for many years. This pushed my pinky toe on my left foot over all my other toes and to this day my left pinky overlaps my other toes.

While Dad worked painting and fixing cars mom worked at a sweatshop (maquiladora) full time. There was no baby-sitting except for a few pockets of time when we had neighbors who could come and watch any one of us. When my sister was about 7, she was tasked with taking care of us. I was a good kid but my brother would give her a run for her money by setting fire to things in our home and otherwise just being a pain in the ass. One time, he was so bad that she chased him out of the house with a broom; he went without eating the whole day and when our parents got back from work they found him unconscious at a playground. Haha, pendejo!

If we got sick, we stuck it out—there was no visiting the doctor. Life was surprisingly perilous—barbed wire fences, broken glass bottles glued to walls, dangerous bike stunts, violent loose dogs. My mother and sister told me of a time when my brother got involved in some real shenanigans. He had managed to pierce a hole in his abdomen so large that it revealed his guts; my mother had to get him to calm down and lie down, then poured a ton of hydrogen peroxide on the wound. Splinters gushed out in a bubbly mess, to which she taped a gauze pad. There, all done. If we ever visited the doctor, we went to Juarez where the care was a lot cheaper but the industry was much more unstable. The surgery years later for fixing my overlapped pinky toe was a catastrophe and after we went back to complain to the doctor, he had vanished. My first legitimate doctor visit came when I was about 16 and only because there was a government insurance I qualified for.

I remember the day when natural gas was finally run into the house. My brother and I were playing outside when suddenly we heard an explosion and a shattering of glass. My brother always had the goofiest look of shock I’ve ever seen in a kid and I looked at him wide-eyed while he gave me the goofy look. As we ran to the house, we saw that all our windows had shattered and the glass had shot outward. The service man doing the installation was ambling his way towards the door—he looked at us and we saw that all his facial hair had turned to ash as he pawed at his face and coughed. We laughed hysterically. The propane tank was a drastic change in quality of life. It was a pretty common setup with a huge cylindrical tank set outside that provided natural gas for cooking and heating. (It was also a pony or a wild buffalo for poor kids without toys.) And now we could shower with warm water and heat our home during the winter. My mom would eventually get a gas range with knobs to control the flame level, a bit of an upgrade from throwing wood into a piece of iron.

After a few years, our humble home became a decent place to live in. We eventually even got evaporative cooling and electricity! Our home required a lot of maintenance so all of us were tapped early in life for the job. We washed dishes, cooked, cut weeds, and swept and mopped to Mom’s obsessive standards The standards were never met. At one point, my sister put it upon herself to grow a vegetable garden for us to help our nutrition. She was about 11 years old.

I remember our home fondly, even if I do not remember too many moments spent with my family. Our home was beautiful. We had a big tree planted square in the middle of our back yard. There was patchy yellow desert grass and dried weeds all around. I remember scaling our roof many times to give our evaporative cooler maintenance. I remember walking in the yard to bring in clothes that had been hung out to dry on metal wires, taut between iron poles, as a howling thunderstorm was approaching. I remember constantly stealing away and sitting at the back steps of the house; the stupid dog would come over to me wagging his tail as I sat in the night, looking at the stars, serenaded by crickets. It was such a beautiful home. It was the only place for me.

We had a ton of pets with some outrageous personalities. We