Fighting the Monster

By Anonymous / Spring 2022

I am writing these lines in the third year of my higher education journey. As a 26-year-old majoring in international studies, this isn’t any type of remarkable achievement. In fact, I am very late in this race in which we all participate. But given the circumstances in which I write these words, I believe there are many things to celebrate. At some point during my early 20s, I suffered a total disconnection from my own identity. I didn’t know who I was or what my purpose was in life. In fact, the task of finding myself once again is still an ongoing process that I am not sure when will finish.

This feeling of looseness and hopelessness was not something I was born with. Rather, it was something I developed upon realizing how the world functions around me. Many factors altered my vision of my surroundings. The first one was the passing of my mother. The unexpected loss of the most loving and charming person in my life completely changed my sense of belonging in this world. But what had the most profound and intense impact was what came later. Acknowledging the structural barriers that compromise any effort toward self-realization, happiness, and quality of life made me lose every bite of hope and sent me on a trip of no return to nowhere. Something started growing within me. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I knew this feeling was growing bigger and more powerful without any chance of stopping it. It was a monster that would soon take control of every aspect of my life. Anxiety was its method of governing my inner me. I have a constant battle with this monster every day. It has convinced me that I am an irremediable loser and that I shouldn’t even try challenging myself because everything I propose would be a total failure. Perhaps, this monster is a reflection of our society. I want to use the following paragraphs to tell the story of how I have struggled with mental health in the context of our distorted social and economic structure.

Losing myself

I grew up in a small town in the south of Spain, very close to the Mediterranean sea. I had a very happy childhood with my mom and sister there. We didn’t lack basic needs, but we didn't enjoy much economic freedom either. We lived on a very tight budget for most of my life. It didn’t matter; I knew our financial situation was momentary. All my life, I have heard the false promises of the capitalist defenders: “If you study and work hard, you will achieve everything you have ever dreamed.” I gave my best in everything, knowing every sacrifice would pay off in the long run. Since I had the best grades in my class, I knew it was just a matter of time to find success. I continued earning the best grades during High School, where most of my peers, professors, and I believed I had a bright future. In fact, I obtained the second highest grade on my state University admission test, the famous ‘Selectividad.’ I applied to some of the most prestigious universities in Spain, and all of them accepted me. I decided to join the chemical engineering program at the University of Valencia, where I was offered a scholarship. It was June of 2013, and ahead of me, I had the most promising and adventurous summer of my life, free of responsibilities and full of hope. But life had different plans. My mother was diagnosed with colon cancer at the end of July. My world changed completely the moment I heard the name of that infamous disease. I cried for three days straight, as I couldn’t imagine a life without that beautiful soul by my side. But news got worse: cancer was on stage four, and doctors estimated six months of life. The estimations were wrong. On August 23rd, 2013, less than a month after her diagnosis, my mom passed away. I was by her side when she took her last breath, and as she left, one part of me went with her.

The passing of my mother was the lowest emotional point of my life. But it was something more. It was my first contact with the cruel reality of the system. My mother had been visiting the doctor for a year before her cancer diagnosis. She had been experiencing intense stomach pain that wouldn't even let her sleep at times. However, the hospital refused to give her specialized medical tests because they lacked timeslots for the few testing machines available in our region. It was December 2012, and she had been given a colonoscopy appointment for October 2013, two months after she passed away. They gave us another option. We could choose to go with the private sector of the national healthcare system and pay a disproportionate fare to get an expedited appointment in just a matter of days. Unfortunately, our unstable financial situation didn’t allow my mom to pay for those services, and she had no other option than to wait nine months to find out what was killing her. She never stood a chance.

At first, I had a passive attitude toward the ineffectiveness of the healthcare system; I thought the medical team at the hospital was to blame because they couldn’t test my mom earlier. I was furious, angry, and committed to finding the responsible who didn’t want to help my mother. But as time passed and I learned to look deeply at how things are structured around me, I realized that my mom’s death was not just a mere and sad diagnosis error.

I recognize myself in the figure of the farmer being forced out of his land in The Grapes of Wrath. The tenant, who is being evicted from his land by the bank, refuses to give up his home and threats to kill the tractor that came to demolish his house. The tractor tells him that he is just following orders from the bank and that if he kills him, someone else will come to destroy his home. The farmer kept asking who was to kill as the tractor responded: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all” (Steinbeck, Chapter 5). As this farmer, I was influenced by the human tendency to personalize every source of malice. What I was failing to see, like the farmer, was the deeper root of evil.

In the eyes of our economic system, the only reason why my mother is not here today is that she was not worth saving. Neoliberalism has taught me that. The medical testing equipment was there, the appointments were available, and the disease could have been cured without even having to do a chemotherapy session. But as neoliberalism ideologies have privatized every aspect of the public sector, it has redefined our society to prioritize profits over people. We are not citizens anymore; we are consumers. The institutions meant to preserve citizens’ rights are being utilized to maintain and fuel the competitive environment that drives our economy. The privileged class doesn’t need public services such as Social Security or Public Healthcare; they have all the resources to protect themselves if any disgrace comes their way. We, on the other hand, are left unprotected and forced to compete in a structurally unequal context that pushes us to the edge of our mental and physical health. As Noam Chomsky reflected in the documentary Requiem For The American Dream, solidarity is under attack in our current economic system. “Solidarity is a fundamental human trait - but that has to be driven out of people’s heads. You’ve got to be for yourself, follow the vile maxim: “don’t care about others,” which is okay for the rich and powerful, but is devastating for everyone else.” (Chomsky)

Realizing the deeper root of evil was an inflection point; it made me lose trust in the system I had always believed to be fair. It made me lose hope in my future, as well as in myself. The French sociologist Emelie Durkheim calls this effect the state of ‘rulesless-ness: “Ruleless-ness means the norms that govern a society and create a sense of organic solidarity no longer function. The belief, for example, that if we work hard, obey the law and get a good education we can achieve stable employment, social status and mobility along with financial security becomes a lie” (Hedges, par. 3). I decided to drop out of college before I even had a chance to start. I became distant from my friends and family. I started reading worthless books on self-help meditation that kept telling me everything was alright when it really wasn’t. I was not myself anymore; part of me was already gone. And what remained was a disillusioned 17-year-old who had no motivation to keep going. Something had started growing within me.

Feeding the monster

I moved to the United States to escape reality. In the voice of my mother and many others, I have always heard that America was the land of opportunities, a place where you can truly achieve everything you wish. Not the whole me came to this country; a part of myself was already missing. But I wanted to move on, take control of my life once again, and get back on track. I arrived at Kingston, a small town about 70 miles north of New York City, where most of my mother’s side of the family had been living since the 80s. The first thing I noticed when we finally arrived in our neighborhood was devastation and poverty; it did not seem like the New York I had seen on TV. As I looked out of the window, I saw a neighborhood that had been submerged in deep poverty. My uncle told me that when they first arrived in the 80s, the community was thriving: many businesses were open in the area, and plenty of work was available as many industries were present in the Hudson Valley area. But as New York City grew larger and a high flow of immigrants kept coming to the region, the government enacted urbanistic measures to accommodate housing. It wasn’t until years later that I learned about redlining policies, the actual reason why these neighborhoods were segregated. As banks refused to lend money to aspiring non-white homeowners, urbanistic policies drew maps based on racial demographics and labeled Latino and African American neighborhoods as bad investments (Shaw, par. 17). These neighborhoods were filled with immigrant families who couldn’t afford the increasing rent prices on the other side of the Hudson River. The structural inequality in the housing sector has turned a prosperous neighborhood into a focus of violence and crime. And here I was, starting a new life, in a new socio-cultural context but facing the same evil I had been trying to escape.

The initial motivation I experienced when I first moved to this country rapidly decayed. I knew that if I wanted to get back on track and move on with my life, I needed to continue my education. But like every other aspect of American society, systematic barriers prevented me from getting back on my feet. My family was in no position to help me pay for college tuition and other expenses. I couldn’t even apply for student loans due to my lack of credit history and not having a job. Even if I did, that would’ve meant jumping into the debt trap that has caught millions of students. I felt miserable. I went from being a straight A’s student with a scholarship to one of the best universities in Europe to an immigrant on the other side of the Atlantic who couldn’t even sign up for English classes at the local community college.

The labor situation wasn’t any better. There were indeed thousands of entry-level positions available for young adults with no experience like me. Still, most of these positions were precarious work that wouldn’t even pay living wages. At first, I couldn’t believe it. I knew the United States was relatively negligent in social services such as Healthcare or pension benefits, but I have always thought that the quality of work was better than in any other country, including Spain. What I didn’t know was that the U.S. labor market, as well as the rest of the country, was a system built on racial segmentation. There were good work opportunities, just not for us. The ‘New Deal,’ a series of programs instituted during the Great Depression aiming to offer financial relief to Americans, excluded Latinos and African Americans, establishing structural racialization that has become one of the most significant contributors to inequality in America. The legacy of the New Deal and its racial segmentation has kept Latino and African Americans concentrated in low-wage occupations, establishing economic barriers to education and condemning them to a life of financial insecurity (Unidos Us, p. 9). I saw this problem reflected in the lives of my tios and tias. The structural barriers to employment force them to survive paycheck to paycheck for more than thirty years. My uncles worked in landscape, laboring endless hours under extreme weather conditions. My aunts worked sewing curtains for a company that didn’t even offer paid sick days.

They look tired; their facial expressions evidenced a life that was not meant for them. But they have no escape. Their children had to keep eating, and rent needed to be paid. I saw my future compromised by the same barriers that took away their dreams. After three months of living in New York, I felt out of place, isolated, and unmotivated to keep going.

The circumstances involving my life at the time were just too much. I was moving in no direction in a tempest that showed no signs of ceasing. All my frustrations and uncertainties about my future became anguish and anxiety. Every dream became a nightmare. The monster was growing bigger within me. In my head, I convinced myself that my situation would soon get better, that I was just going through a bad time but the sun would rise again tomorrow. But it didn’t. Some days, I didn’t even have the energy to step out of bed to see the sun. I knew that the moment I went to the real world, I would start suffering again. I hated myself for acting cowardly, but I couldn't help it. I had no net to fall back; the only person who had ever had my back was gone. I felt no longer in control of myself. This monster pushed me to the edge of my existence and made me contemplate suicide as the only way to regain control. But I wasn’t going to give up; that would have meant hurting people I love. I couldn’t put that burden on them.

Finding myself

It’s been almost nine years since my world changed forever. During this time, I have worked on finding myself. It is still an ongoing process, but I think I’m on the right path. I enrolled back in college to continue my education. It wasn’t easy to return to college. At first, I thought I was too old to join a classroom. It wasn’t my age that made me feel old; in the end, I’m only twenty-six.’ It was the socially constructed idea that you must begin college as soon as you graduate High School. The competitive environment of our system has made us fall into the belief that you must follow a predetermined pattern of life roadmap where every step of the way is meant to maximize your participation in the economy. If you fail to follow this pattern, you fall behind in the race. I have experienced how my self-esteem deteriorated after seeing my peers leaving me behind. It’s tough to see some of your best friends graduating college when you didn’t even have the chance to start. But as I open my eyes to a reality that hid in plain sight, I realize that we are all in the same race but with different starting points. It’s not that I fell behind; I started behind. The social experiment of The $100 Race helps visualize this concept. In this experiment, students are challenged to run for $100. But after responding to a series of questions, some students are allowed to take steps forward. These questions represent how social inequalities prevent us from starting the race at the same point. It’s like being in the same tempest but with different boats. I recommend watching this video experiment to anyone facing insecurities about starting a new adventure at an ‘odd’ time. It’s never too late.

Recovering my academic career was a huge step in finding myself. But it was not enough. So many frustrations and broken dreams wouldn’t allow me to feel completely alive again. The monster that lives within me is still powerful, and it would take advantage of any situation to retake control. But I had recovered something important, something that would be essential in continuing to find myself: hope. Not hope in the system and its institutions; hope in me. I had been able to face my strongest demons, and I had been able to see the deeper root of evil. Even at my lowest point, I had fought the monster with all my strength, showing who truly was in control. I have awakened to a deeper reality of myself and the world around me. I have discovered that the imposed context of my existence does not define who I am or where I want to go.

I don’t want to be part of this race. I want to run my own race, at my own pace, and with my own rules. If that means disconnecting from the unfair and unequal competition world where I live, that would be a low price to pay.

Works Cited

Hedges, Chris. “American Anomie.” TruthDig, Sept. 24, 2018, Accessed on June 8th, 2022

Hutchison, Peter D., et al. “Requiem for the American Dream.” The Film Collaborative, 2015. Accessed on June 8th, 2022.

Shaw, Danny. “Red-lining and the Historical Roots of Housing Segregation in New York City.” Liberation School, 2009.

“Social Inequalities Explained in a $100 Race.” YouTube, uploaded by PeterD, Oct. 14, 2017. Accessed on June 8th, 2022.

Steinbeck, John. “The Grapes of Wrath, Ch. 5”.

“Toward a More Perfect Union: Understanding Systematic Racism and Resulting Inequality in Latino Communities.” UNIDOS US, 2021. Accessed on June 8th, 2022.