About 15 years ago, when I was a university student in Mexico City, I was going to the dentist one day, and I got a text on my phone. It said I had won something and should respond to the text to claim my prize. I was super naïve, and I responded to the text. While sitting at the dentist’s office, I got a call from this guy saying congratulations. I was a winner in some promotions I didn’t even participate in (the first clue, this was a scam).
I woke up this morning inspired to write this post. I spent much of my life holding back myself, limiting my potential because I was worried. I was concerned about how people would respond, what people would say, and afraid that I would be called out as fake. I was worried that the people I grew up with, who knew one side of me and did not necessarily know the “me” I was becoming, would call me out for being fake. As a result, I held back.
About three weeks ago, I was at JFK International Airport awaiting a flight to Toronto. Since I had some time to spare, I decided to look around. I went into a store, and I saw a lovely bracelet. If I were a cartoon at that particular moment, everyone in the store would have been blinded by the brightness of the lightbulb that went off above my head. I thought to myself; my wife would love this! Satisfied by my excellent choice, my movement appeared to mimic that of Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as I gleefully bounced with the bracelet to the store’s sales representative to make the purchase. She took the bracelet, looked at it, skimmed through a stack of papers, then said to me, “I don’t know the price of this.” At that point, I knew exactly how the Wile E Coyote feels when one of his anvil traps for the Road Runner backfires and gets him instead because I was crushed.
When I was younger, I remembered hearing news of people dying, whether from the adults around me or on television, if I happened to be at someone’s house when the death news was on because I didn’t have a television at my home. What stood out to me back then was that it was always someone I didn’t know, or If I knew them, they were not close to me. Hence, these deaths never bothered me, but lately, there has been a shift.