I was talking to my therapist the other day who mentioned I may have PTSD. I immediately laughed. Do I compare the last five years to a war zone? Am I asshole enough? The first-world brat in me told me to say yes- to not be ashamed of my feelings nor measure and compare them to others on the trauma scale. The first-generation in me said “callate” and told me to be grateful for not having to walk the streets with bananas on my head. How do I categorize the mess that is me?

I’m turning thirty five this week and I’m throwing a big party. I’m inviting everyone I know to celebrate this coming-of-age milestone. Oh- and I invited Usher and asked him to sing happy birthday but ONLY in falsetto.

Mhmmm…sike. Goth Moth is out in full vengeance. She wants to spend her birthday alone, isolated from the world and bathe in absolute solitude. Why invite other people and make it a whole thing? Does anyone even like birthday parties or gatherings? For real, are people excited or is it like “let’s get this over with”? Because TBH…in true Goth Moth fashion…I am the latter most of the time :/. To be clear, it has NOTHING to do with the birthday girl/boy. I’ve never liked being in a room full of people I don’t know. If I was being interrogated and was put into a room full of people having conversations over loud music, I would spill ALL the tea. Give them the chinaware too. I would sell out everybody. No secrets would be safe.

First of all, what is the point of getting to know someone if you can’t hear them?

Second, what if you heard bits of what they said but completely missed the part about them saying ‘let’s go chopping babies’ because you heard ‘ let’s go shopping, maybe’ right when the bass dropped? Unintentional serial killer in the making.That is a ‘Dexter’ spin-off waiting to happen. Showtime, call me.

Speaking of bass, have you ever been in a car where someone had the bass so loud you felt your soul having a seizure? Like why? Why is the bass that loud? Just because we could doesn’t mean we should. Why is it an option? Is there a need, besides setting off the alarm of every car you pass by? I genuinely would love to understand why people enjoy losing their hearing but I digress…

Where was I…gatherings! I don’t like them. Especially the birthday kind. My friends asked me if I wanted to do anything special but I told them I wanted to spend it alone. It made me realize that most of the time, my default is to be alone. I’ll let you know when my therapist cracks the code but for now I’ll say I’m betrothed to my depression and she is a jealous bae.

I somehow convinced myself to believe that I’m a human Rubik’s cube. No one, including me, knows or understands the alignments of my colors. Why waste my time trying to feel included in a world where I don’t feel like I blend with anything.

You know you’re depressed when you’re annoyed writing this depressing shit.

I’ve been rewatching ‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ this past week, reminiscing that at this very same time, five years ago, I watched it for the first time and it changed the course of my life.

I was depressed, just about to turn thirty and was living a comfortable but unfulfilled life with someone who did not understand me. I remember feeling immediately immersed into the show’s colorful and late 1950’s depiction of New York City, resonating with the housewife who suddenly realized her dreams didn’t revolve around keeping and maintaining her marriage.

I worked with the city and even though I was a director who made decent money, I felt absolutely worthless there, rotting away in my cubicle. I often dreamt about quitting, starting a new life where I just practiced and taught karate everyday. When I think about it now, I don’t think it mattered what I did. I just wanted to escape and knew my partner at the time would be disappointed if I quit. So I stayed, tolerated and focused on saving money for the ‘happily ever after” part of our lives except I didn’t realize that the ‘happily ever after’ was conditional. We would only be happy if things were done his way and in the order he wanted.

We had just been rejected by the board of our building on a two bedroom apartment we wanted to purchase on the C-wing side. My partner owned another apartment (same building), where his mother resided and forgot to pay the maintenance for several months. When the board saw it went to collections for missed payments, they denied our application right away. I was pissed. He never told me he was paying the maintenance or that he owed money. I confronted him but he refused to talk about it. What he did or didn’t do with his money was ‘none of my business’. According to him, the board made a mistake with their decision because he was always on-time with his payments (in the apartment he lived in) but you know what he didn’t forget? He didn’t forget to remind me that I didn’t pay rent, whenever I criticized him, hitting my ego right in the solar plexus. I guess I didn’t contribute enough to have opinions, making me feel like a freeloader even though I paid utilities and groceries. When he calmed down, he would sweetly tell me that everything would work out, what we really wanted was a house and an apartment would have gotten in the way. I believed him because I didn’t have enough money to disagree.

We lived in the butt crack of Forest Hills and Corona Queens, right by the Grand Central Parkway. It was a residential area and the nearest train station was about a twenty minute walk. We had a beautiful apartment, on the top floor with a view of the highway and Flushing Meadow Park. I could see the infamous globe from our window but there wasn’t much near by. To avoid taking a cab and a train to the city, I would stay home and keep myself entertained with a new show, game or recipe except if I cooked, I had to hide it. He couldn’t stand the smell of food in the apartment. He said it was “ghetto”. I grew up in a Dominican household, where the aroma of chicken bouillon, red onions, garlic and tomato paste sautéing in a skillet was engrained into our walls. A Dominican kitchen was never white. It was an eggshell color with a shade of red, growing more burgundy over time as the grease piled on. That was the shade of love and I couldn’t fathom how an act of affection could be depicted as ‘low-class’. When he came home and smelled a wiff of a home-cooked meal, he’d yell and stomp around in the apartment, asking me why I cooked. If I said was hungry, he’d yell why I didn’t order food instead. He’d lock himself in the room and wouldn’t speak to me until the smell aired out. I hated the silent treatment. Despised it. He would completely disengage, and wouldn’t even acknowledge me. So I invested in expensive candles, cleaning products and prayed he didn’t smell any food after I cooked a meal.

He worked in construction, overseeing projects in high rise buildings and often worked late. That year on my birthday, he wished me well in the morning and told me he had to work late. I saw this coming and already planned to drink the entire day on the couch. I felt so worthless. I didn’t feel like I was living my best life. I felt tortured inside and when I looked at our beautiful apartment, knowing how comfortable I was, I hated myself for feeling this way. I called off from work and at eight in the morning, I was already down a glass of wine and two episodes deep into ‘Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’. I laid and pressed my entire existence onto the couch. My limbs were lifeless as I resisted wiping my tears, allowing the rivers to forge new paths on the crevices of my nose and I could feel my skin care going down with sorrow, dripping onto the cushion.

Watching Miriam build her life back together, after her husband walked out on her, captivated me. The way she used humor, the stage and a audience to process her grief inspired me. Even though we led two different lives, I couldn’t help but resonate with her. I remember telling myself:

That’s it, I’m not going to hold myself back anymore. I’m going to quit my job and become a fitness instructor.

I knew what I had to do and how I was going to do it. I was going to slowly transition out of my role, give my boss a three months notice, start working part-time so I can teach boxing classes at night, leave my job in March, go to San Francisco for a week and return in April as a full-time instructor. It was so clear to me, it was like being in the desert and seeing a path to the city. I had a plan and it was going to work. Oh- and I wasn’t going to tell my partner until I handed my resignation first.

I knew he would be upset. I knew he would talk me out of it and I didn’t want him to- not after seeing my myself drinking pina coladas on the other side of the desert. So a couple of days later, I went into my boss’s office, handed in my resignation, told him my plan and thanked him for the opportunity. He was shocked but was surprisingly supportive and agreed to work with our HR department for my transition out. Once it was a done deal, I went home that night and told my partner about my decision. He didn’t react at first but I could see his blood vessels slowly charging up his neck like it was the ‘Battle of the Bastards’. He was furious and refused to talk to me about it. I tried bringing it up again before we went to bed but he turned over and pulled the sheets over his head.

The next couple of weeks were pretty rough. He tried to act like it never happened. The day would begin amicable but immediately turn tense when I brought up the subject. He would shut down, give me the silent treatment and then the next day act like nothing ever happened. It was exhausting. Then I started getting more classes at the gym and my last day at work was six weeks away so one Sunday morning, I told him we really needed to talk about this.

Just so you know, I really hate remembering this part. I’ve spoken about it several times but I paraphrased and cut a lot of the details out.To be honest, I think I forgot or blocked out a good chunk of what happened because now all I remember are the paraphrased bits I’m about to mention.

I told him I was going through with this. It was a done deal. No turning back. I had enough money in my savings and didn’t expect him to take care of me and was going to be responsible for myself. He told me I was making a mistake, that I was giving up a good career to become a ‘low-life’, a ‘bum’ and that if I wanted to quit my job with the city, I needed to start paying rent. I told him I still planned to work so I didn’t understand why he was so repulsed. He told me if I really wanted to do this, he couldn’t be with me anymore.

I was loyal, loving and caring to him for five years. I almost bought a property with this mother fucker. How did I not see this coming? Was he always this shallow? Was he only with me because of the job and salary I had? What about me as a person?

I called my sister up and told her what happened. She showed up and hour later with my brother-in-law, best friend, her husband and four bins. I packed everything I could and left.

Everything that happened after this moment, felt like falling down the stairs from the top of the Empire State building. I had to move in with my sister and slept on a air mattress in her spare room for three months. I barely made any money working at the gym, so I picked up two other jobs teaching ELA and college access to elementary and middle school students. I couldn’t handle my reality nor be alone with my thoughts because all I did was scream in my head. I would go to bed sobbing, squeezing my eyes shut, like I was trying to implode the world in between my lashes. I could not bear the thought of what I did and the consequences that followed. At the gym, I tried to teach as much as I could. If an instructor was out, I always subbed, sometimes teaching eight times a day. If I wasn’t teaching, I was working out, practicing fitness routines or boxing combinations. At one point I enlisted in the revenge-bod army and became fucking G.I. Danessa. I taught myself how to do pull-ups and one-arm push-ups. I would punch the wall to ‘condition’ and ‘chisel’ my knuckles because I wanted my punches to pierce through flesh.

Want to lose weight, gain abs and take over the world in seven days? Get your heart broken.

I really wanted my partner to have ‘Joel’s’ redemption arc, who was ashamed of himself for cheating and walking out on his wife. He went through the entire series reclaiming his image as good father, husband and provider. That never happened for me. My ‘Joel’ was more like ‘Jafar’ but I’d be okay with his arc if it ended with him being stuck in a genie lamp, slowly melting in a pool of lava.

I’ve been fortunate enough to make it through the other side and survive this ordeal. I managed to find work and my own place thanks to G.I. Danessa. At this point, I think my heart could survive a nuclear fallout because my physical and emotional space is a fortress. I don’t let anyone near me and if I get a bad wiff from someone, I remove them from my life, immediately but I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to be paranoid, cautious and feel like I’m at war.

As I approach thirty five , I have a lot to be proud of but I still feel I’m living in a setback and not going through it, like I’m being strangled by an invisible lasso. Is that why a moth will sit motionless on a closet door for days? Is it turning thirty five?