Honduras: Prologue

I'm the guy.

From March 25th to April 3rd of 2019, I was part of Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective's delegation to Honduras. The theme of the delegation was "Migration and Social Movements."

Around this time last year, I was sitting in my Habitat for Humanity pickup truck by our construction site in Hugo, Minnesota, a small town on the edge of the Twin Cities. It was a few minutes after 4; our workday had just ended. I was wearing my AmeriCorps hoodie, jeans and work boots, all of which were streaked with paint, caulk and other construction materials.

It was a work outfit I’d never imagined wearing for a job I’d never imagined having. I’d gone many years without taking a risk and ended up in a rut that led to severe anxiety and depression. The AmeriCorps job with Habitat was my attempt to get out of that rut. Now I was getting ready for a phone call that might mean taking on more risk.

I called her or she called me, I don’t remember which. It was Meredith, one of the coordinators of Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective’s upcoming Honduras delegation. We’d be meeting with indigenous communities and other groups that had been subjected to violence from state security forces and others.

She warned me about the dangers, which freaked me out even more than I already was. I’d read the description of the trip, especially the part about how every group or person we’d be meeting with had active death threats against them. I thought she’d downplay the risks, so when she didn’t it put me on edge.

She said it wouldn’t be like the trip to Oaxaca, my previous Witness for Peace delegation; we wouldn’t be scuba diving. I thought, “Does she even know what we did in Oaxaca?” But that was probably just a joke to lighten the mood. I was too nervous to pick up on her sense of humor.

I told her I was still interested, but I had to think about it. My answer was pseudo-macho, not wanting to sound like a wuss. I didn’t want that to be my reason for going though. It should be a noble, selfless choice. Still plagued with regret for not taking more risks, I decided to go, even though I could feel the symptoms of my repressed fear: detachment, disorientation, fatigue.

There was some courage in that decision (I guess), but I’d been so miserable for so long that it just felt like I was taking a flyer. My life had become such a burden that the risk seemed minor compared to the pain of continuing in my rut.

I was so emotionally detached from the rest of humanity and the world that I had no faith in my ability to help anyone (esp. myself). But the real problem was that, even when I did help people, it didn’t bring me any joy. I was so hopeless that no amount of do-gooding could drag me out of my pit of despair. At best, it only distracted me for a while.

Looking back now, I wonder if I ever really got much joy from helping others. I volunteered at a soup kitchen a few times in high school and even took a “missionary experience” (minus the proselytizing) trip to Tijuana for a week. But I was always nervous around the people we were trying to help and never felt like I made an emotional connection with them. There was a gulf between us that I couldn’t cross.

There was also the problem of being emotionally repressed. That was probably the main issue. I’m very sensitive, and I got bullied a lot in elementary school and didn’t have many friends. I could cry on a dime in those days, but, when I got to middle school, my tear ducts shut down. I was terrified to show any weakness in that emotionally perilous environment, so I pushed down the sadness and put up a brave front.

My fear of vulnerability was so strong that I couldn’t reach the despair building up inside me. The risk of letting people see it was too great. As a result, I couldn’t connect with anyone on a deep emotional level. Being a teenager at the time, it either didn’t seem like that big of a deal or like something that would pass in time, once it was safe to come out of my shell again.

I think that fear led me to become selfish. I hated the bullies so much that I took on many of their qualities. I was irritated by those who reminded me of my own weakness. I could tell myself I was better than my tormentors because I kept those feelings to myself. I usually didn’t let my hostility show (although I wasn’t as good at hiding it as I thought).

The anger inside ate away at my soul. My high school and college experiences were good, but, once I got out into the Real World, I didn’t have the emotional resilience or support network to get by. I had friends, but eventually they either moved away or ghosted me. I didn’t have a strong enough relationship with my family to get me through the travails of Modern Life.

Through multiple breakdowns/crises, I seemed to rebuild my psyche on stronger footing, but, in the long run, my social situation kept getting more isolated. Over time, my desperation and misery built up and made it harder to put on a happy face and make new friends. I got worn down by Life. Each time I crashed, I thought I was hitting rock bottom, but every 3 years or so I found a new basement.

That’s how I wound up living with my parents in my 30’s, left with one friend who would actually call me back. It seemed like a dead end to the rut I’d been in since graduating from college. This led to my last breakdown/crisis in 2014, which resulted in me quitting my last permanent corporate job. It also convinced me to start taking psychotropic medication for the first time; the anxiety had grown to new, gargantuan size, becoming truly scary.

After several months of unemployed misery, I finally tried a non-corporate job. I started out as a part-time yardwork contractor with a non-profit, shoveling the driveways and sidewalks of seniors, then transitioned to mowing lawns for them in the spring. After a 2-year-long detour back into the corporate temp world, I found the Habitat/AmeriCorps job and took the chance, despite my fear of supervising people, esp. in a field I knew nothing about.

The job started in September 2018, and the delegation was in late March 2019, so I still had a lot of detachment to overcome before I could even get to the anxiety that underlay it. In other words, I was dealing with plenty of my own shit before I could really empathize with anyone else. But I finally figured out that helping others was the best way to help myself. It was advice my parents gave me many times, although the benefits weren’t apparent until I’d overcome enough of my own misery.

With that in mind, I figured joining the delegation would help me get over my issues. Even the threat of death seemed like an acceptable risk. But my detachment was still strong enough that the threat didn’t seem real. Life didn’t seem real. Only the pain was real.