THE BROTHERHOOD

I never belonged anywhere. It was one of the first things I heard from the mouths of other alcoholics that connected me to them. But before AA, I spent my life feeling disconnected. Among other reasons for that perpetual sense of uniqueness was that I grew up in two worlds--the world that my Mexican father came from, and that of my Long Island mother. Raised in suburban school systems, I looked little like the children in my classes. We spoke Spanish in the home, and my family was loud. We spent some time living on the border of a barrio enclave of migrant families and WASP suburbia while in Arizona, and I started the process of becoming a chameleon. I learned that it was easier to be whoever you wanted me to be than to seem different at all. I developed third and fourth lives. Soon, I hardly knew who I was. I fought to fit in, and waging that many different wars of identity on different borders made a casualty of who I really was. Eventually, I lost myself completely. The friends, acquaintances and eventually codefendants that I'd made drifted away from the falsehoods I was barely keeping alive. I wanted friends, but fit in nowhere. I knew that friends helped you to belong, but I no longer had a home, a race, or a purpose. In a sense, I'd become a ghost.