THE HOLLYWOOD TALENT AGENT

Reading about Hollywood actresses coming forward with their #MeToo stories in 2017, many times I found myself thinking: “Why has it taken them this long to talk publicly about the abuse they went through? Why have they been silent for all these years?”

One answer lay on the surface. Obviously, they had to gain enough security, privilege, and recognition to let their stories of trauma be seen. As young actresses being sexually harassed, no one would have treated their experiences with respect. Instead, the system that enabled their abuse – Hollywood’s patriarchy, classism, and corruption – would have effectively banned them from the profession. At that moment, their voices wouldn’t have been widely heard and supported. Their talent wouldn’t have been evidenced by careers spanning for decades. Their truth wouldn’t have brought about as much accountability and meaningful change as it has these days.

But there was also a more important, deeper reason. I came to understand it after myself going through essentially the same abuse at the hands of the Hollywood’s powerful.

The reason is, after going through a traumatic experience like sexual harassment and abuse of power, you need time – sometimes years or even decades – to filter out emotional intensity, gain perspective, contextualize, and distill lessons from the experience in such a way that, when the story gets shared, it can bring about empowerment, empathy, and systemic accountability, rather than vengeance, defamation, and blaming.

In 2018-2019 I went through one of the most devastating experiences of emotional abuse in my entire life. Previous episodes in this series pale in comparison to what that person, being a powerful man from Hollywood, did to my life. It’s a story of how, over one year, his lust, narcissism, greed, and cowardice destroyed my self-worth, my sense of legitimacy as an artist, and even my sanity.

By and large, this is my #MeToo story.

However, I only write about it now, one year after this relationship ended. I understood the abuse and its particulars a long time ago. As someone equipped with mental health knowledge from my previous research, in the back of my mind I didn’t fail to identify toxic patterns and red flags in his behavior. I realized that what kept me trapped in that relationship was his privilege and my disadvantage.

I knew how to write. I had an Instagram page and a community. I had people check in with me and wonder why I stopped putting out new content. It looked like I had skills and space and relationships to share what was going on.

Why have I been silent so long, still?

First, it was about my fear. Old programming dies hard. As a man I was raised to believe that I have no business sharing how I feel. That whatever emotionally significant experience I go through, the “right thing” to do is to just suck it up and soldier on. Because, as the culture told me, “real men” don’t do vulnerability. They don’t own, explore, and talk about their emotions because it’s weakness. It’s taken me years and two episodes of terminal clinical depression to unlearn that bullshit and reinvent the concept of a “real man” in a way more aligned with reality – based on courage, integrity, and self-worth, rather than fear, armor, and scarcity. However, I still struggle with it. No matter how much I evangelize around vulnerability, I’m not good at opening up, especially about experiences where I got abused or taken advantage of – I’m scared of being seen as weak.

But that fear, like any kind of bullshit, could be easily reality-checked with time. In my experience, fear gets invariably outweighed by the critical understanding of empathy and empowerment I can create by sharing my lived experience, especially when it clearly reflects forms of systemic oppression.

Then the question becomes: how do I share my story? How do I tell it to maximize its positive impact – empathy, critical awareness, and call to courage and accountability? How do I tell it in the rawest and most honest way possible, owning my part in what happened? Putting aside my unfiltered emotions and unrelatable circumstances, how do I extract relatable, widely applicable, most powerful lessons from my experience to share and thus create added value, rather than just get attention and publicity?

Now, this is what’s taken me more than one year, as I was working on my upcoming YouTube channel. Recalling. Writing down. Analyzing. Reality-checking. Getting in touch with screenshots of chats and other pieces of evidence, painful as it was. Connecting the dots. Contextualizing. Distilling. And today, the truth finally demands to be told.

Have you ever met a gay man rationalizing homophobic violence? A gay man saying that thousands of American LGBT teenagers get kicked out of their homes by their own families "for their spiritual enlightenment"?

Have you ever had a friend telling you that dying from cancer in your thirties — not because your cancer is untreatable, but because you don't have access to adequate healthcare — is a destiny-sent gift?

Well, today you're in for a treat. Meet José, a talent agent from Hollywood.

BEGINNING

Unlike in previous episodes, here I will call the person by name, although José is not his real name.

I met him on Instagram in the beginning of 2018, following his comment on the post of a person that we both followed. As the experiences with the hijabi poet, the vegan make-up artist, and other people came to their toxic closures, I didn’t stop looking for new people to connect to around my work. No matter how easy it was to question my personal worth as a result of those abusive experiences, the worth of my artistic work was measurable and observable, and the evidence from my recent research on empathy, privilege, and intersectionality reinforced my trust in the relevance of the story my book had to tell, and the impact it could make if shared on appropriate platforms.

So yes, now even more than two years before, I knew I had to find allies having the privilege I lacked. Like-hearted folks standing for social justice in real, no-BS ways. Folks willing to do the work. Folks putting truth and courage over comfort. Folks understanding and practicing real spirituality. Folks recognizing the lack of meaningful human connection in our culture and recognizing the power of art in building that connection. I did believe that such people existed – because I existed. And the fact that I didn’t have enough privilege to get this work off the ground on my own was a result of randomness. I did believe there would be someone willing to recognize the value of this work and share their privilege with me – because this is what real fight for social justice looks like.

So now, I saw the profile of another upper-middle-class American man, living in Los Angeles, having around 40k followers, working as a talent representative at his own agency. Remarkably, his pictures didn’t look narcissistic or shallow to me right off the bat. He posted quite a lot about personal development and spirituality – enough for me to allow the possibility that we had common ground in values. In retrospect, I see one factor that, without my conscious awareness, positively influenced my perception of him: he had a Hispanic name. Just like in the case with the Christian fashion stylist, the fact that he was a Latino, originally from Venezuela, made me believe he would be likely to connect to and understand my life experience.

This assumption reflected a pattern that these days I work hard to eradicate. Somehow, in the process of developing my social justice vision, I bought into this misleading concept of group identity. It means that if I share certain identity with someone, like the identity of race, ethnicity, class, orientation, religion, etc. then this person thinks like I think, feels like I feel, lives like I live, and sees the world the same way I see it. This is the bullshit idea claiming that our identity, whether privileged or oppressed, defines our values, our perspective, and our way of walking through life more than our individual choices. For me particularly, it played out in believing that people “like me” are more trustworthy than people “different from me” on the surface. That Hispanics, for example, are more trustworthy than Anglos. That Christians are more trustworthy than agnostics. That people originally coming from socioeconomic disadvantage and third-world countries are more trustworthy than people who grew up middle-class in the West.

Over the years and through many relationships, life has given me enough evidence to reality-check that notion. It’s horseshit. No, Hispanics aren’t any more or any less trustworthy than Anglos just because they’re Hispanics. And no, Christians don’t possess any higher or lower level of integrity or moral standards compared to agnostics just because their Christians. No, just because someone grew up in a third-world country and/or amidst socioeconomic oppression doesn’t mean they will be interested in fighting for social justice like I am. Because how I conceptualize my Hispanic identity, my Christianity, or my trauma of growing amidst poverty can be very different from how other people conceptualize and operationalize those things.

However, at the beginning of that relationship in 2018, I still held on to the belief that Hispanics are “my people”. Aside from that, my sense of self-worth and critical awareness were heavily damaged by previous abusive experiences. Traumatic pressures were increasing in my life in Russia, with no time and space to contextualize what happened, to rise strong, and to distill lessons to be learned for my future relationships.

Back then, I didn’t even follow him. I thought I’d come back to research and read his feed later. I just left a casual comment on one picture that really surprised me: him skiing on a snow-covered slope, amidst the rest of the photos showing the sunny climate of California. I read the geotag on the photo, and just said it was interesting to learn that there were ski resorts in that state.

A few hours later, he started following me. Moreover, he even DMed me, “Hi Jorgito! Why haven’t you followed me yet? ;-)”

My critical awareness went offline. I was just shocked by the fact that this privileged dude from Los Angeles followed me after my goofy, casual comment. It didn’t even occur to me that he could be gay and just liked my pictures. With my sense of self-worth still reeling from my previous experiences, I took his behavior as a bid for meaningful connection.

So I started following him immediately and replied in the chat. We texted back and forth a bit before I went to sleep, and the next day I took a closer look at his page. Yes, he appeared to be quite an intellectual person, interested in spirituality and psychology. He’d also recently started doing stand-up comedy, and his performances were really great. At the moment, I didn’t realize he could have some connections to help me with my work. Honestly, I didn’t actually understand what a talent representative was. I saw his photos with one or two celebrities, but there was no evidence he had access to those particular people I was interested to connect with. Anyway, I just liked him as a person.

I started liking him even more a couple weeks later, when he started hosting a podcast centered around innovation, personal growth, and spirituality. He had entrepreneurs and creatives share their stories of success, and from the very first episode featuring a trans-rights activist, there was a lot of stuff that resonated with me.

So we started discussing it. Over email and in texts. He always responded respectfully and behaved like he appreciated my feedback. From those early stages of our correspondence, he started complimenting my intelligence. It was gradual but consistent. After a month he told me that my train of thoughts “was brilliant” and wondered why I didn’t start my own podcast.

Well, he didn’t know I’d written a book already. Our conversation hadn’t so far provided the context for me telling about it. But I decided I would tell him at one point. Given my multiple experiences from 2016, I still had this fear that people would ghost me as soon as they learned I had a book I was trying to get off the ground. So the story about my book and its role in my life was too vulnerable to be shared in a casual chat. However, the fact that he liked my feedback on his podcast topics created the expectation that he’d be interested to learn about my artistic work, which revolved, essentially, around the same values. It was a normal expectation. Except I didn’t know I was again dealing with one of those people who consistently communicate signals to inform expectations and encourage emotional investment on your part, only to crush you down later.

He made me feel like we were gradually growing a friendship. Once in April, when he shared about his Mom being a cancer survivor, I took it as an act of vulnerability. Trust, as I knew from research, is created in such small moments of courage, which, after all, aren’t that small given the deficit of courage in our culture. So I thanked him for sharing this and then recorded a voice message where I opened up about my recently diagnosed tumor and the fact I didn’t have access to necessary treatment in Russia.

It was the first voice message I ever sent him. Prior to that point, we had only communicated through texts. He saw that message. But he said nothing in reply.

That was the first red flag in this story that I missed – the moment I got really vulnerable, I got rejected and ignored.

In fact, I didn’t have enough time and space to think about this at the moment – my focus was on the relationship with the Christian fashion stylist, which, after having started in February with big promises, big commitments, and big value statements, was now going downhill after she learned about my place of residence, my socioeconomic status, and my health situation. I still didn’t recognize that it was her true colors coming out. I still made good assumptions about her and thought I could do something to fix that relationship.

So I even reached for José’s help. I realized that doing negotiations with celebrities for work, he could have some skills necessary to effectively talk to people of these social circles – the skills I believed I lacked. I told him I had an unexpected setback in a hugely important professional relationship – the kind of chance coming once in a lifetime (I really believed so at the moment). I asked him if we could have a FaceTime about it on the weekend – so he could offer some advice from his experience.

He agreed, and honestly, I wasn’t surprised he did. Given his treatment over the months, I’d already taken him as a long-distance friend. In his emails and texts, he’d told me he was rooting for me. Now, seeing his normal reaction to my bid for connection, I even started rationalizing the fact he hadn’t responded to my voice message about the tumor. Maybe, I thought, he was shocked and just didn’t find anything to say. Or maybe, someone or something interrupted him as he was listening.

So we arranged to have that FaceTime on the weekend. On Friday night, which was Friday morning LA time, I texted him about the day and the time we’d see each other. Eleven hours of time difference were no joke. It all had to be planned and set up in advance. I asked him about his available time slots.

Waking up the next morning, I saw there was no reply from him, although he’d seen my message. From his Instagram Stories, it was obvious he wasn’t having any emergency going on. Just an ordinary day of his fortunate, upper-middle-class American life. Meaning that he’d just decided to ignore me.

THE HEDONIST

I’d been there enough times previously. I’d had enough people chicken out of communication as soon as the conversation got real. So at that point, I decided I’d never text him again. I’d already offered enough vulnerability to now offer even more to someone who obviously wasn’t interested to see it.

During the weekend where our first videochat was supposed to happen, there was no word from him. In his Stories, there were a workout and a party. He was just having fun, even though I’d told him I needed his presence and support.

I should have believed his true colors when he showed them to me. Right at that point. I should have unfollowed, and probably even blocked him. But some part of me – in retrospect I see it as a seed of doubt about my own sanity, artfully sown by an abuser – this part told me to just not text him anymore, but not cut him off completely. Also, in the back of my mind, I saw his possible help as my plan B with the work – it was getting clear that he might have necessary contacts.

About a month later, when the situation with the Christian fashion stylist was over, I woke up to an Instagram notification about his new post. It was the screenshot of an article interviewing him about his career in a fashion magazine called The Hedonist. So I left him a comment about the meaning of the word hedonist – a complacent, selfish person, celebrating their privilege and showing no concern about the pain of their fellow human beings. I reminded him of his friendship statements made over the months and the fact that, when the time came to practice them, he chose to have fun with his privileged friends instead of having a FaceTime to support me in my critical situation.

I thought he’d just delete my comment and block me. In my experience, that’s what people always did when confronted about their hypocrisy.

But guess what? Instead, he wrote me a long DM, acknowledging his mistake and apologizing. He said that on that weekend “he knew he wouldn’t have available time for me”. He said he was missing our chats and my feedback on his podcast episodes. He said he hadn’t even known the meaning of the word hedonist, and that in fact he cared about what was going on with me. He offered to have a FaceTime on the weekend to come and said he’d love to see me live.

Again, he artfully sent my critical awareness offline. I didn’t ask him obvious questions. If he realized he didn’t have available time (which can happen), why didn’t he just let me know? If he missed our chats, when didn’t he text me first? Instead of asking these legit questions, I just silenced myself and “assumed good” about him. No, it wasn’t real generosity. I was just too broken, too hopeless, and too desperate after the crushing betrayal of the Christian fashion stylist, and now I saw him as someone else who could help with my work.

Above all, he apologized. This behavior gaslighted me the most. Because previously in my life, for all the abundance of emotionally abusive people, I’d never seen any of them apologize in a way that showed the understanding of their mistake. Abusive people, as I believed, only deny, blame, and rationalize. Most recently, that’s what the hijabi poet did. That’s what the Christian fashion stylist did.

And this dude, he behaved like a normal person would behave after making a mistake. So, subconsciously believing that I would hardly find anyone else to connect to around my work in the near future, I came back to building a friendship with him.

That’s where the real, hardcore cycle of abuse started, following the same classical phases it follows in romantic relationships – idealization (a.k.a. love-bombing), devaluation, and discarding.

MAY

So a few days later in May, we actually did a FaceTime. He didn’t ignore me. He showed up on time. He appeared warm and raw and down-to-earth from the beginning – literally from the time he said Hi. We saw each other live for the first time, but it felt like we were on the same frequency – like we were friends knowing each other for ages.

Now, I remember I had the same feeling during my first WhatsApp conversation with the Christian fashion stylist. She talked to me as a good old friend. And with experience, I’ve come to see it as a telltale sign of abusers – no, even if you’re as straightforward and wholehearted and raw as it gets, you don’t get this warm with people the first time you see them. It’s easy to fall for this “friendly treatment” when you were bullied or humiliated or betrayed before (my case), but it’s just not normal.

There was something else that wasn’t normal. Ten minutes into the conversation, he asked me: “So are you dating someone?”

I was stupefied. Why would he ask me that?

“No,” I said, “I’m single.”

And before I had the chance to tell him that dating anyone was not in the cards for me at the moment – that I was working my ass off to get out of Russia and start over in the West, laying the foundation for my creative career – before I opened my mouth to say this, he replied:

“Wow, how come? You’re so handsome. If you were here next to me, me and you would do some dirty things that my dog would be embarrassed to see.”

Then he laughed. I was speechless for a moment. Okay, it became clear that he was gay. And that wasn’t a problem. The problem was that he assumed that I was gay before taking the trouble to ask me about my orientation. Just because he liked me. Or just because he saw LGBT-related posts on my feed – and assumed I had a skin in the game.

Instead of setting boundaries, I laughed it off. Remember, I was already hooked emotionally. Just like a young actress being harassed by a Hollywood producer, I knew this person in front of me had power and privilege. Based on my previous life experience shaped by disadvantage, I felt like my talent and my work would stay unused and unclaimed forever, eating me up from inside, unless that person used his power and privilege to help me, opening the gates of this industry where I’d dreamed to work since I remembered myself.

It was also easy to dismiss this minor episode of sexual harassment because he was very talkative and quickly steered the conversation away. In fact, we were on the same frequency and both talked a lot and I didn’t notice how one and a half hours passed. Although his sexual advances made me feel uncomfortable in the beginning, I actually enjoyed the rest of the conversation. He appeared smart and funny and self-aware. And, it looked like me and him shared big interest in many important topics related to spirituality and personal development. So we arranged to have videotalks regularly.

At that point I sincerely believed we’d be growing our friendship this way.

IDEALIZATION

SUMMER

During the next two months, he made it clear that we actually had a friendship. Yes, this wasn’t something I made up just because I needed his help.

Instead, it looked like a normal, gradual, reciprocal growth of trust and vulnerability. We FaceTimed almost every weekend, and he never failed to show up. We got carried away in our fluent conversations, and I didn’t notice how time passed. Because of the time difference of eleven hours, the only available time slot was night Moscow time/ morning LA time, and he always apologized for having to end the conversation and go on with his day. He made me feel like he enjoyed how we hung out.

Then, clear, unambiguous, literal statements of friendship followed – on his part, not mine. I never was the first to call him a friend. Instead, he told me how much he “appreciated our friendship”, how grateful he was that he met me, and how great it would be if we could meet one day in real life. I bullshit you not, he said those things. Thanks to technology, I have proof of that in my messenger apps and my mailbox.

This impression of him being a wholehearted, raw, and warm person was reinforced by what I saw other people say about him. One of his LA friends, who regularly commented on his posts, had his birthday picture on her page where she mentioned what an extraordinarily kind person he was. She said he was someone who always showed up during hard times, someone she could trust and rely upon, in one word – her “ride and die”. Doesn’t this say enough about his loyalty and integrity? Well, there was another friend of his who, while being interviewed on his podcast, mentioned how a few years ago she had an idea of a movie or a book (I don’t remember exactly), and when she told him, he put her in contact with people who made this project possible. And he replied he was happy to do that. This piece of their conversation blew up my mind – because that was the exact kind of help I needed with my work. And, as it sounded, he saw nothing wrong about providing that help through his connections. Finally, on his Instagram page, there was a picture of him with an internationally famous Venezuelan fashion model who was now one his best friends – and the story of how, almost two decades ago, meeting her at some event and telling her about his work brought his career to the next level. All that information communicated clearly: he was someone who understood the importance of personal connections in the artistic world. He was someone who received help and gave help graciously, honoring our shared humanity.

Aside from that, it finally occurred to me that he was a professional in the exact field where I needed help – the field of representing artistic talent and negotiating with big companies and big figures in the industry. Yes, unlike all those people I’d met before, he did it professionally. He’d been doing this for a living for about 20 years now, and he was obviously successful. He had the skills and connections to represent work like mine.

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Following these findings, next time we FaceTimed I brought this topic up. No, I still didn’t feel we had built enough trust to tell that I needed help with my work. But I had to find out how he saw giving and receiving help in his professional area – to understand if my impression about him was right.

He said he was happy to help his friends with their innovative and creative projects whenever he could – and he’d been himself given a lot of help in the past. He added, “LA is a small town. When you live here for 15 years, you know almost everybody. And everybody who has a phone is potentially a producer.”

I thought to myself, “What a great guy he is. He rubs shoulders with the powerful and the influential, and he makes it look like it’s no big deal.”

See guys, just like him I also had a phone. But I couldn’t be my own producer or my own talent agent because I didn’t have the contacts of those who would be interested in my work. And he made it clear to me that he had the contacts. That he had the access. That he could make or break dreams of someone as underprivileged as I was.

At the moment, I didn’t recognize that, instead of communicating his good will to help others, he was simply waving his privilege in my face. Instead, I thought he meant what he said. Let’s see reality for what it is: he’d been calling me a friend, making me feel seen and welcome and appreciated, and now he confirmed he’s happy helping his friends through his connections.

Based on his statement, it was logical for me to assume: José’s gonna be willing to help me too. Especially given that my project is innovative, and he appreciates people thinking outside of the box. Especially given that my book addresses homophobia, and he’s gay. Why wouldn’t he be willing to help me? At least, why not try?

Still, I didn’t feel ready to ask for his help immediately, after these values have professed. Given the scars from my previous relationships, it was too much vulnerability, and I didn’t feel there was enough trust between us.

And then, as if wanting to increase that trust, he got vulnerable in front of me on a new level.

SURGERY

He told me he was going to get a cosmetic surgery. He’d been thinking about it for quite a long time, but he hadn’t made up his mind until recently. Because he knew he’d receive judgment and trivialization around this issue from most people in his social circles. Like, he would be shamed for spending a lot of money on the surgery, instead of sending money to his parents. He would be shamed by his friends because having cosmetic surgeries was seen as emasculating. (Yes, to my great surprise, these patriarchal stereotypes existed even in Hollywood’s gay community – where people putting piles of money into cosmetic procedures and surgeries still had to pretend their good looks were “natural” – isn’t this what Brené Brown calls a shame-prone culture?).

I thanked him for sharing this with me. He was forty years old now. From my research on the intersection of gender and sexuality, I’d known that body shame, and aging as a related aspect, were powerful forces in gay men, blowing appearance imperfections completely out of proportion. It was all the more powerful if you lived in a place like West Hollywood: where your worth was mostly defined by how you looked, where regardless of their gender, people went to all lengths in their anti-aging efforts, where comparison and fitting in were running the show.

Yes, it was hard to live under these pressures. Especially if you’re a gay man, going into middle-age, and still single.

I’d never been in his shoes. However, I’d had a similar emotional experience in the past. In the beginning of 2014, during the remission after my first depression attack, still being a poor person from a third-world country, I’d also had a cosmetic surgery. I’d gotten a microinvasive hair transplant in Spain. Working at my semi-slavery job in Russian healthcare, I spent almost all the money I’d amassed over one year on this surgery. I’d also got shamed and judged and ridiculed – by my family and by the people I socialized with. But I went for it, because deep down in my heart, I knew why it was important – I dreamed about making a career in performing arts after finishing my book and moving away from Russia. For a performance artist, looks are damn important, whether we like it or not. We may spend hours condemning the pop culture for its shallowness, but it doesn’t change the fact: if you’re going bald in your thirties, you won’t fit the image most producers want. You won’t get record deals and you won’t be seen as relevant by the audience as another handsome guy with thick hair. So yes, I had to make this huge, devastating investment for my future. The future that I sincerely believed was there to come.

Now, four years later, my situation was completely different. I no longer had a job that even covered my inevitable expenses like food and gas. My current job at best yielded $100-$150 a month. I’d been borrowing from the scarce savings I’d made over the years that had shrunk twofold in 2014 as a result of Russian ruble devaluation, and these savings were coming to an end. I’d been diagnosed with a skin tumor that was most probably malignant, and now, with no access to adequate healthcare in Russia, I didn’t even have two thousand euros to go to Spain and have that tumor removed. Every day, I was waking up thinking if my tumor had already gone metastatic. Instead of moving away from Russia, publishing my book and starting a career in performing arts, in fact I got trapped in a yet bigger trauma and misery than I’d been in 2013, when I started to write the book.

So now, what would I respond to an upper-middle-class American gay man in Hollywood, having celebrities among his friends, who was about to probably spend tens of thousands of dollars on a cosmetic surgery?

If I were like the majority of people in our culture, I’d use his story as a perfect chance to shame him around his privilege. To bash him over the head with my cancer story, also reminding him that he’d never responded to my voice message where I’d told him about it. It was an opportunity for me to diminish his struggle by comparing it to mine.

I could also invalidate his experience in another way. Looking at his body in a few shirtless pictures he had on Instagram, I didn’t see any problem in the area where he was going to have this surgery. In my perception, it already looked perfect. So I could tell him, “José, you’re obsessing too much about this. You look awesome. And yes, you indeed look much younger than your age. There’s no need to spend money on this and undergo surgical risks.”

But instead, I just listened and held space for him. And when he finished sharing, I gave a response normalizing his experience. This is how developed my empathy skills had become by that moment – I could disconnect from my own circumstances and my own trauma, horrible as they were, to be fully present to another person’s experience. To the experience of someone who, as I believed at this point, was my friend. Someone who shared it with me because I was his friend.

Because, if you’re a mentally normal person with healthy boundaries, would you share something like this with someone unless you trust them and see them as a friend?

He appeared very thankful. He made me feel like my response was actually different from how other people reacted. He then went on to say that he’d also confided this to another close friend who would drive him to the surgery. Thankfully, it could all be done on an outpatient basis.

After this conversation, I felt like my trust for him increased. Like, this person dared to share his vulnerable experience with me. Could I do the same? Not now, when he was amidst his own vulnerability, but when he hopefully recovered from the surgery? The answer was a resolute yes. I no longer questioned if our connection was real.

Because I felt I was concerned about him. I wasn’t concerned about what he could do for me, but now I was concerned about him as a person. I worried if the surgery would go without complications. I worried if he’d be satisfied with the visual result. I worried about how his wound was going to heal.

On the day of his surgery, one hour before it was scheduled, I prayed for him. At that late hour, I was still at work and I sent him my selfie wearing a scrub and surgical cap with supportive words coming from my heart. I manifested my presence in his situation and appreciated that he allowed me to be present. That meant a lot to me.

“You’re an angel, Jorge,” he responded in a while. “I haven’t met anyone like you before. You have no idea how I appreciate your friendship.”

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The next morning, I saw a text from him letting me know the surgery went well. I felt calmed, even though now I found myself worrying about his wound and how soon it was going to heal. Literally, I experienced his surgery exactly as I’d experienced my own hair transplant four years before. For me as someone who’d systematically studied empathy for years before, now it was the time to see what it looks like in practice. And here I was, connecting to my friend’s experience as if it were my own.

A few days later, we had another FaceTime. He looked joyous and lively, as always. First off, I asked how he was feeling and whether the wound was hurting. As someone who’d been a physician in major surgeries department for five years, I knew how different the healing process could be, and how it had to be closely monitored, especially in outpatients.

He said it was okay, and I asked when his wound was planned for revision and suture removal.

“The surgeon said there’s no need for revision, and the sutures will be absorbed within a week,” he explained. “I’ll just have to wear a dressing for another five days, then it’ll be over.”

“Good for you,” I said. Honestly, as I’d never worked in cosmetic surgery, I wasn’t familiar with the types of sutures and dressings being used – especially in the state-of-the-art American healthcare.

“I feel like the dressing itself causes me more discomfort than the wound,” he shared. “It’s so big and clumsy. But you know what? This discomfort got me thinking about physical pain, and how blessed I am to be generally healthy and only feel it for a few days after the surgery.”

Now, this was a crucial moment. For the last three years, I’d been thinking a lot about physical pain and its impact on our emotional well-being and productivity. For these three years, I’d been suffering from almost constant upper-back pain, following the shoulder injury I’d gotten at my previous job after being forced to inadequate physical labor. In Russia, I’d had no access to adequate healthcare, and common remedies like home-based yoga, stretching exercises, and tennis ball massage had almost no effect. The degree of pain varied over the days, ranging from mild to severe, where every breath felt like there was a knife moving between my spine and my left shoulder blade. And yes, amidst my overall traumatic life circumstances, this physical pain drowned me down even further emotionally. It heavily reduced my productivity – because it got worse while sitting, including sitting in front of the computer, no matter the kind of posture, chairs, and armrests I used (over three years, I tried everything available, trust me). It made driving a nightmare – because, unlike in a subway car, in an automobile, you cannot stand, and when there’s no subway in your neighborhood, you have to drive in traffic jams every day. If I lived in the West, as a healthcare worker myself, I would hardly find myself in a situation of being stricken with such a benign health issue and no opportunity to get it effectively treated. But in Russia, I was. Years of my youth were being lost to trauma, and recently, to this physical pain.

And it wasn't a three-day-long pain resulting from a cosmetic surgery. It was a three-years-long pain resulting from the injury I'd gotten as a result of being exploited in my workplace. This wasn't by any means normal.

So right now, when he brought up this topic of physical pain, it was an opportunity for me to open up about mine and the story behind it. As any vulnerable act, I knew it implied risk and emotional exposure. It implied a bid for empathy and connection. But the fact was, he’d just gotten vulnerable with me about his surgery. We were friends, as he’d told me many times. So it was appropriate to reciprocate his trust and share my experience with him.

“Well, that’s really hard.” I said, “I hadn’t told you before that I’d been living with chronic physical pain for the last three years.”

“Oh really?” he asked, with a clear look of concern on his face.

So I started telling him how this pain felt, where it came from, why I couldn’t get treatment for it…

Ha-ha-ha. No, I didn’t get to tell him any of that. His look of genuine concern faded after ten seconds of listening to my story. Then, it got replaced by a smirk, covered by an expression of politeness. He clearly wasn’t there. He wasn’t listening or paying attention. He was disengaged. My experience clearly made him uncomfortable. And he wouldn’t tolerate the discomfort. He was an upper-middle-class Hollywood man. Connection with me wasn’t worth it.

So after a minute of me talking, he just interrupted me and steered the conversation in a different direction – putting the focus back on himself. He started telling me how the wound dressing, visible through the clothes, limited his social activities – he had to bullshit the majority of his friends that he’d gotten an injury while skiing. For a moment, critical awareness crept up on me: were those people his real friends? Or were his relationships so shallow that there was no space for truth in them? Did that shallowness tell more about him, or about those people, or about Hollywood as a culture?

Well, before I could think about it, he said:

“And because of this, I had to miss this important gala event with XXX that I’d planned to attend. I just couldn’t afford to let him see me with this dressing – it’s so not sexy. Did I tell you I was dating him in the past?”

XXX – another person whose name I’m not gonna reveal – was an internationally famous A-list celebrity. Yes, a pop musician with many Grammies, Billboard hits, and platinum albums behind his belt who’d come out a decade before, after making a phenomenally successful career.

“No, you never told me you’d been dating him,” I said calmly. I saw his complacent smirk, but I wasn’t buying into it. Dating a celebrity is not an achievement. It’s a function of having access to certain social circles through privilege. There’s nothing in it to be proud of.

Well, José obviously believed otherwise. With an air of grandiosity, he eloquently told me that he’d known this celebrity through work for a long time, and three years ago, he’d started dating him. He said he’d had big expectations of “taking his life and business to the next level” through this relationship, which could end up in a marriage, but things didn’t work out. Because XXX, he said, wasn’t committed enough and approached José like “Let’s have sex, but don’t have hopes.” And, this was a dealbreaker, because José, as he said, knew about himself that he would inevitably develop an emotional bond with anyone he’d been dating. So, he emphasized, he basically rejected XXX and let go of all the big expectations he attached to this relationship. He didn’t fail to mention that this celebrity’s now-husband looks a lot like him, and that now he and XXX are still friends and collaborate on many projects.

After he finished, with the same smirk on his face, I didn’t know how to respond. I felt disgusted, but I couldn’t name my emotion at the moment. In hindsight, I see it clearly – I don’t know if I was more disgusted by José’s regret about not looking sexy in front of an ex already married to another person (which is manipulative and scarcity-based), or by the approach “Let’s have sex; don’t have hopes” that he claimed XXX had in their relationship.

“Wow, that’s an interesting story,” I said. “I hope there’s the right person down the road for you.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with the same smirk, “I’m fine being single.”

No, he wasn’t fine being single. People who are fine being single don’t spend thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgeries. He just wore this complacency as an armor. But why did he tell me that story in the first place?

In retrospect, it’s clear. He was communicating the following messages: A) he was so extraordinary that he got an A-list celebrity going on dates with him; B) unlike the celebrity, who was shallow and probably promiscuous, he was looking for a profound and committed relationship; C) he’s so good at relationships that even after rejecting that celebrity, he still managed to continue working and being with him. D) he still cares a lot about “looking sexy” in front of the celebrity, and showing up with a wound dressing wasn’t an option.

So here’s how our relationship dynamics emerged in the conversation: what I was experiencing amidst my disadvantaged life circumstances in a third-world country just wasn’t important to talk about. Now, what was important was his glorious Hollywood existence: how he’d been dating an A-list celebrity and going about his cosmetic surgery. His capacity for empathy, his tolerance for discomfort, and his attention span for another person’s experience sucked.

Isn’t that a textbook situation with a narcissist?

SIGNS FROM ABOVE

I made this mistake a lot throughout my life – I didn’t believe people the first time they showed me who they were. Especially when they were people who pretended to be my friends or allies. Who made clear statements about our shared values and portrayed themselves as trustworthy. Who professed the importance they attached to their relationship with me. And, especially, when they were people who, through their privilege, had power and access I could never get from my place of disadvantage – and still sorely needed.

Here’s one clear thing about power that left me feeling small and trapped after his A-list celebrity story. I didn’t care about their upper-middle-class Hollywood gay shit, like promiscuity and shallowness. However, I did care for the stated fact that he and XXX were still friends and collaborating.

Because in my story, XXX was also a special person. Mind you, XXX wasn’t someone I’d dated or ever wanted to date. But he was someone who used to be a huge role model for me growing up – as an artist, activist, and philanthropist. He was that Hispanic singer-songwriter whose songs for the first time let me feel what true belonging was like, whose stories had healed me and given me hope, and whose memoir and coming out story informed a big source of inspiration for the plot of my book back in 2012. In the beginning of this series, I told y’all that my initial networking efforts revolved around finding a way to contact that artist. No, unlike José, I had no intention of “taking my life to the next level” by marrying him or getting money or celebrity from him. My intention was to have a meaningful conversation with him about the social issues my book addressed – social issues he also publicly championed – and the difference my work could bring to that table. I didn’t have any expectations nor did I need any guarantees. However, if my work resonated with him, this artist had plenty of connections and resources in the industry to help me put my book on the appropriate platform – the platform where it could be actually successful. And by successful, I don’t mean generating millions of dollars in sales. By successful, I mean getting the right kind and amount of exposure so this story could serve the people it had the power to serve.

But with this artist living in his A-list celebrity privilege bubble, there was no way I could have this conversation with him. As it became obvious over the years, I needed someone who had privilege and access to him in order to represent me.

And José, who did representing artistic talent for years, now made it clear he had immediate access to that person.

Guess how it made me feel.

Of course, I felt so exceptionally lucky. It was like, after so many doors shut in my face by other people, destiny again led me to that person whose work had informed a huge part of my artistic vision growing up and whose story stood at the roots of my book as my biggest creative project.

And José was someone who could represent me to him and put us in contact.

Yes, I knew I deserved that chance. I knew my work and vision and the kind of impact I could make as an artist, if helped to get out of oppression, were big enough and worth his attention. No matter how many previous people made me feel like a piece of shit from a third-world country, whose work or story by definition couldn’t matter nearly as much as the hot bodies and privilege of those who surrounded that celebrity, the truth inside of my heart could not be silenced. And the truth was, while talent is universal, opportunity is not. From that artist’s memoir, it looked like he had no problem connecting with underprivileged people. Now, even more than three years before, I had confidence and evidence to back up my work and the difference it could make in the world.

That celebrity could actually be a shallow asshole José portrayed him to be, and then he wouldn’t be interested in a work like mine. But José, as it turned out, knew many other people who could be my potential producers/collaborators. Stereotypical as it sounds, he was a Hollywood insider. And although I wasn’t looking for big fame or big money, I was looking for my work’s chance to be brought into life. He had the kind of access to make it reality. He had the skills to represent artists. And, following how he’d treated me over previous months, I believed we had a friendship. He’d given me enough reasons to believe so.

I stuck to that belief now, even though in this conversation he clearly denied me empathy and dismissed my experience as irrelevant – a complete opposite to my response to him sharing his cosmetic surgery situation. But don’t we all screw up these things every once in a while? Of course, inequal power dynamics made me think that I had to be generous, non-judgmental, and give him the benefit of the doubt.

So I decided that I would be more open about my life experience in our next conversations to come. First, because he’d framed our relationship as a friendship. And it now occurred to me that most of the time we were talking either about abstract topics or about his life. Yes, I didn’t have anything fun and exciting to share about mine, but in a friendship, does sharing always have to be fun and exciting? If we’re friends, he should be just as interested to learn about my life as I am interested to learn about his. And second, he had to know more about my life and my story because they’re inextricably connected with my artistic work – the work I eventually wanted him to represent. Because whatever negotiation skills and access he had, how could he effectively represent any artist if he didn’t understand their vision, their background, their mission, and their values?

Look, I wasn’t going to get vulnerable on the second day of knowing him. I was going to get vulnerable after months of communication, clear statements of friendship from his part, and other signals encouraging me to trust him. I was going to get vulnerable after he’d gotten vulnerable first and appreciated how I’d treated his vulnerability.

Was there anything wrong about it?

Well, no. Except for the good old lesson I’d learned by heart by then: the moment you get vulnerable – really, genuinely vulnerable, not using vulnerability as a manipulation tool – you also get to see another person’s true colors. And, after all of my experiences mentioned in previous episodes, I was afraid that his true colors were different from what he portrayed them to be.

And, most sadly, I didn’t have any other relationship on my networking horizon.

---

A week later, our next conversation began as if nothing were wrong. His wound healed perfectly, his body looked perfect, and he was very cheerful. Our chat went into casual topics, in a casually fluent way. However, I remembered my decision to connect on a deeper level. We were friends, weren’t we? It’s not that I would interrupt his chatter and blast him with some of my hard experiences out of nowhere. But I remember I tried to share a vulnerable story from my clinical work that was germane to the subject of our chat.

It was met with clear resistance. No, he just steered the conversation back into something trivial and fun. It was as if he said. I’m an upper-middle-class gay man from Hollywood. I do fun. I don’t do discomfort. In fact, he did little to hide that he was paying little attention – he was walking around the house, doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, brushing his teeth, rummaging through his closet… I mean, I didn’t mind any of that. But the fact he wasn’t focused on me as I was vulnerable and trying to communicate important thoughts – it was strange.

He was focused on himself, though. Instead of trying to listen to me or really understand my experience, for an umpteenth time, he started preaching to me about “surrender”.

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

Surrender was, by and large, José’s favorite word, thrown around everywhere without much thought. It was a spiritual concept meaning “stopping to fuss about the things we cannot control”.

“A while ago,” he said, “I got a deal broken that was supposed to make me sixteen thousand dollars. The client just withdrew from the deal at the last moment. And yes, I felt upset and frustrated about it. But then I just decided to surrender and trust the Universe to bring me a new deal.”

“But José, look, surrender has a limited scope,” I responded. “It’s not applicable everywhere. When we go after our big dreams in life, we have to fight, oftentimes for a long time and despite many setbacks and many naysayers, looking for new pathways and knocking on new doors, instead of just putting down our hands and waiting for the Universe to bring us what we need.”

Making my case, I went on to tell him about my deepest, dearest dream of making a career in performing arts – this truth inside of me whose voice I’d heard at the age of 12, when my hands had first touched the dilapidated piano in the public school of a poor Moscow neighborhood where I’d grown up.

Before I could finish this story, he interrupted me. Just like in the previous conversation where I made an attempt of sharing about my back pain, his attention span was very short. Instead of trying to understand and connect to my experience, he dished out a fast-food psychology response:

You know, it’s very simple. If you’re meant to be the next Britney Spears, you will. If you’re not meant, you won’t.”

He said it with this disgusting, complacent smirk on his face. And now, two years later, when I remember this moment, I wonder how I didn’t smash my fist into the screen of my old iPad when I heard him say this.

“I can’t be the next Britney Spears, first, because I have a penis, you moron,” I thought to myself, trying to smile despite my boiling anger. “I can possibly be the next Ricky Martin. But whether I will or not depends on people like you – overfed assholes standing at the gates of this industry. You decide what’s meant to be and what’s not meant to be in my career. And you fucking know this.”

Of course, he knew this. His complacent smirk communicated that knowing. Of course, as soon as I exposed my vulnerability, he quickly sniffed the power he had in our relationship.

I remember I was baffled by his response. For the first time over the months of our “friendship”, I didn’t know what to say and how to react. I wanted this FaceTime to be over as soon as possible. He hurt me. I still didn’t understand clearly if he did this purposefully, and if so, why. But it was real, and we had to talk about it. That’s not how friendship works, and I never deserved to have my vulnerability be treated like that.

A BID FOR CLARITY

So in the middle of the following week, I sent him an email clearly sharing my concerns. I told him how I felt after our recent conversations. I said I was making up a story that he wasn’t comfortable with my vulnerability. I said it was okay but he had to make it clear. Clarity of intention and boundaries is one of the most important things in relationships. I didn’t write it but I thought back to his story about dating XXX: “Let’s have sex, but don’t have hopes” may sound disgustingly shallow and promiscuous, but it’s honest and clear. It allowed José to choose whether to stay in this relationship or quit it.

So now, I wanted to get the same clarity from him. I didn’t shame or attack him. I shared how I felt and respectfully asked him to help me understand what was going on on his side.

He never replied to that email. Remarkably, reviewing our whole relationship, I can tell this was my only email he never replied to.

Because it was a request for clarity. And clarity is one of three things you never get in abusive relationships.

The next weekend, we had another FaceTime. And guess how he showed up? No, he didn’t say anything about my email. But instead of that, he again was his “normal self”. I mean, there was no complacent smirk and no air of superiority. He was again the down-to-earth, raw, smart, funny José I’d known as a long-distance friend. He was again the José chatting with me naturally and making me feel like we were equal.

This is, by far, the most fatal weapon of a narcissist — gaslighting. These people make you question your sanity by constantly changing how they treat you and how they show up. Like, one day they crush you down emotionally, and the next day they're again your best friend. Or one day they dismiss your ideas as irrelevant and the next day they tell you how brilliant the self-same are.

This pattern emerged even clearer in his further behavior, which y’all will see below. Abusers have to employ these tactics to keep their targets hooked. To undermine their target’s sense of reality. To erase their boundaries. They do it so artfully that unless you collect the evidence of their inconsistent communication – like screenshots or call recordings, you’ll be effectively manipulated into believing that their harmful behavior never happened, or at least that it wasn’t intentional (and therefore, there shouldn’t be any accountability around it).

Now, consider how this typical mechanism of abuse was enhanced in the particular situation between me and him, characterized by huge, objective disparity of power and privilege. Consider how I was feeling, believing that a friendship with someone like him was the one-in-a-million chance I could get in my disadvantaged life. Consider how desperately I stuck to the initial assumption that, after all, he was a good person who just did a couple of bad things.

---

I walked away from that FaceTime full of hope and soothed. It was somehow lost on me that he still ignored my straightforward question from the email. Following his gaslighting, I happily deluded myself into thinking that his neglect and insensitivity weren’t real – I’d just made it up, probably based on my previous toxic experiences.

So the next week, before another scheduled FaceTime, I texted him saying that I had to talk to him about an important thing related to my work. I intended to start telling him about my book, and mention my story piece by piece along the narrative, insofar as it was related to my book. Anyway, he became aware I had something important to talk about in the upcoming conversation.

And now guess, how the conversation turned out?

He made a clear effort to keep it fun and shallow – telling me about his glorious Hollywood life. Like making another deal, shooting another campaign, going to another party with his no less fortunate friends. A few times, when I made a communication bid to finally start talking about this important thing I wanted to share, he rapidly steered the conversation back into fun, fast, and easy. No, he wasn’t in the mood for real connection. And no matter what was important to me, why it was important, why I wanted to share it – he wasn’t having it, but in a perfectly polite, American bleached-smile manner, without saying it outright in my face.

Huge lesson: when a person professing friendship, love, loyalty etc. to you then makes you feel like there's no space for your vulnerability — in a conversation, at the dinner table, or in the relationship as a whole — it's a no-win situation.

During that conversation, it was like he made me wait for the right moment to finally switch the gears towards my matter. But guess what? He knew very well we didn’t have a big time window. After an hour of trivial chatter, he just said goodbye because he had to go on with his day.

At this stage, aware of my vulnerability that his previous friendship statements successfully created, he took over the conversation lead and framed it however he liked. He already felt he could get away with disrespecting me. He knew his privilege gave him the license and entitlement, and I would have to accept anything, anyway.

As a final note, he added that we weren’t going to have a FaceTime the next weekend because he was going to Burning Man with his friends. I was yet to research about this festival, which every year gathered America’s rich and powerful to celebrate their privilege.

How important could my life, my art, and my story be compared to his excitement about Burning Man?

BURNING MAN

In the absence of clarity, I was effectively gaslighted to still allow the possibility of meaningful connection with him. Like, didn’t he talk all those eloquent talks about us being friends? Didn’t he trust me with his cosmetic surgery story because we were friends?

I still didn’t have enough evidence to see that all of that was epic hypocrisy and manipulation.

As José and his friends went to celebrate their privilege at Burning Man, I found myself face-to-face with my reality: the traumatic circumstances of my life in Russia grew worse and worse. Now, it’d been one year since having my skin tumor diagnosed. If it was actually melanoma, which was about 60% likely, my prognosis was already poor given the treatment delay of one year. It goes without saying that there was still no way I could earn the budget to perform this affordable, non-invasive, outpatient surgery in Europe, and no opportunity to get it in Russia. My economic reality got even worse than it had been, as the clinic where I worked part-time experienced a further decline in the number of patients, and the workplace rumor had that it was about to close down soon. Given the horrible employment situation in Russian healthcare, I didn’t know if I would find another job – if only one yet shittier than this was. To make it measurable: that summer, when José was having a cosmetic surgery and went to parties in the Caribbean and Burning Man with his friends, my monthly income went below $100 a month. Food and gas expenses and other inevitable bills had to be paid, and my savings were coming to an end. In August, I had to start withdrawing money from my emergency account. No matter how poor I was, it was the account where for years I kept the little budget for a visa fee and one air ticket to Europe or America, thinking of the day I would fly there for negotiations about my book.

But despite three years of my networking efforts, as I practiced exemplary courage and integrity and showed up with my talent and my artistic commitment to make the world a better place, this day never came about.

And now, just like I had buried my expired American visa in January, I had to bury the hope to even buy an air ticket with my own money. Because otherwise, next month I wouldn’t have the money to buy food.

---

Speaking of money, there’s one thing totally worth mentioning. Despite the abyss of economic difference between me, a poverty-stricken guy from a third-world country, and José, an upper-middle-class man from Los Angeles, I was never jealous for his wealth – instead, many times throughout our conversations I found myself feeling like he needed my help with the money. Sounds crazy? Here’s what I mean.

I cannot tell you how often he mentioned he couldn’t get out of credit card debt. WTF? Are you bullshitting me? I thought first. Because I saw the economic standard of his life. Parties, vacations at luxury resorts many times a year, one of the most expensive Mercedes-Benz models – and with all these ongoing expenses, couldn’t he pay back the bank? Initially, I believed he just told me this to appear more relatable. But he repeated it over and over again, and then he shared that he was considering hiring a financial advisor because this “credit card thing” was stressing him out too much.

I offered him empathy, but I still didn’t see why he couldn’t figure it out. How could it be that an upper-middle-class American person, enjoying huge economic opportunity even compared to other people in his country – never mind third-world country folks like me – how could it be that he wasn’t able to get out of his credit card debt? He earned more than enough. Far more than was necessary to cover basic needs. If this “credit card thing” stressed him out as much as he claimed, couldn’t he just restructure his expenses for a couple of months? Did he have to buy/lease the most expensive AMG version of his Mercedes-Benz model, or could he save $25k buying/leasing a regular version – and close his loan as a result? Or, more radically, couldn’t he get a Toyota Prius instead of a Mercedes-Benz?

Look, I hate doing math about other people’s incomes and expenses, but one thing I know for sure. As someone growing up with adults unreliable in all aspects, financial included, I had to learn personal finance very early in my life – how to save, how to budget, how to plan ahead, etc. Living and working in a country with small economic opportunity, and earning sums risible in terms of Western standards, and almost never having discretional income, I still always had money in my savings account. No matter the comparison and consumerism prevalent in our global culture, I never spent money on things before I earned that money. Like, when most people around me freaked out about new iPhone models they got, I still managed with an old flip phone. There was no way I could take bank loans for anything, probably because in my profession I never had security. My legal salary was risible, and 90% of my income came from tips. I could never know for sure whether or not next month I was going to make a certain amount of money – so borrowing from the bank wasn’t an option. The only time I maxed out my credit card was in September 2015, when after the two-fold devaluation of Russian ruble the previous winter, RUB/USD rate started to decline even further – so I had to convert the rest of my ruble savings into dollars, and since the savings were on a deposit I couldn’t withdraw from immediately, I bought out dollars with credit card money. But I did so only because this was the rare occasion where I had security – I knew I would get my deposit back within a month, during the remaining grace period on my credit card, meaning that I wouldn’t have to pay a penny of interest rate to the bank. Basically, in all of those rare occasions in my life where I used loan money on my credit card, I wound up paying zero interest to the bank because I planned my finances ahead. I knew for sure – almost for sure – that I’d be able to pay the debt within the grace period.

It kinda blew my mind to realize that, as a person living almost my entire life in poverty, I’d never found myself “unable to get out of a credit card debt”. There was no magic here. I wasn’t better or smarter with money than anyone else. I just had the skills, learned out of necessity. And now, when I saw an upper-middle-class man from Hollywood struggle with this, it was kinda obvious that his inability to get out of credit card debt resulted from lack of those skills: reasonable spending, planning, and budgeting. That’s where, crazy as it sounds, he could actually need my help. Which, unlike his prospective financial advisor, I was willing to give him for free.

So technically, me and José both struggled with money. But while my struggle resulted from lack of economic opportunity in my country, his struggle had to do with his overspending. While my struggle kept me in food insecurity and lack of healthcare access, he, despite his struggle, dined at restaurants and had cosmetic surgeries. Therefore, the emotional experience underlying my struggle was fundamentally different from the one underlying his. His experience was shame over comparison-driven overspending. Mine was powerlessness amidst the disadvantage I never got to choose.

DEVALUATION

SEPTEMBER

We had our next conversation when he came back from Burning Man. Predictably, he shared what an extraordinary, incredible experience the festival had been. Interestingly, it was the first time in our relationship when after him asking me “How are you?”, I distinctly felt that he didn’t want to hear the response. He asked that out of politeness, not genuine care. Nevertheless, enjoying telling me his awesome Burning Man stories, he acted like he was entitled to my care. Like I was supposed to always be interested about his glorious, fortunate life – even when it was tainted by “the credit card thing” and by the shame over having a cosmetic surgery and not “looking sexy” in front of an A-list celebrity he’d once dated.

Somehow, in this FaceTime we again came across his favorite topic of “surrender”, and, making his case, he clearly showed his abusive, misleading interpretation of it. He said, “I know you think you’d be happy if you moved over to the U.S., but actually you’re wrong. You don’t know what would happen to you here. You could get hit by a bus on your second day of being in this country…”

I felt shocked, and insulted, and diminished. Because his words flagrantly violated the truth. First, I’d never believed moving to the U.S. would make me happy. I’d never said I wanted to move to the U.S. in the first place, because I didn’t want that. It was an arrogant assumption of a successful Hollywood man – that someone struggling a third-world country could only want to immigrate to America. He never bothered to be curious and learn the truth, which was bigger and more complex than what could fit in his narcissistic mind: I was indeed looking for the opportunity to leave Russia, but the place I wanted to move to was Spain. Because Spain was my place of true belonging. As to the U.S., I knew I might have to move there for a while, to study and work in my artistic profession, but it definitely wasn’t where I wanted to settle. And sure as hell, I didn’t think that moving anywhere in and of itself could make me happy. It was a blatant trivialization of my experience.

What was real, nevertheless, is that if I lived in America, as a doctor with eight years of clinical experience and the highest scoring diploma from one of the country’s top medical schools, I definitely wouldn’t find myself in poverty. I definitely wouldn’t live in food insecurity and without access to healthcare. I could still suffer from my creativity being unclaimed and unused, from my true calling being not honored, but I definitely wouldn’t undergo multilateral trauma.

And as to the bus – I could get hit by it in Russia, in Spain, in America, or in China, for that matter, as well. What did it have to do with moving, or not moving, to another country?

Well, because the core message of his bullshit was clear – I had to “surrender” (i.e. give up) to the realities of my life in Russia. It’s not the story I’m making up, because as you’ll see from the following events, that’s exactly what he meant.

Which prompts the following question – if he was trying to convince me that life in the U.S. wasn’t really worth moving towards, then why, on his podcast, did he feature and honor his Venezuelan doctor friend who’d recently immigrated? Why didn’t he himself consider leaving his nice house, his brand new Mercedes-Benz, his $20k deals, and his glorious Hollywood life and just moving back to Venezuela, his native country that was now falling apart under oppression, corruption, and dictatorship?

The thing is, José didn’t left leave Venezuela in the same way, in the same context, and under the same circumstances as those in which modern-day Venezuelans flee from the country. José had left almost thirty years ago, at the age of 12, because his grandparents had already lived in Miami. He’d moved at the expense of his family – by virtue of privilege, essentially. Then, he went to middle school and high school and college and Florida. And then, after graduating, he moved to New York where he started working as a photographer agent in the fashion industry. Given how burgeoning this industry was in the city, that’s where all his connections and security had sprouted before he moved to LA and started representing talent in Hollywood and producing campaigns for big brands. So in his fortunate, predominantly American life, he never had to create the opportunity for emigration through his own effort – the opportunity was already here because of his family.

Given the young age at which he left Venezuela, one might assume that he didn’t remember what a third-would-country existence looked like. That he didn’t remember the poverty and the oppression and the corruption. But as it turned out, he did. Once on his podcast, he shared that walking into grocery stores in America he still found himself recalling how those had looked in Caracas in his childhood – yes, even in those years when the economic situation in the country hadn’t been as grim as it got now. Moreover, he still had his Dad and some relatives living in the country. He knew how tough it was. And, every time he spoke about them, it looked like he empathized with their experience.

Then, the question became, why did he trivialize mine?

Why this double standard?

The answer was, because I and he were already in the second phase of narcissistic abuse: devaluating. Unlike in the first phase, where he bombed me with messages of respect, friendship, and appreciation, now he didn’t hesitate much to hurt me – exactly in the areas he knew were the most sensitive. In the areas in which he’d encouraged me to be vulnerable. He was doing it purposefully – making me feel that unlike his Venezuelan friends and relatives, whose experience he recognized and respected, I didn’t deserve recognition and respect of mine.

---

Remarkably, it was around the same time – in this conversation, or the next one in September, where he started to openly put down the concept of empathy. He said: “I don’t think empathy makes much sense, because we can never see the world how the other person sees it. So just acknowledging we cannot do it is enough.”

That was epic bullshit. I hadn’t researched empathy for the fun of it. I knew well how to call BS on such rhetoric. I told him that empathy doesn’t require him to see the world exactly as another person sees it – because the lenses through which we see the world, informed by aspects of identity and personal experience, are unique and they’re soldered to our faces. There’s no way I can put down my lens, pick up the other person’s lens and see their experience through their lens. But real empathy doesn’t even require that. Instead, it requires that we recognize and unconditionally accept the emotions underpinning another person’s experience – even when the particulars, the circumstances, and the perspective of that experience are not relatable to us. Then, empathy requires that we connect with the same emotion within ourselves and communicate it back to another person. That’s how we learn to be here for them in a way that’s meaningful, helpful, and healing.

But, no, he wasn’t buying it. He still stood that empathy wasn’t possible, and not even worth trying. He was openly cynical and skeptical about it.

His rhetoric could be summarized and decoded to this: “I’m not willing to try to understand other people’s experiences when those aren’t fun, fast, and easy. Connecting to their emotions is uncomfortable, and I’m not doing discomfort.”

Make no mistake: this person putting down empathy in front of me now hosted a podcast about spirituality. He was a die-hard fan of Oprah. And yes, he was basically trying to tell me that empathy was bullshit. How cute is that? And why wouldn’t he say this on the mic or in front of the camera?

Moreover, when I shared what I’d learned about barriers to empathy from the evidence-based research of Brené Brown – the world-renowned research informed by hundreds of thousands of real-life interviews, processed with the grounded theory methodology – he responded, “Well, you know, it’s just a theory.”

He said that with the same complacent smirk on his face, which obviously communicated: “This information makes me uncomfortable, so I won’t recognize its importance.”

Because, in his picture of the world, comfort was invariably favored over truth. And just because he didn't say it out loud, it didn't change that these priorities were observable and measurable in his behavior.

Even more interesting, just a few months ago, when I shared with him the exact same ideas and findings about empathy from my research, he responded by saying “how brilliant I was” and that I had to start my own podcast.

Isn’t that another gaslighting move, so often used by narcissists in the devaluating phase?

OCTOBER

In the beginning of October, he took denials of empathy, and the process of devaluating me, to the next level.

His birthday was on the first week of the month, and mine was nine days later. We were both Libras, and I remember him saying that this was why “we were such good friends”. I was no longer sure about that in the light of how he was treating me, but anyway, he talked a lot about how excited he felt about his birthday. How his past year had been full of blessings, and how he saw more exciting things in the year to come – like doing new projects, doing more comedy stand-ups, and taking his podcast to some TV production company. Yes, another time he didn’t hesitate to wave his privilege in my face.

Given how close our birthdays were on the calendar, it was logical that after sharing how he felt about his birthday, he would ask me how I felt about mine. Because normal, healthy friendship is a reciprocal relationship. It cannot revolve around the life experience of one person and dismiss that of the other.

But no, he didn’t ask me. And this was the moment where I stepped in, trying to make our conversational and relational dynamic more equal.

No, I didn’t shame or confront him about why he wasn’t interested in my birthday experience. I still assumed he did care, because just in the beginning of that conversation he mentioned we were good friends. So I just started sharing with him how I felt. Because in a friendship, there should be space for this.

I told him that I was feeling grief. That for the last four years, every time my birthday approached in mid-October, I didn’t feel like celebrating anything. Because every year, it was the calendar mark at which I understood that I got one year older, but despite my continuing, committed efforts, my life hadn’t moved an inch closer to my most important goals. That I still lived in poverty and food insecurity in a third-world country. That my creativity still lay unused and unclaimed and unable to serve the world. That I still didn’t get to begin the career where my biggest gifts could be actualized – and the older I got, the smaller the chance at succeeding in this career became. That despite showing up in the arena, despite being brave with my life, despite working my ass off to make my dreams happen, despite rising strong after people abused me and shut doors in my face – despite living and working from integrity and with full-time, dead-serious commitment to creativity, I still stayed trapped in the same never-ending misery and multilateral trauma. I felt like time was slipping away like sand through my fingers. I felt like I was lagging behind more and more, and although there was no way I was going to leave the race, with every year I saw increasingly that the magnitude of talent and the surplus of effort could not outweigh my deficit of privilege. This year, I added, I was in even deeper grief, because on top of my chronic back pain and other health issues, in the absence of access to adequate healthcare I had this probably malignant skin tumor, and it’d been more than one year since it was diagnosed, so I wasn’t sure I would make it to my next birthday…

“Wait, wait, wait,” he interrupted me. “Do you have a tumor?”

At this point, his face expressed deep concern, with a hint of shock. It felt like he was really present. Like he finally started paying attention. Like he put aside the shallow, Hollywood-style chatter, and it was the moment for real, meaningful connection, so normal in a genuine friendship.

“Yes, I do,” I said. I knew better than to tell him that my tumor shouldn’t be big news for him because I’d already told him about it back in April. In that voice message he’d never reacted to. Now, seeing this shock in his face, I assumed he’d just missed them, and bringing it up would cause him to feel shame. I couldn’t let it happen and destroy this fragile connection that was just being born.

“So where is the tumor?” he asked.

Wow, I thought, he really cares. And for a moment, I thought it was so normal that he cared. Because we’re friends. Because his mother was a cancer survivor. Because I cared about his cosmetic surgery, and he communicated how much he appreciated it. It was like this down-to-earth, warm, vulnerable José, willing to show up for another in need, was back to me.

I told him the tumor was on my leg. I felt really vulnerable telling him further details – why biopsy wasn’t an option and why it had to be removed anyway, why I couldn’t get the surgery in Russia, what I needed to get that surgery abroad, how urgent it was, etc.

But, with his look of concern, he encouraged me to be vulnerable. He encouraged me to believe it mattered to him. Because when you understand that your friend is facing an existential threat in their life, why shouldn’t you be interested to know the details? Just in case to find out if you can help, and how?

So I started telling him. I expected him to ask, “So what’s your plan around this? What are the options to get this surgery? In which country? How much money do you need? How do you think you can obtain it?”

Telling this story, I didn’t expect him to donate me three thousand dollars that I needed for this surgery in Spain – the budget I calculated in the beginning of the year, based on my correspondence with a hospital in Barcelona, airfare, cheapest accommodation costs etc. For someone like him, it wasn’t too big of a sum, and I probably would accept his donation if he made it, but I’d rather see him help me otherwise. First, I knew I could set up a GoFundMe campaign, and with my four thousand followers on Instagram, I could probably try to collect that money. However, once collected, I would need him as the person with American residence and taxpayer’s number to withdraw the money from the platform and then have him send it to me privately, over Western Union, Paypal, or similar services. GoFundMe wouldn’t transfer anything directly to Russia. Such were their rules – campaign beneficiaries had to be American or EU citizens. Indiegogo and other platforms that allowed bank transfers to Russia charged such mind-boggling fees that they would eat up half of the collected money. I’d done comprehensive research on these opportunities.

But second – and this was a far more strategic and meaningful way in which José could help – he could help me with contacting people in the industry around my book. Because in the long term, it was my only way to get out of poverty and other aspects of existence in my third-world country. The current situation with the tumor was just a particular illustration of how traumatic that existence was.

---

Well, thinking this far I clearly overestimated him. Because after thirty seconds of listening to the information about my tumor, he just interrupted me:

“Oh, you shouldn’t be so upset. The Universe’s always got your back.”

And then, with the same complacent smirk, he proceeded to feed me another round of his Hollywood-style spirituality bullshit about “surrender” and so on. No, he wasn’t interested in learning what kind of treatment I needed, and where it could be obtained. He wasn’t curious about how he could help. He wasn’t willing to acknowledge the traumatic reality of my lived experience in the first place.

All of that would be empathy, and it all was too vulnerable and uncomfortable. He wasn’t doing empathy, because he wasn’t doing discomfort and vulnerability. He was an upper-middle-class, fortunate man from Hollywood, enjoying access to cosmetic surgeries. So from the comfort of his privilege bubble, he preached about how I should be feeling about the tumor threatening my life in a third-world country, without access to basic healthcare.

In the face of my trauma, his look of concern, his attention span, and his ability to listen lasted 30 seconds.

Thirty. Freaking. Seconds.

So no matter what you profess and how eloquently, your capacity to show up for another is measurable and observable.

---

He showed me his true colors, and I still didn’t fully believe those amidst my increasing sense of powerlessness. I rationalized his denials of empathy, thinking that maybe I just broke my tumor news too abruptly to him. That maybe he got triggered around his privilege and ashamed of the birthday excitement he’d just shared – and that shame drove him into this bullshit rhetoric mode. It somehow was lost on me that whatever the reason behind his behavior was, it wasn’t okay. That people who are honest and self-aware enough apologize after such fuck-ups, and he never did.

Speaking of self-awareness, as the quality he’d many times boasted he had, and the quality he’d allegedly appreciated in me during the first phase of our relationship: now, as the second, devaluation phase began after me getting really vulnerable, he told me in the conversation where I shared my trauma experience: “You’re so emotionally mature and self-aware, but you see this experience one-dimensionally.”

So what was that? It was another aspect of gaslighting. Specifically, he was trying to invalidate my perspective on my lived experience – as though he understood it better than I as the person who lived it. In another conversation in late September, hardcore gaslighting happened when he told me about another spirituality speaker he recently found on YouTube. According to José, this speaker claimed that the concept of self is invalid because in fact, we don’t know who we are, or even if we exist or not.

So, José told me now, “You think you know who you are, but that’s just your imagination. In reality, you don’t even know who you are, or if you exist in the first place”.

In retrospect, I can’t but see how psychopathic – clinically psychopathic – this communication was. He was literally trying to erase my sense of identity. Isn’t that what abusers do to keep the target hooked?

What he didn’t understand, though, was that I didn’t break up with him not because I was hooked. Not because I was gaslighted or unable to recognize the emotional abuse that was happening. I already recognized it. At this point, I held to that relationship only because of the power he had – the power to help with my book. My close friends in Russia who knew what was happening – and who knew how he’d showered me with friendship statements over previous months – encouraged me to give him the benefit of the doubt. They understood how scarce opportunity was in my life, what kind of power José had in the situation, and the fact that I didn’t have anyone else with the same kind of power, access, and privilege on the horizon.

In romantic relationships, narcissists love-bomb their targets as long as their targets provide a perfect supply and don’t make bids for reciprocity. As long as targets don’t hold them accountable for their behavior. As long as targets don’t create situations where professed values have to be practiced. As long as targets stay small, quiet, and accomodating to their grandiosity.

My experience showed that, in friendships, it works the exact same way. José bombarded me with fake appreciation and respect of our relationship as long as I supplied him with care and attention that he felt entitled to. When instead I showed him that I needed his presence and care and attention, devaluation started. Remarkably, even now, amidst the ongoing devaluation phase where he mostly treated me like garbage, he’d quickly return to eloquently professing friendship to me when I supplied him with attention and care.

The incident on his birthday definitely illustrated this. Given the time difference between Moscow and Los Angeles, I wrote him a congratulation text and intended to send it at a scheduled time, so it would be delivered on the morning of his birthday – which was around 7 p.m. Moscow time.

But as I woke up in the morning of that day and scrolled through Instagram stories, I saw something in his story that I made a casual comment about. It was so insignificant that I don’t even remember what it was.

I distinctly remember what followed, though.

He DMed me in one minute, saying: “Do you remember it’s my birthday today?”

It shouldn’t be, I thought. His birthday was the next day. For a split second, I thought I’d just messed up the dates. I’m not good at remembering dates, and then time difference makes it even more complicated. I knew how sensitive some people were around the timing of birthday congratulations. I admitted I could’ve made a mistake. So I checked my Calendar app, and the time zones app before replying to him.

“Bro,” I texted, “Now it’s 10 p.m. your time. Your birthday hasn’t yet come. Two hours remain till it.”

He sent back a laughing emoji.

“You know I’m not good at remembering dates,” I said, “but don’t worry: I set up three reminders on my Calendar app. There’s no way I could miss your birthday.”

In retrospect, I imagine how his grandiosity was inflated hearing about the three reminders.

“Wish me Happy birthday ;-)”, he replied.

I was surprised.

“But your birthday isn’t here yet,” I said, “I will congratulate you tomorrow :-)”

“No, I want it now :-)” he replied.

A literal, textbook communication of entitlement?

Okay, I wrote him the congratulation now. No matter the shit he’d done so far and this blustery demand for immediate attention, I wrote him my heartfelt wishes of health, courage, love, and success. They weren’t too eloquent but they came from my heart.

He replied: “You have no idea how much I love you.” With a dozen emojis attached.

That's the thing with narcissistic people: they might really think (and say) they love you, but it only lasts as long as you supply them with attention and care. In fact, they don't love you. They love the supply. Watch out for the moments where they openly demand it.

---

Quite predictably, in his Stories I saw the luxury and privilege in which he celebrated his 41st birthday. Unsurprisingly, it drowned me further in the pain and grief about mine, about to come nine days later. I knew I wasn’t any less talented, worthy, and hard-working than José. But in Russia, I was still blocked from opportunity, from normal life or even a basic sense of security. I had to encounter my birthday thinking about my poverty, my food insecurity, and my symptomatic tumor. Sure, there wasn’t going to be any celebration because I still lived with my dysfunctional family. Sure, I wasn’t going to have any birthday pictures to post on Instagram. Just like I hadn’t had one to post in the previous years. And just like in previous years, the only thing left for me to do on that day was to hope that next year, my birthday would be different. But with every year, as it remained the same, that hope wore out.

I knew my close friends would congratulate me, and I would again feel embarrassed that I didn’t have a place of my own where I could invite them for a party, or even host a small dinner in a restaurant. Since my teenage years, I’d dreamed of having a normal birthday one day. Just like I dreamed of having a normal job. And a normal life, not just survival. But no matter how hard and where I worked, following the meritocracy tale, my dreams never came true.

What was true, however, is that I wasn’t going to stop working to get the life I deserved. No matter how long I’d been deprived of it. No matter how many losses, including unrecoverable losses, I’d suffered. I wasn’t going to quit the race, no matter how overwhelming my feeling of lagging behind was.

Right now and here, my work got reduced to my relationship with José – because he remained the only person in communication who could help with my book. I stopped posting anything on Instagram, because writing and posting my motivational poetry didn’t help the project of my book anyway. It didn’t help my chances to finally get out of Russia. It didn’t help my chances to get my tumor treatment. I no longer saw the point of putting out my art to lift up others while my urgent, existential needs remained neglected.

So in the next FaceTime with José, I decided to start talking to him about my book, in a straightforward way, without further ado. He ignored my vulnerable bids for connection, so I thought maybe I should be bolder, clearer, and louder about my needs.

It was lost on me that this is exactly what narcissists push, and then punish, their targets for.

REALITIES APART

This FaceTime happened on October 13th, 2018, two days before my birthday. As bad as I am at remembering dates, this date seared into my memory – because my conversation with José that day turned out to be one of the most devastating, humiliating, and gaslighting conversations I’d had in my entire life.

Like, it was a perfect present for the birthday I’d already dreaded.

It all began relatively well. In the morning, José lay wrapped in a blanket, on the couch in his living room. The weather, he told me, wasn’t good. It was one of those rare days in the sunny California when it was raining incessantly. Unlike many previous times, he wasn’t walking around the house or going outside to take out garbage. Instead, he was focused on me, looking thoughtful and attentive.

This looked like a perfect moment to start the conversation about the book.

So I started by telling him I had a creative project I wanted to talk about because I needed his help with it. He agreed quite graciously. I’d prepared thoroughly for this conversation, because basically now I was making a presentation of my work. Basically, it was my life’s work. And my only opportunity to get a breakthrough in my life. So it goes without saying I knew how to make an appropriate, evidence-based, no-BS pitch. Before going into the particulars and explaining that my project was a novel, I started talking about the social issues it addressed. As a gay man, to him homophobia would be probably the most relatable one, I thought.

I briefly shared with him the evidence from my research on homophobia – where it came from, how it worked, what impact it had, and who benefitted from it. For now, I focused on the third part – the impact – because it backed up the urgency of the LGBT-equality fight at multiple levels.

Despite my expectations, he didn't look much interested around this whole homophobia thing. Obviously, his socioeconomic privilege — class, place of residence, occupation — kept him safe and far from the trauma that the majority of his community faced. But even so, I was shocked to hear what exactly he believed about the trauma of his fellow LGBT people.

I wish it had been a Zoom call that I could’ve recorded. Because two years later, I still can’t believe I did hear what I heard. But here he was – the narcissist, the gaslighter, the bullshitter exposing his true self.

Elaborating the evidence about the prevalence of homophobia in the world, I told him about this fact. One year before in Russia, my country, a certain region had seen “concentration camps” being built for gay men. Those were a special type of prisons that didn’t took in criminals. Instead, they took in gay men who got literally kidnapped by “special force” officers hunting for those men on gay hook-up apps. Here’s how it worked: those officers set up fake profiles with attractive pictures, then set up “dates” with the gay men who responded. Because in Russia altogether, and in that region speficially, there was no visibility of LGBT people at all. They had to hide themselves, their names, and their faces even on their dedicated apps. Then, once arrived at these “dates”, those gay folks got attacked by a group of officers, handcuffed and then brought to those prisons, where they were beaten, tortured, mutilated, and some of them murdered. Mind you, this whole thing wasn’t perpetrated by extremist groups. Those camps were built on taxpayers’ money. People perpetrating these barbarities received their salaries from the federal budget. So whether I liked it or not, as a working person in Russia, I was also sponsoring this violence through my taxes. Because it was a government-sponsored and government-covered homophobic violence. I explained to José why reinforcing homophobia was a huge part of our government’s political agenda, and that the information broke out accidentally, outside the majority of government-controlled mainstream media. And when international human rights organizations requested inverstigation, the head of that region officially stated that “there were no such sick [e.g. gay] people in the region, and even if they were there, their own families would bury them alive.” Then I mentioned that Russian television hosts regularly endorsed homophobic violence on their shows…

…at which point he interrupted me.

“Oh Jorge, I see you’re so concerned about this”, he said with a barely contained smirk, as if ridiculing me. “But in fact it’s simple: if we’re spiritual enough, we have to respect all people and their beliefs. These police officers, too.”

For a few seconds, watching his smirk grow into a full-size grin, I couldn’t believe my ears. I literally felt my hair prickle with horror.

José could be one of those men, lured out of the closet and then thrown into a cell and then mutilated and murdered because of who he was. It was a random circumstance that instead of living in that region of Russia, he was now living in West Hollywood. It was his privilege, not his merit, that he was safe from this violence. That his house didn’t get set on fire when his neighborhood saw him with his same-sex date. That he didn’t get laid off, pulled over, or harassed when he came out. And now, from that position of privilege, he just rationalized the violence being perpetrated on people like himself? Like, really? Was this the person hosting a podcast about spirituality?

My mind raced through the toxic cocktail of shock and disgust. Was this the third function of privilege, showing in full grace? Was I seeing in practice what I’d previously studied in theory?

I was at a loss for words, trying to get back on my emotional feet and speak truth to his bullshit, all the while staying civil. Well, as you know, the amount of time and energy it requires to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

But before I could find that time and energy, I thought: maybe he was just too triggered? Maybe I described very graphically the trauma that men like him went through, and he just armored up with this bullshit? Or maybe, as something happening on the other side of the globe, this thing didn’t feel relatable enough to him?

So making my case, I proceeded to give him another, somewhat less trigerring piece of evidence. In America, the country he now lived in, almost one half of homeless teenagers identified as LGBTQ. These kids weren’t thrown out into the streets because they lost their parents to natural calamities, car accidents, or because their parents lost homes to bankruptcies or poverty. These kids got kicked out of their own homes by their parents once those parents found out they were gay or trans. They lost their homes to the homophobia of their families.

Homelessness informs trauma at all ages, but what does it mean specifically at that age, in this particular demographic? Exclusion from education (and probably workforce in the future), exposure to human trafficking, drugs, prostitution, crime. At this formative, vulnerable age, these kids lives get deeply damaged at the hands of their primary caregivers.

Guess what he responds?

“Well,” he says, “we actually don’t know why it happens. Maybe God sends these kids this experience for their spiritual enlightenment. Maybe they end up more enlightened than you and me.”

Again, I couldn’t believe my freaking earphones. Spiritual enlightenment? Really? How cute is that when you lay on the couch in a chic living room of a nice house in West Hollywood? When you have a shiny black Mercedes-Benz parked in front of your door? When you don’t pick up your lunch from garbage cans?

“If you knew that God sends them this experience,” he continued the rhetoric, “would you then intervene?”

Well, obviously he wasn’t kicked out of his home when his family found out he was gay. But now, not only was he erasing the trauma of thousands of people like himself – far more vulnerable than him – he was making me, as an acitvist, feel like my work went against God. Literally.

I was baffled and speechless. I struggled for words. Not in my wildest fantasy could I have prepared for such a response. He totally defeated me with the combination of rhetoric and the imbalance of power he clearly was aware of. Because it was obvious that I was making a bid for his help with my work. The work that now he dismissed as worthless and useless – because according to him, the problems it addressed weren’t really problems.

The conversation ended with some trivial chatter. He didn’t make anything clear – like the fact he was not interested in my work. That’s what abusers do to keep you on the hook. But once we hung up, despite his polite formulas and bleached American smile, I felt emotionally eviscerated. As if I had been a gay man at the concentration camp, and he’d been the police officer who lured me out of the closet with a fake dating app profile and then mutilated me in a torture chamber.

Because, after all, neurobiologically that’s exactly what he had done to me – encouraging me to be vulnerable and open, pretending he loved and appreciated me, and now, as I opened up, just crushing me down.

One hour later, I got a text from him: “I’m looking forward to continue the conversation with you. I appreciate you so much.”

And that’s where my reality totally split apart. Abusers know how to undermine your sense of sanity: first they treat you like garbage, and shortly after they again act normal.

This epic gaslighting is what made me think: “Maybe he just wasn’t in a good mood? Maybe the weather was bad? Maybe he was having a hangover? Why would a sane person say things like that? Maybe he just wasn’t being his true self?”

I still gave him the benefit of the doubt, instead of seeing that rationalizing homophobic violence, the homelessness of gay kids, or any kind of oppression-related, systemic trauma – as long as this trauma didn’t affect his privileged ass – was exactly his true self.

Is it necessary to say that two days later, I heard nothing from him on my birthday? That, unlike me, he didn’t set a reminder to not miss the date? That, fully aware of my emotional on this day, strikingly different from his, he didn’t bother to offer me words of love and support? Well, because in retrospect it’s clear: he saw me as a piece of shit from a third-world country who’d never be equal to his grandiose, well-buffed, well-clad, well-groomed, Hollywood-employed self.

---

Aside from clarity, another thing narcissists don’t give you is closure. In situations like ours, where the imbalance of power and privilege comes out clearly, they entertain themselves with your vulnerability until your last emotional breath. Because they derive pleasure from it. Devaluating has to go the full way before discarding finally happens.

I didn’t know better to cut him off at that point. That’s where my generosity and willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt clearly exceeded a healthy threshold. Because when you have a gay person rationalizing homophobic violence just because they’re not the one who became targeted because of their privilege – that’s the evidence of their true colors. There’s no justifying that. And his gaslighting over the months, enhanced by the imbalance of power and privilege, left me feeling trapped.

So next weekend, as frustrated and confused as I felt about the initial conversation, I decided to continue telling him about my work. Casting another ounce of pearls, I gave him another chance at devaluating me, which he happily cashed in on.

Leaving my homophobia research aside, I switched to next item in my book’s presentation plan: the concept of intersectional empathy, which informed the narrative design of my book. I knew he’d been cynical and skeptical about empathy previously, but it was such a crucial part of my work that I had to get it through to him – now, from a somewhat different angle.

This Sunday, the weather in LA was gorgeous – as most of the time. The sun shone, the sky was cloudless, José was joyous and lively, doing house chores as our FaceTime began. Now, I again felt disrespected by the fact he didn’t focus on me, but what could I do? He was the master in this relationship. He set the rules, and I had to obey.

Remarkably, every single time we arranged the time of the call, he always set it in LA time. He never bothered to open the Clock app on his iPhone and look what time it was in my time zone. A trivial nuance? Not substantial enough to qualify as a sign of power over, superiority, and disrespect? Maybe, but not when it reflects larger relational dynamic.

I started by saying I had something new to share about empathy. It wasn’t new to me, but given his previous skepticism and rhetoric, it was obviously new to him. I said that the amazing, though quite countercultural, thing about empathy is that it’s not really about connecting to another person’s circumstances, the particulars of their story, or the aspects of their identity. Instead, empathy is about connecting to the emotions that universally underpin our experiences despite the differences of our identities and our circumstances. That’s why, I said, art could build empathic bridges between people of different genders, races, religions, orientations, ethnicities, etc. That’s what I called intersectional empathy.

He looked considering, but not convinced enough.

“Let me give you an example of what this looks like?” I asked.

“Sure, that’s interesting,” he said.

I knew I had a recent experience to illustrate this. I drew on courage from within, because it was a vulnerable personal experience. My previous acts of vulnerability hadn’t been met with support and understanding by José. And this time, it was even scarier than before.

Because here’s the thing: vulnerability is the greatest casualty of trauma. When trauma happens to you, you have less vulnerability left within you. You become less willing to open up to others. And, when you still draw on that vulnerability and open up and get denied empathy as a result – then instead of healing, it creates a new layer of trauma above the one that already exists. Remember, trauma is an uncontrollable negative situation that’s neurobiologically experienced as threat to survival or basic human need. This definition explains why getting denied empathy around trauma informs new trauma – because by making a bid for empathy, we’re seeking to fulfill our basic human need – to be connected to others and to have them connected to us.

Therefore, denials of empathy, whether in the form of blame, sympathy, rationalization, trivilization, threaten that meaningful connection we all need. When you're genuinely looking for empathy — not seeking sympathy or playing a victim or otherwise faking vulnerability — getting denied it is invariably processed as new trauma by the brain.

So he’d already denied me empathy around my dream to be a musical artist, around my birthday situation, around my economic situtation, around my health situation – why the hell did I even consider opening up to him again?

Because I had to make the presentation of my fucking book and its ideas. There were no other ways to effeectively do that. From the very beginning, embarking on this ambitious project against all odds from my place of disadvantage, I knew it wasn’t going to be a “play safe” thing.

“So last week,” I narrated, “I drove to a huge grocery store in my neighborhood. Owned by a French retail group, it’s sort of remarkable place in Moscow, because it’s incorporated in the first-ever, full-size shopping mall in the city built by the IKEA group, sixteen years ago. Before that, we hadn’t know what shopping malls looked like. As part of it, this grocery store with its cleanliness, abundance of foods, and very affordable prices, was our first glimpse into what middle-class European life looked like.”

At this point I thought he’d remember what he’d mentioned about grocery stores in Caracas from his childhood – and how strikingly different grocery stores in America looked like. He was someone who had firsthand experienced this economic contrast.

But his face showed no signs of connection. He walked out of his house and sat down on a bench in his yard.

“I still have to go and buy most of my food there,” I continued, “because groceries within a walking distance from my home aren’t that clean, and at the same time they’re far more expensive.”

I noticed something like disgust show up on his face. No, it wasn’t empathy or attention or presense. Or maybe I was just making this up amidst my vulnerability? Anyway, I continued to make my case.

“So last week, I drove by there another time, grabbed the cart, and then as I wheeled towards the veggies, I saw this big advertising signboard in the meat aisle that read: Eat at least three kinds of meat every week. Making your diet diverse promotes good health. And you know, José, the moment I read it, I felt that my eyes welled up with tears.”

I made a pause here to check in with him. I’d watched him look around as I’d been talking, and I wanted to make sure he was present.

Yes, he was. Because at the word “crying”, an expression of engagement and concern showed up on his face. Like, he was hearing me. He didn’t miss what I was talking about. Maybe he expected to hear that just like many of Hollywood friends, I was a devout vegan and wanted to cry because the sign falsely claimed the health benefits of meat.

But no, my reason was different, and far less expected to his upper-middle-class American worldview.

“The thing is, sixteen years ago, when this grocery store opened, I was 15. I was in my junior year in high school, and for years I’d been bullied for being skinny and shorter than other boys. I was actually lagging behind in my physical growth – my biological clock always ticked slower than it did for other people. Today, looking younger than my real age is privilege, but back in those days it was a huge disadvantage. So I got picked on for being underweight and short and and at the same time getting all As and being visibly the poorest kid in the class. What can make a kid a more ideal target for bullying?”

At this point, his expression of presence faded. He was again looking around. Either his attention span was actually as short as Donald Trump’s, or his tolerance for discomfort just sucked. I continued nevertheless. I couldn’t check in with him every 30 seconds.

“So, as a result of bullying, I had a lot of insecurity about my muscle mass. In fact, I loved sports and I was still in puberty. My testosterone was increasing. My bones still could grow. My parents knew about what was happening at school. They knew how much it hurt me. So I wanted to grow my muscle mass – start going to the gym and increasing the amount of protein in my diet. Remember, I was still physically growing at that moment. I needed enough protein. And, in fact, as I calculated, I was getting only about 50% of the daily norm. At the point, I couldn’t understand why my mother made such small portions of meat or fish. Most of the time, I left the dining table hungry. When I tried to talk to her about making bigger portions, or giving me the money to buy a gym membership, she just made scenes and shamed me. According to her vision, meat was “too expensive”, and I was demanding too much of it, and gym was a luxury, and I was being selfish, and most of all, I was being a bad Christian because a good Christian shouldn’t care about his appearance.”

José exhaled loudly, as if trying to contain his anger rising up. I found myself thinking he was doing empathy – that along with me, he was being mad at my mother.

“Yes, unfortunately, my family was dysfunctional. I never saw empathy or real care growing up, and I didn’t choose this family I was born into. Scarcity was not as much our economic reality as it was my parents’ operating system. We were poor, but not so poor to not be able to afford buying enough meat. Many years later, I learned that depriving their kid of the protein he needed to normally grow, my parents put lots of money in the bank.

“Anyway, their stories are theirs, but what I clearly understood at that point, 15 years old, is that my primary caregivers were unreliable and in the absence of relatives or other significant adults, I had to prematurely learn to be self-reliant. So I learned to cook on my own, but still I didn’t have my own money to buy food. And then I remember, when this grocery store opened sixteen years ago, and it was fresh and clean and shiny and brand new, I used to go there by bus, most times hungry, and then I walked through those meat aisles thinking: When I get to earn my own money, I will buy enough meat for myself. Different kinds of meat, not just chicken because it’s the cheapest. I like meat. And I like to cook. And I need and deserve to get enouguh protein. And I will also get a gym membership.

“Making these wishes to God, it wasn’t lost on me that growth zones in my bones might close before I got to earn my own money. It was tragic. But it wasn’t nowhere near as tragic as I’m feeling now, at 31. Because I went to medical school, studied arduously for eleven years, graduated summa cum laude, have been working my ass off – and guess what? I still live in poverty and food insecurity. I still can’t afford to buy any kind of meat beyond chicken. No matter where I worked and how much, I never could afford a gym membership. So this signboard about different kinds of meat makes me think of my fifteen-year-old self and his trauma, and the fact that all my efforts to rise above this trauma as an adult bumped against the very low glass ceiling created by factors outside of my control – corruption and underfunding in my industry, and stagnating economy of this country as a whole.”

At this point, José’s face expressed clear annoyance and irritation. As if, instead of a friend sharing his experience, I was being an intrusive peddler he couldn’t get rid of.

“Here’s the reason why I mentioned this story,” I concluded. “You probably cannot identify with my circumstances or particulars of my experience – like an emotionally abusive family, or food insecurity, or the inability to get of poverty despite a high-ranking university degree. But what you can do, though, is recognize the emotions underpinning this experience – powerlessness, loss, trauma – and then identify with these emotions, although for you they could have been created by events and situations significantly different from mine. That’s the kind of connection art can effectively forge as long as storytelling focuses on universally relatable emotions rather than unrelatable particulars. That’s how art can effectively tackle social problems at large, cultural level. Regardless of identity differences or political beliefs, what better than art can bring you painfully close to the people you think you hate, and show you their humanity in such a frustrating way that your hate gets defeated at its core? What better than art can call bullshit on everything that’s happening in the world that is untrue and unkind? What better than art can remind us of our inextricable connection to one another through a power greater than us, and the fact that this connection is rooted in love and kindness? In the domain of LGBT equality, this is how my project brings something new to the table. And next time, I’m going to tell you all the details.”

This time, throughout the whole talk, he didn’t interrupt me. He did let me finish. I saw he hadn’t been really engaged, paying attention, or making an effort to understand what I was talking about. I saw my feelings and ideas weren’t getting to him, as if he put up a wall in my face. No, there clearly wasn’t empathy or reciprocity or meaningful connection. But still, I wasn’t prepared to what was going to say in response.

VENOM SPILLS FIRST

“Look, this doesn’t work for me,” he said, making a visible effort to sound polite and keep his bleached American smile on. “You’re talking on and on and on. I don’t like being a tape recorder. I don’t want to disempower you, but this has to be a conversation, like a dialog.”

I was speechless. It was a vulnerability train wreck. Amidst the wave of shame he effectively sent over me, my critical thinking went offline. It didn’t occur to me to ask him why this hadn’t been a conversation. Because I, in fact, invited it. It was supposed to be a dialog. Because before starting to talk, I encouraged him to interrupt me along the way – if something was unclear, if he had some ideas/questions/experiences/opinions to share, etc. I never intended to give a lecture, and I was not on a TEDx stage. I was having a private FaceTime with a friend. So the reason it hadn’t been a conversation was that he made no effort to engage and be present in it.

Because he felt it was a real, tough, and uncomfortable conversation, and he wasn’t doing any of that. He was doing fun, fast, and easy talks, like those about him dating celebrities and making new deals with big brands. But leveraging the power imbalance in our relationship, and clearly targeting my vulnerability in a typical abuser’s move, he distorted the reality and shifted the blame on me.

Out of shock, it also didn’t occur to me to ask him: why had it never been a problem in the majority of our FaceTimes when he talked on and on and on? Telling me about his fortunate life? About Burning Man? About his cosmetic surgery? About dating someone? About doing his comedy stand-ups?

Why did he feel invariably entitled to my attention and care and time, but the moment I made a bid for reciprocity, he didn’t hesitate to snap at me?

I wish I’d asked him these questions immediately. But he crushed me emotionally so heavily that I just felt paralyzed.

In hindsight, it was clear how through this insulting response he unambiguously pointed me to my place – he was the fortunate guy in Hollywood, holding privilege and power and access and connections with celebrities, and I was a poverty-stricken loser from a third-world country. Of course, whatever I shared or created or talked about didn’t matter or deserve his time or attention. He’d called me a friend far too many times, but from his behavior it was obvious that I was just his narcissistic supply.

I’m not a psychologist, so I’m not qualified to give José a personality disorder diagnosis. However, it’s remarkable that our relationship dynamics and his responses reflected a typical, textbook picture of narcissistic abuse. He smothered me in niceties and love and appeciation as long as he got something from me – meaningful feedback on his newly created podcast, empathy and concern around his health, attention for his rip-roaring Hollywood life stories. He was feeling okay and treating me okay as long as our relationship remained focused on him.

But in the last two conversations, I withdrew the one-sided supply and switched the focus on my experience and my needs. In a healthy relationship (which at the moment I believed we were having), this is normal. But in a relationship defined by one person’s narcisisstic behavior, such withdrawal promptly drives aggression, blaming, and devaluation of the other.

Aside from the hypothesis about his narcissstic traits, here’s the observation derived from me watching his facial expression and other non-verbal cues as I talked: the truth about my lived experience was making him visibly uncomfortable – painfully aware about his privilege, and probably ashamed about his overspending. He’d previously resisted my attempts to talk about shame resilience. It wasn’t my intention to shame him, and I made sure to share my experience in the most benign way possible, but such is the first function of privilege:

If you haven't done the inner work of owning and exploring your unearned advantages, you'll invariably feel shame triggered by other people's stories and experiences.

And now that privilege shame happened for him, just like in the previous conversation about gay concentration camps and homeless LGBT teenagers, he had no resources to maintain his integrity and think critically. As scarce as his capacity for empathy had been in the background, now he had no capacity to practice it at all – because shame, aside from being very powerful, is a very self-focused emotion.

The bottom line, though, remains the same: he clearly opted out of honoring the values he’d eloquently professed – from our friendship to his long-advertised self-awareness to spirituality. He slammed a door in my face, although with his polite, picture-perfect, bleached upper-middle-class American smile. He made me feel powerless and small. He made me feel like my work and my ideas were boring and irrelevant. Even his phrase “I don’t want to disempower you” while in fact effectively disempowering me served to further undermine my sense of sanity.

I was so paralyzed that I didn’t have anything more to say in that conversation. He didn’t hesistate to switch the focus back onto himself – where he perceived it always belonged – and told me we had to finish the conversation soon because he was going to the gym.

Isn’t this psychopathic? Just after hearing my story about my life-long body image struggle, and my economic circumstances always keeping gyms out of my reach, he didn’t fail to mention he’s now going to have another gym workout – to make his well-buffed body yet more buffed.

Was this another deliberate attack on my vulnerability or just an insensitive remark?

Anyway, he didn’t stop there. He also informed me he didn’t know if he’d be available next weekend because he was going to the United Arab Emirates, along with the team producing J Lo’s big show, and he was super excited about the trip because he was going to have negotiations about opening a branch of his agency in the country – as he said, “expanding his business overseas”.

So no matter how closely he saw my disadvantage, it didn’t stop him from continuing to wave his privilege in my face. And yes, he wasn’t willing to let me off the hook. Because at the end of the conversation, he said:

“Maybe I’ll FaceTime you from the Emirates.”

Still feeling small and ashamed, I didn’t know better than to say:

“Oh, that would be great. Moscow and the Emirates are in the same time zone, so it’ll be much easier to schedule the call.”

Hanging up, he was already his “normal” nice self, sending me hugs and kisses and blah-blah-blah.

But, just like after the previous FaceTime, I felt emotionally eviscerated and physically sick. In mental health literature, people often describe this condition as having been “emotionally raped” – it’s experienced in the immediate period (minutes or hours) after being gaslighted, diminished, or unreasonably attacked by a person exhibiting narcissistic behavior.

And ten minutes after hanging up, he texted me: “I hope I didn’t offend you. I love you. You bring so much value into my life.”

Just look at this epic, Hall-of-Fame level of abuse: he offered no meaningful apology for what he’d just done, but he gave me no closure either. No, he didn’t want to quit the relationship with me. He just wanted me to know my place, which was – to remain his supply. All the while making it look like he appreciated me as a person.

---

By that moment, I had no doubt things were seriously off. I knew this wasn’t what a friendship should look like. Experience showed I couldn’t be safe practicing authenticity with that person. In a normal situation, I wouldn’t have thought twice before never seeking to contact him again.

But my situation was anything but normal. I still had a pressing health issue I couldn’t get a treatment for without the help of someone from the West, be it through wiring my crowdfunding money or through representing the project of my book to potential producers. After my previous abusive experiences, I completely lost the faith that I could find anyone willing to take me and my work seriously on Instagram. The hijabi poet, the Christian fashion stylist, and a bunch of other hypocrites not mentioned in these series had slowly but steadily corroded my trust in the integrity of American creatives and social justice advocates. José now appeared to be my last chance. And I just couldn’t believe that after so many shitty people, after so many efforts, after so much authenticity and vulnerability and integrity invested in my work and in those relationships built around it, after so much injustice and abuse I’d never deserved – that after it all, God sent me another person who first befriended me and encouraged me to be vulnerable and then just turned his back upon me as soon as I communicated my need for his presence.

Could I get the same shitty ticket in the lottery again and again? It was just statistically improbable. Unlike in the previous years, now evidence no longer allowed me to bullshit myself that “I attracted abusers because I was too vulnerable with people”. No. This wasn’t the case. People were who they were regardless of who I was. And my vulnerability was practiced in a healthy, boundaried, gradual way – exactly the way that, according to Brené Brown and other experts, leads to deep and meaningful connection.

I didn't do anything to invite or enable that abuse. In truth, the abuse was enabled by the huge imbalance of privilege between me and those people.

In late October, as José went on his trip to UAE, the trip about to bring exciting touristic experiences, money, and new horizons for his already thriving business, I found myself facing the closure of the clinic where I worked, with no viable alternatives in near sight.

There's no denying that continuing economic oppression, or any other kind of oppression, has an impact on our self-worth and all of its functions, such as the ability to set boundaries or the willingness to quit toxic relationships. Yes, it didn't matter how many self-help books I had read, how many motivational videos I had watched, and how much motivational poetry I had written myself. It didn't matter that I'd known a lot about abuse and other mental health topics. What made me feel trapped and hold on to the relationship with José despite his abusive behavior was the traumatic reality of my life in Russia. The reality he wasn't willing to acknowledge or even try to understand from the comfort of his privilege bubble. The reality that, nevertheless, remained ruthlessly, immutably real.

NOVEMBER

Needless to say, he never called or even texted me from the Emirates. Narcisisstic punishment had to be felt. In Instagram Stories, I just watched him having fun there with his privileged pals. Yes, even though theoretically it was a work trip, he was still having fun. Because what work looks like for a Hollywood talent agent is not what it looks like for the majority of the world, and at that moment, facing bankruptcy another time, I understood this truth distinctly. What I understand even more distinctly with the benefit of hindsight, is that for people like José, life is all about fun.

Work is fun, gym is fun, weekends are fun, sex is fun, relationships are fun, and so on. There’s just no depth, no vulnerability, and no room for anything meaningful and real. They don’t tire themselves actually thinking about contribution, connection, or compassion – they only talk about it all as long as it serves their publicity goals. And yes, my experience so far had shown it’s such people who held power in, and stood at the gates of, the American creative industry.

Deep down I knew it’s people like me who belong in that industry – who are able and talented and committed enough to use big creative platforms to make meaningful sociocultural change. That’s why I also knew that, by not continuing to make attempts to get into that industry, I was eventually stealing from the world and the people my work could serve.

The next weekend after José returning to LA, I texted him asking how the trip had been.

Just as I assumed from his Stories, the trip turned out awesome. And of, course, fun.

“I missed you so much,” he added with an emoji.

“Oh really?” I thought to myself. At this point, his manipulation became obvious. He’d brutally shut me down the last time we talked, he hadn’t sent me a text during the trip, and now he was claiming he’d missed me.

In the dynamics he’d created, there was clearly no space for me to voice how I really felt. I was talking to a Hollywood gatekeeper, so I had to play along saying that I missed him too.

And it wasn’t a complete lie that I squeezed from myself out of politeness. I’d actually missed José, but in a different way. I hadn’t missed the complacent, arrogant, shallow asshole who’d gone on another fun, money-making trip. I’d missed the down-to-earth, warm, and smart José, the long-distance Venezuelan-American friend I’d believed I knew before August.

I missed the José I'd known before I got to know the real José.

He scheduled a FaceTime as if nothing were wrong, and we talked the next day. He again acted normal, warm, friendly, down-to-earth – but I no longer felt okay in his presence. I felt silenced and diminished. Unlike previously, I couldn’t just be myself – because he’d effectively punished me for that. Supporting the shallow, trivial chatter, of course centered on himself, I tried to make the most generous assumptions about his behavior, so inconsistent with his eloquent friendship statements and our spirituality talks.

“He was overwhelmed. He was triggered by my story. I gave him too much information. I should’ve been more concise,” I thought.

Making up these sorry-ass and excuses essentially blaming myself, I was trying to put together the benign theory about José’s intentions: that he’d been honest about our relationship; that he was actually my friend; that he cared about my life and my health and my work.

Obviously, time was needed to test that theory. Given how he reacted in the last two conversations, I wouldn’t start talking to him about my work again. If he were actually my friend, I reasoned, he would get back to that conversation himself. Because he had heard that I needed his help.

A friend in need is a friend indeed, the good old saying goes, and it makes all the sense.

In the next two FaceTimes, though, he never got back to this pending conversation that he knew was so important for me. Just like he’d never asked in a meaningful way about my health situation or my work situation. When I mentioned that I’d lost my job because of my clinic’s closure and there were no alternatives, he just brushed me off with another statement about “surrender” and “the Universe’s got your back” and went on to talk about his fortunate American life.

What a thoughful person – let alone your friend – would do in such situation? First and foremost, they would ask questions. Because they would really want to understand what’s going on for you. Like, Why did your private clinic close? Do many private clinics close these days in Russia, and if so, why? Why do you say there are no alternatives? Are there public hospitals? Can you work outside your industry? What’s your plan?

Let’s put aside empathy and emotional context – questions like “What are you feeling amidst this?”, “How can I be here for you in a way that’s supportive?”

There should’ve been at least curiosity about facts informing my experience.

But there was nothing. Nada. Because whatever happened to me, it didn’t deserve space in our one-time-a-week, one-hour-long FaceTimes. What deserved space were stories about his fortunate life, and news like this: for Thanksgiving, he was going to St. Barts, a luxurious resort destination in the Carribean with a group of friends, and on the week to come, he was going to get a fake tan so he could “look sexy” in their company. It was going to be another Instagram-worthy, shirtless party of well-buffed buddies, celebrating their affluence and luck. How important could my life experience be compared to his?

However, he continued to fake friendship in my face. On Thanksgiving day, he tagged me, along with a dozen other people he’d mentioned many times, in an Instagram picture from St. Barts.

Whether he’d tagged me to another time wave his privilege in my face, or just to make me feel appreciated and thus keep me on the hook, or maybe all at the same time – remains unclear.

What is clear, though, is that it isn’t normal to profess friendship and gratitude towards people whose lives, in fact, you don’t give a shit about.

DECEMBER

Coming back from St. Barts, José wasn’t short of amazing, awesome stories about the great time he and his company had. Needless to say, he still wasn’t interested in what was going on on my side – whether I found a new job or not, what was going on with my tumor or my back pain. As usual, he kept the conversation focus tight on his privileged life experience. And, he said one thing – being one of his St. Barts reflections – that had a clear gaslighting and manipulative meaning in the context of our relationship.

He said one evening he was on a yacht with his friends, and he was watching a beautiful sunset.

“So I’m here, amidst this affluence, and I’m holding a glass of wine, and I’m enjoying the sunset. Then I suddenly understand it’s all bullshit. The beauty and the joy and the pleasure of this experience is bullshit. I’m just making up that this experience is good. I could be stuck in a traffic jam in LA, and feel just as good. But when I’m stuck in a traffic jam in LA, I’m feeling bad only because I’m making up that this experience is bad. In fact, nothing is good or bad. We’re just making it all up.”

He said it all with a clear intonation of “spiritual” gravity, trying to sound almost like Oprah.

And however he tried to frame it, it didn’t change that what he said was utter, epic horseshit. I recognized it immediately. In America, it was part of the fast-food psychology culture that claimed our emotions and experiences and identities weren’t real, instead we just made them up. That regardless of external events and circumstances, at any given moment we can choose to feel good or to feel bad.

Truth be told, this horseshit is common in people who never went through real struggle and trauma. In people whose lives, just like José, have been for many years informed by privilege and security. In people who, even if they experienced poverty and oppression at some remote point, these days chose to be completely out of touch with the lived experiences of their fellow human beings. They lived on the upside of injustice and inequality, and in order to keep themselves comfortable with it, they employed this gaslighting rhetoric that our emotions aren’t real and don’t represent adequate responses to external reality.

Because denying the adequacy of someone else's emotional experience, and external circumstances as the root cause of that experience, is a very convenient way to deny that person help and support, especially when you have the power to provide those.

Make note: such “highly spiritual” thought came to him when he was on a yacht watching a beautiful sunset, amidst the luxury and among his well-buffed and well-groomed buddies. It didn’t come to him when he was actually stuck in a traffic jam in LA. I don’t think such an idea – that feeling bad or good is what we make up – comes to the minds of homeless people who dig into garbage cans for food. I don’t think this ideas comes to the minds of LGBT children who suffer violence at the hands of their own family. People who experience real trauma don’t doubt its reality until they become gaslighted by those who enjoying privilege.

And now, he knew the trauma I was going through – my poverty, my oppression, and my recent joblessness. Yes, he showed clearly he didn’t want to talk about any of that, but with this “story”, he communicated that I shouldn’t feel any worse about my life than he feels about his.

Just like at that moment in October when he eloquently convinced me that I “didn’t even know who I was”, he was again trying to erase my reality. The reality that, following his profuse friendship statements, I’d had the courage to open up about.

---

Holding on to the benefit of the doubt, I still tried to give him wake-up calls.

Maybe, I thought, he’d be more receptive in written communication? Maybe he would accept information holding depth and meaning while reading, not listening? Maybe, he’d be able to read my emails during the week with more attention than listen to me during our FaceTimes, always limited to an hour or two because of time difference?

See, I knew I’d have to confont him about my book eventually. I wasn’t going to play along. I wouldn’t act like I forgot about this conversation. I wouldn’t act like my need for help wasn’t real, because it was. There was no problem for me in hearing a No. The problem was in not hearing anything from his side, and still framing this relationship as friendship.

So I had to make sure there was no space for doubt or misunderstanding. I had to make sure he knew my life situation, and the worth of my work staying unclaimed, and the urgency of helping me with it. How do you make that known to a person who never bothers to ask?

In early of December, I sent him two important emails, trying to wake up his awareness and create the premise for continuing our conversation.

He didn’t ignore either of these calls. Moreover, speaking of abuse and gaslighting, it’s remarkable how he reacted to both of them.

The first was Easy Mark, a chapter fron Brené Brown’s book Rising Strong that had to do with need – asking for help, giving help, the courage inherent in both, and how both were indispensable parts of our lifelong spiritual contract as human beings. He thanked me for the piece, but it wasn’t clear if it really got to him.

A few days later, though, he spoke on his podcast about the sudden death of a friend amidst a yoga session – an upper-middle-class person his age who lived a perfectly healthy lifestyle. Reflecting on this tragedy, José said that it got him thinking about “the clock that was ticking” because just like anyone, he didn’t know how much time he still had left. Then, he wondered “how many people he was going to be able to help in his remaining lifetime.”

Well, this statement communicated that helping others was his value and priority in life, right? Why else might one be thinking about this in relation to death?

Then, this was totally inconsistent with his behavior in the face of my need for help.

So without getting personal, I decided to ask him about his values clearly. Not on his podcast, not in front of the mic, but in a private WhatsApp – the place where his audience would never see him. The place where he could be his true, non-performing self.

Here's the screenshot of what he responded:

Lo and behold: I sent him Brené’s chapter doubting whether he was repelled by my need for help – because that’s how it looked back in October – and now he communicates the exact opposite. After having been toxic, now he communicates that he’s safe. And willing to help. And “loving” me. Basically, after bashing me for my vulnerability he again encourages me to be vulnerable. Isn’t that the definition of emotional abuse?

That was one of the biggest baits that I swallowed in our relationship, hook, line, and sinker. My benefit of the doubt grew bigger. Amidst my powerlessness, I started gaslighting myself that what had happened in October wasn’t that big of a deal. That he’s actually a good person. That he was indeed here for me. That he’d probably woken up and remembered about my bid for help. That in the next FaceTime it’d probably be safe to continue the conversation about my project.

A few days later, I sent him another email containing the description of three flagrant cases of corruption-driven medical malpractice that I’d witnessed when working in the academic hospital affiliated with my university in Russia. That piece was taken from the memoir I’d written for the hijabi poet, but it was short and relevant even taken out from the context. It clearly illustrated the systemic realities of Russian public healthcare: how money trumped over ethics, how accountability was all but dead, how the biased opinions of those in power were favored over evidence-based clinical guildelines – and most importantly, how thousands of patients bore irreversible health losses because of that shit.

I sent him this piece with two aspects of intention: on the one hand, I wanted him to be aware of the conditions I’d worked in for five years – and thus understand why continuing a medical career in Russia was a dead end for me, economically and professionally and spiritually. On the other hand, and it was even more important, this evidence in large part explained the reason why getting a tumor treatment in Russia wasn’t an option: just like those patients, there was a good chance I’d suffer the same malpractice and have my health irreversibly damaged.

I asked him to read the text and tell me if its meaning was accesible to a person without medical education, like him. It still contained a lot of technical terms.

“It’s perfectly understandable. Good job :-)”, he replied the next day.

It was a strange reply. Almost everybody who’d read that piece before said they were shocked and even traumatized by this piece of evidence. They couldn’t believe medical malpractice in Russia was so prevalent and so covered-up. They couldn’t believe the extent of corruption and the fact that the majority of workers were exploited in the conditions of semi-slavery, without having a chance to intervene in the atrocities that were happening. They couldn’t believe patients couldn’t be effectively protected by the law. Many people said they would dread to live in a country with a healthcare system like that.

Why did I get such reactions to this story? Because my vivid, graphic writing style made people step into the shoes of both patients and myself as a ordinary healthcare worker in these cases. Because, as a writer and an artist in general, I was skilled in successfully connecting to people’s hearts and minds and effectively calling forth empathy, which was then transformed into shock and anger.

But José, as you know from previous chapters, wasn’t doing empathy. Whether unable or unwilling, he wouldn’t get in touch with the emotions that lay on the very surface of that story. He just confirmed that he understood it intellectually.

In order to understand my need for help, though, that was enough.

---

He would also have to get in touch with the healthcare system soon. In the next FaceTime, I was heartbroken to learn that his father had been recently diagnosed with leukemia and, in the course of his treatment, he needed a stem cell transplant from someone biologically related. José and his sister were going to take a compatibility test to find out if they could the donors.

José shared this news in a casual manner, as usual masking with “surrender” and other “spiritual” rhetoric, but I guessed he had a big emotional turmoil within. Because I’d already known certain things from his background. I knew his mother was a cancer survivor, and when both of your parents get cancer and you’re in your forties, you can’t but worry about how the genetic lottery will play out for you. I also knew that his parents were divorced, and he mentioned he’d had a rocky relationship with his Dad, and his Mom dissuaded him from becoming a donor even if he tested compatible – because the harvesting of blood stem cells implied significant health risks.

But, he concluded, “I’m gonna fly to Miami and do the test anyway. If I’m compatible, I’ll go for the donation procedure. See, it’s my Dad. No matter what we had in the past, this thing can probably save him. With cancer, you never have guarantees, but if I fail to show up and try doing this for him, I won’t be able to live with it.”

At this point, I again recognized the José I’d once believed in. The José that had integrity and courage and good conscience. I reasonably thought that if he understood the gravity of the his Dad’s health situation, he’d also understand the gravity of mine. And, in order to help me as his friend, he didn’t have to donate stem cells or otherwise risk own health. He’d just have to help me with my work, which he obviously could, and my work would open the opporunity for me to get the treatment I needed. How could he fail to show up?

Or was he one of those people who practiced empathy and showing up selectively?

Importantly, as he narrated his Dad’s cancer story, it was obvious that he understood his privilege. He said he’s so grateful his Dad could receive proper, state-of-the-art cancer treatment in the Miami hospital, because in Venezuela it would be “a whole different story”.

Make note: he’d just read my accounts about systemic malpractice in Russian healthcare, and then he suggested the same about his native country – which was unsuprising given the chaos and corruption Venezuela had been going through in the recent decades. So he understood how life-saving it could be to have access to a foreign healthcare system in the face of cancer, and that it was a privilege.

Despite all the shit he’d done to me this far, I felt totally present in his current experience. When he flew to Miami to take the compatibility test, I asked how his Dad was doing. On the day of test, I prayed for them and then asked José about when the results were going to be ready. I was emotionally invested in this situation, even though I’d never known his Dad. Because I knew José. And I knew what friendship looked like for me. My presence and empathy were the best I could offer. And no matter how much José had put down empathy before, now he again appreared grateful for that.

YOU GET WHAT YOU GET

Test results came positive in mid-December, meaning that José could be the effective stem cell donor. The donation procedure was scheduled for the beginning of January, shortly after Christmas holidays. Staying present with him in the situation, I was feeling totally vulnerable. Grateful and uncertain at the same time. Grateful because there was a chance to try saving his Dad. Uncertain because there were no guarantees, and pre-donation treatment, stimulating José stem cells before harvesting them, could have serious side effects, both short-term and long-term.

José left Miami and came to visit his sister who lived in New York. His sister, a couple years his senior, was a classical pianist. I remember how he once sent me her videos, and then I shared with him the story of me falling in love with the piano and then getting separated from it by poverty and oppression – another story he failed to empathize with. Now, he and his sister were having another pre-Christmas family reunion. He visited her regularly, as I could see from his Instagram pictures with her and his niece.

This family visit wouldn’t have caught my particular attention if it weren’t for one event – so meaningful that it gave title to this whole story.

He, his niece, his sister, her friend and her friend’s daughter were having a meal in a coffee shop. It would be just a casual picture of American middle-class family life, but his niece said something special. Something José deemed worthy of shooting and posting to Instagram Stories – because, in fact, it represented his life philosophy.

This incredibly beautiful, blonde five-year-old was facing the camera eating her chocolate cake. Her tiny lips werew smeared with cream, and she was looking even cuter than always. Her picture was one of those that always make me smile and realize how much I want to have my own kids.

I remember how, for a couple seconds, I marveled at that girl’s beauty before I made out what she was saying and my heart fell.

“You get what you get! And you don’t get upset!”

“Oh, honey? Say it again! Preach!” José said through his baritone laughter. He was obviously glad to hear that.

“Uncle, you just ge-e-et what you ge-e-et,” the girl repeated, “and you don’t get upset.” Then, she happily dug back in her cake.

As an empathy researcher, I immediately recognized one of the most typical phrases (and cognition patterns) that informs denials of empathy in our culture.

She was a kid, way too young with way too little life experience and perspective to understand that what she was saying was bullshit. That it didn’t reflect the complexity of life. That it was okay to get upset. That we get different things in life, sometimes deservedly and sometimes randomly. That sometimes, if what you get is trauma or abuse or injustice you never deserved, getting upset is necessary to start making change.

Probably, she’d picked up that phrase from the adults who once refused to buy her another candy and then told her to not be upset. The kid now just mechanically repeated what she’d been told.

So I wasn’t sorry for her. I was sorry for the adults around her who acted like they endorsed this BS. I was sorry they didn’t reality-check this idea for the kid, even though it could evolve into dangerous congnitive patterns as she grew up – her denying empathy to herself and people around her.

I was sorry they didn't understand that all of them right now could be not a fortunate middle-class American family eating a lunch in a New York coffee shop, but a family now losing the roof over their head amidst another bombing in the war-stricken Syria — and then their five-year-old would hardly preach about not getting upset, and her Uncle would hardly put it out on Instagram.

I was sorry for José, a grown-up man using heedless words of an immature kid to drive through his typical rhetoric about life: rationalization and denial, under the sauce of spirituality.

Because, dear God, he engaged in that rhetoric so much. Over the months, telling me about his experiences – like not marrying the celebrity he dated, not having another deal or another relationship work out – he’d masked his real emotions with this argument that we shouldn’t get upset with the things we get in life. This was odd for someone who advertised his high level of self-awareness at every opportunity, and I understood the vulnerability issue underpinning it.

But here’s the important note: he denied himself the right to feel upset about things that were, in fact, pretty much like those hypothetical candies that his niece didn’t get. He wasn’t facing real existential threats. Because of those outcomes he referred to, he wasn’t being targeted with violence. He didn’t risk losing his house or his access to healthcare. He didn’t have to worry if his car would start on any given day. He didn’t have to worry if he’d be able to make his food budget next month. So whether he was upset or not about the outcomes he got disappointed with, his life wouldn’t fall apart.

And, most hurtfully, I’d already seen how he applied this same rhetoric to situations like mine, involving major, uncontrollable trauma. Let alone my health or my poverty – I remembered the cynicism with which he’d spoken about homeless LGBT kids in America and gay men targeted with homophobic violence in Russia.

Was he actually recognizing the scope in which these “spiritual principles” could be rightfully applied? Or was he willing to violate that scope and apply them wherever it would make him comfortable with his privilege?

---

In our next FaceTime, when he got back in LA, I saw him cheerful and lively, just like when he’d come back from Burning Man. I didn’t know if that was another mask he wore, but it struck me that I felt more worried about his Dad’s cancer and the upcoming donation procedure than he appeared to be. And despite my expectations, after telling me he wanted to help a couple weeks ago, he didn’t make any attempt to come back to our unfininished conversation. Moreover, when I slightly tried to nudge him into talking about this, he resisted. One week later, the same thing happened. I couldn’t put a finger exactly on how he resisted talking about my needs, but it did happen. But when people avoid a certain subject in a conversation, it can be felt.

On the one hand, his Dad’s health situation now appeared to be a legitimate excuse – the thing that occupied his mental space and his vulnerability bandwidth. But on the other hand, according to his own statements, I was his friend. He knew my health situation was also severe, and unlike his Dad’s, my access to proper healthcare still wasn’t provided, and the eventual provision of that access depended on whether or not he would help me with my work.

So why would he resist even talking about it? Was it an acute allergy to my vulnerability? Or was it epic hypocrisy about his friendship that had never existed in the first place?

---

Shortly before Western Christmas, I had an experience that prompted me to give José the final wake-up call. The wake-up email, to be exact.

That day, driving back home from the job interview at another clinic, I got stuck in a terrible traffic jam. After a completed reconstruction, the five-lane freeway in my neighborhood became dead for the majority of the day. No, not because there became too many vehicles, but because the reconstruction concept was obviously flawed – it created a disproportionate bottleneck in the road. After millions of taxpayers’ dollars spent on it (and much of it embezzled – because that’s how public construction works in Russia), the traffic got way worse than it had been before. An 8 minutes’ drive on cruise control now became a 45 minutes’ crawl in first gear.

I remembered how José preached that we could choose to feel good even amidst a traffic jam – he preached that while he was watching a beautiful sunset, drinking wine on a yacht near the coast of St. Barths. But now, much as I tried, I couldn’t feel good. Because this freaking traffic jam sort of symbolized my entire life. Because obstacles in it were man-made rather than natural, created by mismanagement and corruption of those in power. Because I was driving home from the interview where I got offered employment conditions even crappier than those I had before – with my university degree, I’d get around $70-80 per month and have to be involved with medical fraud. Because right now I was hungry, and with no income and my dwindling savings, I didn’t know what else I’d have to cut from my food budget next month. Because now, amidst this freaking traffic jam, I had to sit still with little space to move around, and my cutting upper back pain reached its maximum. With every breath I felt like the knife between my spine and my left shoulder blade was moving – and in this country, I couldn’t get proper treatment even for this benign problem, let alone get my tumor adequately treated. No, try as I might, I couldn’t employ American “spirituality” rhetoric to bullshit myself into surrender, acceptance, or gratitude. I couldn’t just “feel good”, like José felt watching a sunset on St. Barths among his well-buffed, well-fed, well-groomed Hollywood friends.

Because mine wasn’t life – it was survival. It was existence in the constant trauma/emergency mode, and it had been so for the majority of my years. Over the years it had taken an observable toll on my physical body, just as big as it had on my emotional well being.

No, I couldn’t feel good. Because trauma was not what my life, or anyone’s life, was supposed to be. I didn’t choose the disadvantage I was born into. But now, as an adult having great talent, diligence, and work commitment, having years of research, experience, and a big, impactful creative product behind my belt – I wasn’t supposed to live like this. I wasn’t supposed to be stuck in that traffic jam, or in that misery in general. After finishing my book, I wasn’t supposed to remain in Russia for so long, continuing to live in oppression, poverty, and injustice.

The justice in my life was long overdue. It was late arriving, as if it were stuck in the same traffic jam I now found myself in.

And this didn’t happen because of God’s will, for some good reason, or for my spiritual enlightenment. It happened because of the hypocrisy, cowardice, and greed of those privileged Americans, those self-proclaimed social justice champions who I’d reached out to around my work for the last three years. Those people who’d emotionally abused me, taken advantage of my vulnerable bids for connection, leveraged the shit out of my talent for their personal gain, shut doors and built walls in my face with the unearned power derived from their privilege – and there was nothing I could do to hold them accountable. Oppression like classism and nativism and corruption effectively informed the reality of the American creative industry, regardless of its facade eloquently advocating social progressivism, equality, and justice. Those cases of abuse, spanning from 2016 towards 2018, perpetrated by tens of people who initially promised to help me, had been my actual lived experience. They had actually happened. They weren’t the stories I was making up. And while those people were well off living their privileged lives in the West, at 31 y.o. I was still stuck in Russia. In poverty, in chronic physical pain, amidst absence of opportunity, and right now, amidst this fucking traffic jam. Unless I gaslighted myself into being a Pollyanna, there was no way for me to feel good in it all.

I couldn’t feel good. Because how I felt now was an entirely adequate response to my reality.

Half of the route still lay ahead of me, but I couldn’t drive anymore. No, my back pain just reached the limit where I barely kept myself from screaming. Unbuckling and wiggling in my seat didn’t help.

So I left the hopelessly congested freeway and took a right turn to the shopping mall. Yes, it was that same shopping mall in my neighborhood where sixteen years ago I’d caught the first glimpse of what Western middle-class life looked like. It was the shopping mall where the French grocery store, mentioned in October, and the IKEA store were located. It was the place where I used to drop by most of the days on my way back home during university years, avoiding to come home and confront my toxic parents. It was the place where in the recent years, I’d come to write important emails and reflect on the relationships I was building. It was the place where I’d felt more belonging and more at home than in my parents’ apartment where I still slept and showered, for lack of opportunity to rent, never mind buy, my own.

It was also the place where I felt so out of place, because every time I came here and saw people shopping, I acutely realized my economic disadvantage. Over almost a decade, as I hoped to improve my economic status through hard work and in fact failed, I felt powerless. I felt like I was doomed to remain in the confinement of my economic class for life, no matter how much effort, integrity, and commitment I put in. No matter my degrees and diplomas and client feedback – the fairy tale of meritocracy I’d believed in growing up just didn’t work in real life, at least not in Russia.

That’s why my book, and the opportunity to move to the West related to it, were the breakthrough that I deserved. And again, regardless of the efforts I’d put into connecting with Western creatives and getting the whole thing off the ground, that breakthrough still didn’t happen. Perfectly formatted and polished, my book’s manuscript still lay in my Dropbox. Despite its potential and value, and because of those hypocrites who kept me out of access to proper platforms and right people, my book wasn’t out there to make a needed difference in the lives of other human beings, and it still didn’t effect a long-deserved change in my life.

How was I supposed to feel good about it all?

Now, I just parked my car and walked into the mall. The back pain was unbearable, and I just had to walk. In summer, I knew it sometimes helped to walk for a mile or a couple miles. I didn’t know exactly how this biomechanics worked, and it didn’t work consistently, but sometimes the pain receded after a mile of walking. If I lived in Los Angeles or Barcelona, I would have access to walking all year round because of the climate. But in Russia, most of the year, long-distance walking wasn’t an option. Because of the cold. Because of the snow and sleet and dirt. Because of the heavy coats and scarves you’d have to wear, which in my experience only exacerbated neck and upper back pain. And now, in mid-December, my only option to walk long distance was here, in the alleys of this huge shopping mall.

I left my parka in the cloakroom, put on the headphones, and just started walking. Doing a circular route, from one end of the mall to the other, and then back, each round worth a quarter mile. Many rounds. Over and over again. After months of not listening to music because of feeling depressed and powerless, I turned on my favorite playlist. Music had been, and continued to be, the love of my life. Music was the career I wanted to go for professionally, after leaving Russia and settling in the West. Just because I and music had been separated by almost eighteen years of oppression, poverty, and trauma, it didn’t change the fact that I loved Her truly, madly, deeply, and She loved me back. Music was how the miracle of creativity first manifested itself in my life, at the age of 12. Music brought forth my biggest talent. Music gave me my first-ever job. And music still made me feel most vulnerable, most expanded, and most alive, despite my age, my trauma, and my scars.

I just couldn’t change it.

Because you can’t change who you belong with once you find them. You can’t change the truth written in your heart by the hands of God. And just because oppression, poverty, or trauma block that truth from being honored, actualized, and celebrated doesn’t change it being the truth. It’s real, and it’s timeless. It doesn’t go away; instead, like good wine, it becomes stronger with years. Now, that freaking night, in that freaking shopping mall, meeting music was like meeting the loved one I knew I still couldn’t be with. It was excruciating, and it was exquisite – at the exact same time. Yes, I knew we’d be together just for a limited amount of time. I knew She’d soon have to leave. I knew I’d be again left face-to-face with my misery and my pain. But now, when music manifested Her presence, for the first time in months, despite my pain and my depression I was somehow able to connect to Her.

And that night, just like in real romantic love, by fully connecting to Her I ended up reconnecting with myself. These Spanish songs, some of them sitting in my playlist for more than a decade, brought me back to the person I’d once been. My pre-despression self. Then my teenage self. That boy who got bullied at school for being underweight and poor and acing. That boy who didn’t have friends. That boy who saw no love and belonging and care at home. That boy who nevertheless yearned for life. That boy who got passionate learning Spanish on his own. That boy who dreamed to travel to the countries he read about on Wikipedia. That boy who sensed the touch of the sacred and divine every time he could lay his self-taught hands on a piano and every time he put together melodies and mixes on a computer so slow it could barely run a software synth. That boy who, seeing the unmatched power of music in expressing and communicating emotion, found his true calling in writing Her. The boy who, despite all the bullying and devaluation he faced in real life, still had enough worth within to clearly visualize himself on stage, telling impactful stories through song and dance. Helping others find, love, and heal their real selves, just like in those days, Hispanic musical artists helped him find, love, and heal his real self.

Now, I was again that boy. As the rock progression of Shakira’s Inevitable stormed in my headphones at max volume, I felt as if the last fifteen years were just undone. As if they never happened. As if the trauma, and oppresison, and abuse, and broken hopes had just been a nightmare I finally woke up from. As if now, disconnected from the world around me and connected to myself through music, I was being really woke and fully alive. It was the same feeling of being lost and found, the one I had at the age of 12, when I learned to play Moonlight Sonata, one-on-one with the piano, in the music classroom of my public school, when other kids left for their homes. Technically, now my physical body was doing walking rounds in the alleys of a shopping mall, but my soul was elsewhere. My dreams, one after another, started showing up before my eyes. My dreams about travelling. My dreams about making a professional music career. My dreams about spending hours in the recording studio and in dancing classes. My dreams about moving to the West.

I'd believed those dreams were dead. Burned out by years of poverty. Ravaged by years of depression. Ridiculed and crushed by Americans who'd shut doors in my face over the last four years, as I was trying to get a breakthrough with my book.

But no, they were here. In some indestructible corners of my heart, they remained alive. Now, I could literally sense their breath, and their glory, and their grace. Because they were full of truth. Because they were meant to be and to come into being, not just in my imagination, but in reality. No matter that I felt like I was lagging behind, no matter how much I felt blocked by oppression in making these dreams happen, the truth within me could not be silenced. Just like so many times before in my life, music brought me face-to-face with that truth. The truth that the world outside me did its best to erase and invalidate over one and a half decades.

Listening to music and staying present with my truth, I was in this transcendental state when I felt a signal from my body – a cramp in my stomach. Dear God, I just forgot I was hungry, and it was way past my regular supper time! On cue, I found myself near the mall’s food court.

Normally, I never ate at the food court, because even take-out restaurants there were too expensive for me. Over the years, I hoped I’d one day be able to afford trying their food one by one, but year after year, this day just never happened. Usually, if I had to have a meal at the mall, I would go to the IKEA cafeteria. There I could buy a full-size meatballs and veggies lunch for four dollars, and get a coffee for free with my loyalty card. In case I wasn’t too hungry for a full meal, I could go spend two dollars on some snack or dessert there. Much better food than at Mickey D, but at the same price.

But right now, I wasn’t going to IKEA. Screw the expense. I was going to a restaurant I’d been looking at for years. Because now I wasn’t alone. Now, I was with music, the love of my life. She manifested Her presence and Her love beautifully, and I was going to take Her to that restaurant. I knew She wouldn’t stay with me for a long time. From experience, I knew that tomorrow, turning on the same songs in my phone, most probably I wouldn’t feel the same way. Depression steals your ability to feel anything most of the time. But now that I felt Her breathing, living presence, I had to take advantage of our reunion, short as it might be. It didn’t matter already that I didn’t have a job. It didn’t matter that just half an hour before I’d been figuring out how to cut my grocery budget next month. Now, I was no longer alone. Music came to remind me that She still loved me as much as She had when we’d met. That through my big, bold, indestructible dreams, She was still waiting for me to marry Her. With whatever resources I had, now and here I had to honor Her presence. So we were going to a restaurant, and I’d be the one to pick the tab.

It was only when I sat down at the table, still sensing Her palpable presence, when I realized:

The back pain was gone. Like, completely gone, as if it hadn’t been there in the first place. As if just half an hour later, it hadn’t been so bad I wanted to scream.

It was a miracle, hard to reckon with. In disbelief, I reached back towards my left shoulder blade. The muscles around my spine that had been tense and inflamed and rigid and acutely painful, now were just barely sensitive to touch. It was as if music, my loved one, extracted the knife stabbed by life in my back. I’d experienced such sporadic reliefs before. I knew they wouldn’t last long. I knew life was cruel and would stab the knife again, and music couldn’t stay with me forever. After making love, figuratively speaking, we were now having a meal, and after finishing it we’d have to again part our ways. I didn’t know when She’d visit and heal me again. But right now, enjoying our delicious restaurant meal pain-free, I was grateful for Her presence. And again, just like when I was younger, I dared to believe that I and She were meant to be together. That I’d defeat my tumor before it’s too late. That I’d move to the West. That I’d start a professional music career, against my age and all the odds, and be successful in it, bringing healing and empowerment to the lives of my fellow human beings through the infinite power of my loved one – music.

A BID FOR CLOSURE

I wrote and shared this story with José, in order to make him fully aware of the reality I lived in. Of my dreams and my history. Of my pain and my joy. Of my defeatedness and my aliveness. Of my love and my courage. If anything, this story exposed the glaring imbalance of what I held within me and the scarce opportunity available in the circumstances I never got to choose.

Again, I expected him to be empathetic and curious. This story was a prompt to a big conversation.

“So Jorgito, how do you plan to get out of Russia?” he could have asked. “What role can your book play in that specifically? What’s the vision for your music career? Do you think it’s worth it at your age? How do you plan to get the education and funding for it?”

No. Nada. He replied:

“I’m here for you, my friend. I just want you to know that I’m here for you.”

Well, at least this sounded like empathy. Though, in the light of what followed, this response shows what an epic abuser he was. Yes, abusers know how to speak empathy. They know the language and even non-verbal cues to employ when they want to manipulate their target. But they never actually do empathy. They just don’t operate on it. They see your needs, they know they have the power to help fulfil them, but they just never do that. And this time gap – between them saying empathetic words and failing to do empathethic acts – is exactly what keeps you trapped in this relationship. It’s what makes you stay, gaslight yourself, hope for the best, and give them the benefit of the doubt – even when they fucked up miserably in the past and never apologized.

Maybe he was still not available emotionally, because he was too concerned about his Dad?

It didn’t look so. He left for Miami for Christmas and New Year, and as I could see from his Instagram Stories, he was having fun full-throttle. He wasn’t sitting by his Dad’s bedside in the hospital. Truth be told, his Christmas pictures triggered me because just like on my birthday, since 2012 every Christmas I wished to have moved away from Russia and started over by the next Christmas. And that wish never came true. Now, though, it felt like I was close to it. A Hollywood talent agent was my friend. We’d shared things with each other that only friends share. He’d confirmed he wanted to help me, and he sure as hell could. Probably, by Christmas 2019, my life would have been completely different.

But would it?

See, the year was coming to an end, but this unfinished conversation about my work still lay like a rock over my heart. I wouldn’t walk into 2019 without clarity about José’s intentions. I’d made my need for help manifest in October. And as much as I tried to convince myself of the opposite, I felt like José was avoiding to resume this conversation. At the same time, he was again professing friendship in my face and telling me he wanted to help. It just made no sense. Gaslighting no longer worked. I had to get clarity from him.

So on Dec 31st, I wrote him a straightforward bid for truth. I knew this could be the email that would end our relationship – because in my previous experience, when people were abusers, bids for honesty made them explode with anger and just cut me off. Most recently, it’s been the case with the Christian fashion stylist. So I knew I couldn’t control who other people were. What I could do was just say what was on my heart and on my mind, and by exposing my true colors, although risking emotionally, I would see the true colors of another person as well.

I came to the IKEA cafeteria in the same shopping mall to write this email. I always came here to write and read important messages, dealing with pivotal steps in my relationships, because in the physical space of my parents’ apartment – where I slept, ate, showered, and formally lived – I couldn’t feel open and vulnerable in my interaction with the Universe. It was like the walls of that apartment had absorbed the toxic environment I’d so acutely sensed and been impacted by growing up. Save for aging, my parents hadn’t changed much over the years, and it was on of the big tragedies in my life – having to constantly wear armor in the place that formally still counted as my home, and not being able to rent a place of my own.

Anyway, my book and my relationship with José could get me out of that place, and this country as a whole. So temporarily, I moved to the cafeteria, the space with a better energy, to make things in this relationship clear. I knew this clarity could be hurtful. I knew it could expose that I’d again been abused and played with, by a person having nothing but fun in his intentions. But I needed to get clarity to move on. If José weren’t okay with my request for honesty and reciprocity, it would be the final piece of evidence to give up on him.

I made sure to not write anything shaming in this email. I started by saying I appreciated that he’s probably preoccupied with his Dad’s disease right now, and again offered him empathy around this experience. And, I said, I was also feeling hurt by how the situation around my work conversation turned out. I wrote I was feeling misheard, avoided, and left out. I said that, in the absence of any input from him, I was making up the story that he avoided this topic pursposefully. That he’d never actually wanted to help me. That for some reason he didn’t say it out loud, but keeping silence around such things corrodes trust in a relationship. Finally, and most importantly, I emphasized that I was myself facing an existential health threat he knew about, with no access to proper healthcare in my country, and that my work right now was the only opportunity for me to get my treatment in Europe – where it would be affordable, safe, minimally invasive, and most probably curative. Yes, I wrote this so he could understand the very real, fatal cost of him failing to show up in this conversation. It wasn’t only about friendship or trust. My life was literally on the line. It was no joke.

I remembered that many people pretending to be my friends had also known it and in fact hadn’t given a shit. From the hijabi poet, advertising herself as the Instagram’s leading “good heart”, to the vegan make-up artist with his “abundance of empathy”, to, most blatantly, the Christian fashion stylist who posted prayers on Instagram where she asked God “to show her to where her love and kindness were needed” and then just discarded me once aware of my health situation and my economic disadvantage.

Well, was there a possibility that José could be a different person?

I prayed so. In fact, after all off my expereinces, I deserved to finally get such person for a friend.

So saying a prayer, I sent the email. Then I had my regular four-dollar lunch, for an umpteenth time realizing my disadvantage and powerlessness, and drove back to my parents’ apartment. Just so you understand, the back pain was again here, slowly cutting through me with every breath. There were Christmas trees and the atmosphere of celebration everywhere in the city. And, another time at this point of the year, I was heartbroken to realize I’d have to spend New Year’s Eve with my toxic parents.

NEW YEAR, NEW HOPE

The next day, Jan 1st, 2019, a notification on my phone said there was a new email from José. I didn’t know what was in there, but my worst case scenario – of him ignoring my bid for clarity altogether and just blocking me – didn’t happen.

Again, I drove to the shopping mall to open it. There was no way I could do it at home where I never felt loved and belonging. I had to physically be elsewhere. I had to be at the shopping mall, because it was the place where my last encounter with music – the love of my life – happened. Where, for the first time in months, I could again feel joy and life breathing within me under cemented layers of years of trauma. It’s there, in that place where I again saw my dreams come alive, that I could be fully vulnerable, open my heart to God, and trust I would be given what I deserve.

Because, to be honest, in my parents’ home I never got that.

I sat down at one of single tables by the big panoramic windows, holding a warm cup of coffee in my hands. I looked at the grim, cold winter landscape outside. I looked at IKEA shoppers having meals around me, their carts full of things for their homes. “Will I ever have my own home?” I found myself wondering. I wanted to be one of those shoppers. I wanted to also to be able to afford a full-scope meal on my table – with an appetizer, a salad, a soup, and a dessert. Instead, now I had just a cup of coffee to hold on to.

Then, I looked at the remote corner of this big cafeteria. There were a bunch of homeless folks. Just like me, they were regulars in this place, but they had to hide in that corner so that security guards wouldn’t kick them off. Unlike me, they had no cars and no heated place to sleep amidst winter. Unlike me, they couldn’t even afford a four dollars’ meatballs and French fries lunch. Every once in a while, they would sneak towards the racks where “normal people” left their food trays, and they would pick up plates with leftovers to eat. It was always depressing to look at, but unlike most “normal people”, I forced myself to not turn away. At those rare times when I had extra money, I’d buy a lunch for them. I’d save on my own lunch, because I still had an apartment where, despite all the emotional toxicity and dysfunction, I could cook, and they didn’t have that. In those moments, I talked to them and learned their stories. Stories of trauma, disability, addiction, and the corruption of systems formally supposed to protect them. Some of them had their part in becoming homeless. Others didn’t. Seeing this people reminded me that my long-dreamed career as an artist wasn’t just for the fun, or money, of it. It was for shifting the culture to help such folks – the silenced, the disenfrachised, and the oppressed.

And now, as I found myself here, in this uncertain position between the middle-class and the homeless, I realized that we all still shared this space. This freaking cafeteria was a microcosm of larger society. Because of the rules, people were segregated in different corners. On some tables, there were full-sized meals, on some there were leftovers, and on some, like mine, there were just warm cups of coffee. But we all were still breathed the same air and benefitted from the same light and heating.

We’re all in this together. There’s no shame in asking for help or needing help. We don’t always get to choose our circumstances, but both giving and receiving are equally important sides of our timeless contract as human beings.

With that thought, I hit the open button on José’s email.

As I read, I started crying, probably for the first time in a year.

He didn’t walk away. He was here for me.

---

“Why have you been afraid to tell me for so long?” he wrote. “I’m so sorry I lost the track of that conversation. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling this way. Of course I want to help you. My father’s transplant procedure will be as scheduled, and I’m engrossed in preparing for it. But I’ll call you as soon as I’m back to LA in two weeks. Thanks for sharing how you felt with me. Love you.”

I knew I deserved this. I deserved to be heard, and loved, and helped. But in my life it was so rare to see anyone recognize it. Just to make sure it was real, I made a screenshot of this message and sent it to my closest friends. They were all aware and present with me in this situation.

One of them said: “Jorge, you see! He’s a normal person. I’m glad your fears turned out false. You get triggered too much because of your previous experiences.”

I was glad to acknowledge I made a mistake. To acknowledge that the problem in this relationship was about false fears in my mind, not another person’s actual behavior. Artfully faking empathy, José gave me a huge dose of encouragement, and I swallowed it. I was happy to gaslight myself.

Except that time, whether we like it or not, still brings out the truth.

---

Needless to say, I was mentally present with José as his stem cell donation procedure approached. I literally felt how after sharing my utmost vulnerability, and his supportive response to it, we became closer and realer as friends. On Instagram, I saw him going through New Year’s holidays in Miami, and I no longer paid attention to his privilege and his merry picture-perfect self. I thought that behind this macho façade, there’s now a person who was here for his sick father, who was scared for his father and scared for himself, and who nevertheless was doing what was right despite it being scary. In other words, I believed that José I’d once known as a friend was, after all, real.

This is how powerful gaslighting can be.

One week before the procedure, he was given the injection of stem cell growth factors – so that as many stem cells as possible could be harvested afterwards. This injection was the point where the most serious side effects could happen. Even though me and José didn’t chat every day, I remembered the day when it had to be administered. Yes, even though I’m not good at remembering dates, I remembered this one. Because operationalizing empathy, I was going through José’s situation with him. More exactly, I was seeing and feeling this situation as if I were in José’s place and my father were sick.

“How are you feeling?” I texted him the next day after injection. “Do your doctors monitor your blood count?”

“I’m okay :-) Just a little pain in my bones,” he responded.

Bone marrow was exactly where his stem cells were now exponentially replicating, so bone pain was normal in this situation, even though bone pain was a triggering symptom for me as an oncologist. Every time I heard about it, I remembered about advanced prostate cancer patients I’d once treated, their bone metastases producing constant, excruciating pain, resistant even to opioids. Every time I heard about it, I remembered about my own untreated tumor, and that if it was actually melanoma, it would also sprout skeletal metastases within a year.

Because that's what your thinking looks like when empathy and spirituality are your real, practiced values: you don't separate your experiences from other people's experiences. Instead, you relate. You contextualize. You realize that we're all in this together.

Yes, even when the person on the other side doesn’t realize the same.

---

On the day of stem cell transfusion, I could be literally present with José as he put out videos in his Instagram Stories. Lying in a hospital bed, his stem cells being harvested by a transfustion machine, José was making jokes and being funny.

For a moment, I found myself thinking, “You know what? This is not what real vulnerability looks like. When you’re really scared about the outcome of a medical procedure – not just the outcome for yourself, but the outcome for your sick Dad – you don’t put out the process for the whole world to watch. You may share it with your friends and/or family – the people who earned the right to see it. But you don’t share it on your public Instagram account. Indiscriminate sharing is not real vulnerability. It means you’re not emotionally invested in what you’re sharing.”

But very soon, I gaslighted myself into denial: “No, of course he’s scared and vulnerable. He just masks with humor. It’s his armor. He does stand-up comedy, after all. Obviously, it’s me who’s too triggered around sharing. Obviously, it’s me who got scarred too many times after my vulnerability was used against me when I shared it. Obviously, José has never have gone through such experiences. He’s just been lucky and therefore feels free about sharing what he’s going through. It’s me who’s gone through trauma, and he’s just a normal person.”

A typical abusive pattern here: you notice something wrong and inconsistent about another person's behavior, but then you immediately start deluding yourself that it's about you, not about them.

After the transfusion, he made a post on Instagram that again helped me deny what I had observed: he wrote eloquently about this day being, perhaps, the most important day of his life – because, through the transfusion he literally “gave life” to his father who’d once given life to him. He wrapped the whole thing into a beautiful spiritual framing and made it look like it really mattered to him. Like it had big, existential meaning. Like he was actually scared about the outcome and emotionally invested. The fact he actually hadn’t looked that way got effectively erased from my mind.

DISCARDING

GETTING REAL

A couple days later, he told me the transplant had been successful, he was feeling well and about to head back home to LA in a week.

Needless to say, my vulnerability was reaching its maximum. After having been present with him in a struggle that turned out well (in large part because of his privilege – access to American healthcare system), in a week, I was finally going to have the conversation with him about my book and my health situation and my life situation in general – far more disadvantaged. The situation dismissed and neglected for so long, by so many who had the power to help me change it.

“But José is my friend. He’s gonna respond differently,” I convinced myself, re-reading his New Year’s messages. My gut feeling told me about the disaster coming, but I tried to calm myself down, sticking to every piece of evidence I had from our correspondence – every profession of his friendship.

That’s another big sign of being trapped in abuse.

In a healthy relationship, you don't have to convince yourself about the other person's intentions. Because, first, they make their intentions clear right from the start, and second, their intentions are consistent. The values they practice are consistent. The way they treat you is consistent. After almost one year of knowing them, and being here for them in every way possible, you don't find yourself terrified about how they will respond to your vulnerability.

And mind you, more often than not, your gut feeling is right. You may try to rationalize and dismiss your fear by thinking that you make up a story about the outcome based on your previous experiences, and that this person is different from others, and that you should assume the best about them and blah-blah-blah.

But the reason why your gut feeling kicks in is exactly because, no matter what this person professes, over time your mind picks up the same red flags from their behavior as those you observed in previous abusive relationships:

Hypocrisy. Double standards. Future-faking. Love-bombing. Gaslighting. Emotional swing. Avoiding clear answers to straightforward questions. Choosing politeness over honesty.

And, when you interact with a person for almost a year, you have plenty of opportunity to see this.

---

Coming to LA, he didn’t get back in touch with me and schedule the conversation. I’d believed he kept our pending conversation, and its vital importance, in the back of his mind, so I expected him to let me know when he was finally available. My tumor, unlike his Dad’s one, didn’t get any treatment, and he knew about it.

Again, I rationalized his behavior thinking that he’d been just overwhelmed. I texted him about doing a FaceTime on the weekend, our regular time, and he agreed.

I didn’t know it was going to become our last FaceTime ever. A friend in need is a friend indeed, they say. After what he replied to me on New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t imagine he’d chicken out of our relationship in a way this pathetic.

Right from the beginning in that FaceTime, things were off. It looked like he showed up to have a trivial chat – not a conversation about my serious illness and my work as the only way to earn the opportunity for treatment. No. Just as most of the time, he was walking around his home, doing dishes, sorting things in the closet, doing things with his computer, taking out garbage…

He just wasn’t paying attention. Because he knew that what I had to share now was uncomfortable. And his tolerance for discomfort – in real life, not in words – was zero. That’s why his real capacity for empathy was just about the same.

Technically, he was present in the conversation, but it wasn’t real and meaningful presence. It was superficial. See, guys, vulnerable as I felt, I wasn’t being a quivering mess of nerves. I prepared for it. I had a presentation plan of my work. I meant business. Starting from research through artistic features to groundbreaking design, I was going to tell him in detail what my work was worth. No, my vulnerability wasn’t weakness. I wasn’t going to break down in tears in front of him because I desperately needed treatment for my tumor. Instead, with dignity and clarity, I was presenting the added value that my work – and my life, for that matter – was bringing into the world.

But no, as deep and meaningful and substantial as my presentation was, he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t take anything seriously. He wasn’t holding space or attention. Instead, he was communicating how bored he was and tried to fast-forward the conversation.

“So you just wrote a book? And you want to get out of Russia?”

Again, I saw the complacent smirk he always wore when going straight into the devaluation mode. He just reduced my whole story and identity to the primitive stereotypes his shallow mind could accomodate.

Before I even could answer, he went on:

“But you shouldn’t be afraid to say this out loud! The Universe needs to hear you!”

Well, hearing his habitual rhetoric about the Universe, I saw he wasn’t receptive enough to hear my truth:

I was afraid to say this because after saying this, most times I’d had people ghost me. Because people didn’t give me the chance to let them know what this book was about and what value it had.

No, José just wouldn’t get this. He was a fortunate man in Hollywood. In his life, things weren’t supposed to be hard. As he said many times, he prefered “to travel through life lightly.” And well, his privilege obviously allowed him to.

I wasn’t going to fit in with him, though. I remembered Maya Angelou’s words. He was trying to reduce me to my trauma, but I wouldn’t be reduced. He was trying to trivialize my work and my story, but I wouldn’t play along. I stayed firm in my integrity. I had grounded confidence about my work, and I continued telling him about it.

Maybe, just maybe, something would register, I hoped.

After an hour, he finished the conversation – because, of course, he had to go on with his day. Gyms, parties, and some other fun to have on a Sunday, you know. Why listen to some cancer-stricken guy from a third-world country? Even if, for a year, you made that guy feel like you’re his friend?

“This all is so interesting, let’s be in touch!” he waved me goodbye.

---

I was stupefied. Again, like in October, I went away from the conversation feeling emotionally eviscerated. Because, after an hour of this conversation keeping me at my utmost vulnerability (let alone months of waiting for it), he still didn’t make anything clear. At the beginning of this conversation, I told him about my plan: in the first FaceTime, I’d tell him about my book. In the second one – about it backstory. In the third one – about my current life situation, including my health. And in the fourth one – about the ways I believed he could help me. That’s it. We’d need four to five one-hour-long FaceTimes to cover it all. Given my health situation, I expected we would schedule them oftener than regularly – twice or thrice a week. Because, as a self-employed upper-middle-class person, he could make this time, especially for a friend who now needed help. What was wrong about my expectations?

Nothing. Except still not knowing that José’s words were worth nothing. All his words – including those about friendship, or help, or spirituality. He was “traveling lightly”. He wasn’t taking life seriously. He wasn’t taking words seriously. He wasn’t taking relationships seriously. He was just saying whatever he felt like saying at the moment.

His New Year’s response made me think he finally realized the gravity and urgency of my situation. And now, again, it all was just gone. He didn’t show any respect towards me or my vulnerability. He didn’t hang up saying: “Look, I don’t have the time to continue this conversation now, but what about next Wednesday afternoon? Which time are you going to be available? This is an important conversation, and we have to do it as soon as we can.”

No. Nothing. Nada. “Let’s stay in touch”, as a polite formula, with no boundaries, no empathy, no responsibility, and no strings attached.

---

My reality was again split into two. Where was the José I’d believed in throughout January? Where was the José who showed up for me and encouraged me on the New Year’s Eve? Did that person even exist?

I knew where all of this was heading. I felt completely crushed till the next weekend, where, predictably, he didn’t reach back to me about the next FaceTime. Abusers, especially if they work in Hollywood and make a living out of politeness and negotiations, prefer to discard you without saying anything outright. Making you question yourself, wonder what it is that you did wrong, and eventually collapse into shame and silence.

But I wasn’t going to let it slide. I wasn’t going to silently walk away from this relationship without certainty and evidence about his true colors. My life was on the line. It’s been one year of friendship. I couldn’t afford any misunderstanding here.

So next Sunday, instead of initiating a FaceTime, I sent him an email with my news – not sure if he cared enough to see them in the first place. I told him I’d found a new job, although with the same dead-end conditions as the previous one. Using this context, I told him about how my medical career in Russia quickly bumped into the glass ceiling of corruption and underfunding. Finally, coming back to the cases of malpractice I’d shared with him in December, I again emphasized I couldn’t get my tumor treated in Russia – and that my work was the only opportunity to get it treated in Europe.

What could be a gentler, more grounded, and more contextual reminder about our pending critical conversation? What else could exceed the threshold of his deafness?

Well, that’s where clear discarding began.

A GASLIGHTING MASTERCLASS

First, he didn’t respond to the email. Then, I texted him on WhatsApp about it – just in case the email got into his Junk folder. Or just in case he decided to play a fool and pretend that he never got it.

“I read your email, Jorge,” he answered the next day. “Thanks for sharing it with me. I can see how your greatness comes about through it all.”

“What?! The?! Fuck?!” I thought. “How exactly does my greatness come about, Mr. Spirituality Podcast Host?! Through dying from cancer in my thiries?! Says who?! A guy from Hollywood doing cosmetic surgeries to look ‘sexy’ in front of celebrities he once dated?!”

I knew I needed to manage down my anger before replying to him. Feeling shocked, I replied the next day.

“So what do you mean, José?” I texted. “Don’t you remember that I need your help with my work? That this work is the only opporunity in my life – short-term, to get this treatment I need, and long-term to move away from Russia and start a new career? I find myself in multilateral trauma, and from my story you know it all happened for no fault of my own. What greatness has to do with any of it?”

His response deserved an Academy Award for the Most Epic Spiritual Bullshit of the Year.

“Just keep going,” he text. “Just keep going, my friend. I don’t know what else to write to you.”

“Keep going?!” I responded. “Where should I keep going?! I shared with you that I’ve a hit a dead end in my career in this country – and given my health situation, probably nearing a dead end in my life. What does it mean to ‘keep going’?”

His next response was even more epic:

“See, I’m a big believer that destiny sends us exactly what we need. Just surrender to it.”

Lo and behold: according to a fortunate man from West Hollywood, who dated celebrities and enjoyed access to cosmetic surgeries, dying from cancer in my thirties was exactly what I needed. Have you ever had a friend like that?

I was just stupefied. I was at a loss for words to respond to this flagrant rhetoric. Remember, the amount of time and energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than required to produce it.

“José, don’t you get that our destiny gets shaped by our and other people’s choices? I shared this all with you because you said you were willing to help with my work…”

Before I finished typing the next message, he interrupted me:

“Yes, I know you want to move away from Russia,” he wrote. “I already helped one Russian person do that, let me tell you:”

So, in a typical gaslighter’s move, he completely shifted the focus of the conversation from where it belonged.

“This is a girl who now lives in New York. She’d done all the paperwork herself,” he continued, “and she just came to me so I’d sign her papers.”

“José, you’re not hearing me,” I stood my ground firmly. “I don’t need you to help me with any papers. My emigration is a long-term goal and I’ll do it all by myself if my work succeeds. This girl’s experience is, no doubt, interesting, but…”

“Perfect, then!” he responded. “I’ll add you and her to a common chat on WhatsApp! And now sorry, I’ll have to go! Talk to you later!”

That’s what abusers do. They chicken out when required to practice the values they preached. They play a fool. They gaslight you. They overwrite your reality. And, when they’re successful people from Hollywood, they feel absolutely licensed to do that.

---

Clarity still wasn’t reached. “Talk to you later” still wasn’t a closure. I still refused to believe what was going on. Just to remain within the boundaries of civility, that night I talked with the girl he’d put me in chat with. In fact, she didn’t tell me anything different than what I’d already known about emigration to the U.S. That the paperwork alone required $20 000 – the money I didn’t have and couldn’t anyway earn in Russia. That coming to the U.S. without first securing a job wasn’t smart. That artists, like me, needed a special type of visa for long stays and work, and that visa could only be obtained after having some pieces of work published. She herself bribed a couple of media sources to get such publications for her first visa. She said she’d give me the contacts of those sources, and also the attorney in New York that helped her illegally get a new visa without returning back to Russia. She also said no one would care about my story in America. The entertainment business, she said, is all about the money – you ask people to do something for you, and then offer them a price for it.

I didn’t even focus on the cynicism and corruption of this information back then – because it was irrelevant. I wasn’t anyway going to move to the U.S. before my book got on the appropriate platform and I got sponsors and funding. José’s help was needed exactly with connecting to people who’d support my work, not with the papers. Yes, if he’d connect me with such people, I was ready to pay him all the remnants of my savings. But he never asked for it!

Instead, he said he was just willing to help! That my mind was brilliant! That I needed to start my own podcast! That he was rooting for me! That he was grateful that we met and wished we could meet in real life!

I had screenshots of these statements in my phone and my mailbox.

WHERE WAS THIS PERSON NOW?

---

Next day, I texted him that I’d talked with that girl. I said that her information was useful for my general knowledge, and I still needed his help with a thing different from emigration papers. For all the resistance, diminishing, and trivialization I faced, I was ready to continue the conversation about the book.

Because, unlike him, wiggling around to employ non-sensical bullshit, I stood on the firm ground of truth. The truth about my life. The truth about my work. The truth about my calling. And, most importantly, the truth about my intentions.

Guess what he texted me back?

“Jorgito, I understand you’re upset about your life. I’m willing to keep you as a friend, and I’m ready to discuss your suggestions here. But I don’t have the time to be on FaceTime with you as much as you want. And, I respect that this upsets you.”

This was it. Finally. His true colors spilt in front of me like a venom.

The minute I read that, I wanted to spit him in the face. Or better yet, to smash his arrogant, complacent, well-groomed face against the dirty asphalt of Russian winter roads. My violent anger was proportional to my devastation. The reality of abuse finally caught up on me. A friend in need is a friend indeed. There’d never been friendship in the first place. It had been a game he played on me. Whether because of his lust, or because of his grandiosity, or just for the mere fun of it.

To understand the depth of my devastation, let’s just dissect his message.

First: I understand that you’re upset about your life was utter horseshit and a blatant disregard for my reality. I wasn’t upset. I was trapped amidst multilateral trauma, all of which happened because of economic, social, and political circumstances outside of my control. I barely survived two attacks of terminal clinical depression, and still didn’t have its root causes eliminated from my life. After years of hard work, showing up, daring greatly, rising strong, and living from the place integrity and authenticity and spirituality I still saw no results – so I was feeling powerless, defeated, and misheard – but that was different from upset. Upset was obviously the biggest negative emotion José experienced in his fortunate Hollywood life. He got upset when he didn’t get $20 000 from another deal. He got upset when he didn’t end up marrying that celebrity he’d been dating. He was upset that he still had a credit card debt. And now, he trivialized my experience – shared with him in clear detail and highest definition – as being upset. As if I were like his niece who didn’t get another candy at the shop. Was it a projection of his own shallowness? Or a conscious attempt to diminish my lived experience, in order to make himself comfortable with opting out of honoring our “friendship”? Either way, it was pathetic and disgusting.

Second: I’m willing to keep you as a friend was an overt, blatant emotional blackmailing – framing the whole situation as if I was a bad person. I hadn’t done anything bad to make him question whether I was worth his friendship. I hadn’t failed him. I hadn’t betrayed his trust. I hadn’t cheated on him or stolen his money. I hadn’t brought the informantion he’d confided in me to gossip Websites. But if your look at this statement from the narcisisst’s point of view, everything becomes clear: he saw me as a thing which could be either kept or discarded. Like a phone with a broken screen. His language betrayed him. The reality was, I no longer represented a good narcissistic supply in his eyes – now that I made a clear, no-BS-enabling bid for honesty, reciprocity, and integrity. Seeing such bid in October, he devaluated me. And now, when my bid for healthy connection became even more assertive, it was time to discard me.

“Keep your dog, bastard. I’m not a thing for you to keep,” I thought immediately, before recognizing clear narcissistic logic in his argument.

Third:I’m ready to discuss your suggestions here was a polite, sneaky code meaning I don’t want to have this conversation at all. Because I’d told him many times, and he’d been fully aware, that this wasn’t the kind of conversation we could have in texts. That it was a conversation involving substantial, complex topics and requiring real-time, reciprocal interaction. So although technically “willing to talk”, in fact he effectively denied me this conversation. That was classic gaslighting.

Fourth:I don’t have the time to be on FaceTime with you as much as you want was probably the most flagrant and the most hurtful piece of bullshit in his rhetoric, and yet easiest to reality-check. This conversation didn’t require any unreasonable amount of time from him. I wasn’t asking him to quit his job and spend six hours talking to me every day, over half a year. Even though my situation was time-sensitive, we could cover the whole thing in four to five FaceTimes, done, as always, on weekends, each one hour long. And José wasn’t an ER doctor, working 18 hours a day to resuscitate COVID-19 patients. He was a self-emlpoyed person in Hollywood, enjoying a pretty loose and flexible schedule.

So can’t such person find one hour a week to talk to a friend who needs help with his work and at the same time faces an existential crisis that only the success of this work can resolve?

Bullshit.

In the American culture, “I don’t have the time” is the cheapest, most pathetic, and most common excuse for opting out of commitments once passionately made and of practicing values once passionately professed.

There’d been never a shortage of time on his part when he boasted to me about his luxurious, fortunate life: about dating celebrities, about doing a cosmetic surgery, about going to St. Bart and Burning Man, wielding his spirituality bullshit about “surrender” and “traveling through life lightly”. There’d been never a shortage of time as long as he was the one talking and being in the attention spotlight.

What changed now? Did his weekly routine change? Did his job or his lifestyle change?

No. There were still gyms, parties, beaches, and restaurants. In one word, a fortunate upper-middle-class homosexual’s life, with plenty of money and plenty of time available to spend at his discretion.

So it’s not that he didn’t actually have the time. In fact, he didn’t have the time for me – the person he’d made believe in his friendship, with his eloquent statements over the year. Me, the person who now opened up about my trauma and came forward with my vulnerability, thus expecting him to make good on his professed values – and exposing that those values had never been real in the first place. Bringing him face-to-face with the truth that his words about friendship, brotherhood, or spirituality had zero worth and zero meaning. His shame about his hypocrisy – not lack of time – was the real reason to avoid this conversation.

The last piece as much as you want was the most ridiculous in the sentence. Did I want to be on the phone/FaceTime with him? Like, really? After all he’d done over the months? Did I enjoy or anticipate our conversations, like I did in the beginning, when he was his down-to-earth, kind, “normal” self?

Hell to the no. I had to be on the phone/FaceTime with him and to continue the conversation about my work, not because I wanted, but because he had the privilege of access and connections to people that I couldn’t contact myself. That was it. Those people were big in the industry, yes, and I needed their attention because my work was also big. It wasn’t my fault or my choice that I came from disadvantage and lived a third-world country. Talent is universal, and opportunity is not. When this big creative idea came to me, I did my best to bring it into life in full glory. And now, all I needed was to connect to like-minded folks who’d recognize its value and who, unlike me, had the power to put it on the platform where it could serve the world. There was no lack of courage, resilience, or integrity on my part. I was clear about my values and my intention and my vision and the strategy for my artistic career.

And, it was just an act of randomness that at the gates of this industry – the industry I wanted to be in not to make money and fame, but to make meaning and difference – stood people like José. Sneaky, phony, shallow, narcisstic, fundamentally broken people. I didn’t want to interact with any of them. But since they were the gatekeepers, I had to.

Fifth: I respect that this upsets you was, again, and polite euphemism for I understand that I’m emotionally annihilating you, and I don’t give a shit about how you’re feeling. The fact that he again used the word upset to trivialize my experience was humiliating, but at the same time he clearly communicated he understood what he was doing.

Or didn’t he? Maybe it was just a drunken message? Maybe he was being upset about not getting another $20k deal and he wasn’t being his normal self?

I wouldn’t let him see my anger or my devastation. I didn’t respond anything to his toxic message. Only the next day, after my emotion ebbed away, I got back to him on WhatsApp with a reality check:

“José, do you understand what you’re doing? Why, after one year of friendship, are you creating this injustice in my life?”

And his reply was as epic as it gets:

“Injustices abound in primitive times. You’ve got to believe that the good and beautiful will always exceed the bad and the ugly.”

Wow! First, the rhetoric about “primitive times” implied that if I perceived what was going on as an injustice, it’s because I had a primitive consciousness or was at a primitive level of understanding of life – incomparable to his enlightened, gay, upper-middle-class, Hollywood state of mind. And second, isn’t that Hall-of-Fame level of gaslighting when a person perpetrating such a betrayal and abuse on you preaches about the good and beautiful always exceeding the bad and the ugly?

With this message, most importantly, he made things clear: he understood what he was doing. He was discarding me deliberately and consciously. Yes, with full understanding of my trauma and my need for help.

HALL-OF-FAME LEVEL HYPOCRISY

Later the same day, he reposted a video widely circulating on Instagram at the time: it was a piece of footage showing people in Caracas, his native city, picking up food from garbage trucks. Yes, that’s how bad the situation was in Venezuela those days. He wrote it was a traumatizing picture to see, but an important one to spread so we could stay in solidarity with the Venezuelan nation. So on the public side of life, José continued to be concerned about corruption, trauma, and injustice.

A few weeks before, leaving Miami after his father’s transfusion procedure, he’d gone to Colombia for a couple of days – to work on a charity show that big Latino celebrities created to raise funds to help Venezuelan people in crisis.

Back then, still anticipating our conversation, I texted him about the huge importance of doing this show. Guess what he replied?

“It’s me who came up with the title for it ;-)”

Isn’t this diagnostic enough? No, he didn’t want to talk about the horrors and trauma of people in his native country. He didn’t want to contextualize corruption and oppression and discuss how fortunate American immigrants like himself could use their privilege to support their native communities. Nope, it all didn’t matter. What mattered that it was he who came up with the title. Wasn’t that grandiosity, combined with lack of empathy and compulsive need for attention – a diagnostic triad of narcisstic personality disorder?

Now, coming back to the garbage trucks video. I wanted to tell him what I thought about it. Like, as a goodbye message. Because I wanted to walk away from our relationship with dignity and integrity. Showing up as my true self up to the last moment.

So I texted him that it was actually important to share and necessary for the world to see what’s going on in Venezuela. That our comfort is important, but it will never be more important than the truth. That by turning our back on the trauma of our fellow human beings we diminish our own humanity as much as theirs. This footage from Caracas, I said, reminded me of the homeless folks I regularly saw at the IKEA cafeteria. Those who picked up leftovers from the discarded trays of us, “normal people”. Those whose humanity deserved to be seen and acknowledged even though society stigmatized them as alcoholics or marginals. I mentioned that despite my staggering budget and scarce resources, sometimes I bought meals for those people, even when I didn’t have my own. Because, I concluded, empathy was my practiced value in life. And I was willing to give it to others even when I got blatantly denied it myself.

Which was, exactly, what José now consciously did to me.

“Beautifully said!” he responded.

He still failed to see that for me, unlike him, empathy was more than just beautiful words. It was a way of living, working, and walking through life.

For him, as the current situation unambiguously showed, empathy and spirituality were ways of showing up on Instagram. In real life, he carefully shunned from practicing them.

---

I thought his Beautifully said text would be the end of our relationship. I mean, what else had to be said? He showed his true colors fully, leaving me no space for doubt.

Surprise: the next day he texts me literally this, as if nothing were wrong.

I have no idea what response he expected to elicit with this gaslighting message. Probably that I would beg him to remain my friend? That I would beg him to have another FaceTime? That I was so desperate and broken that I would again willingly become his supply?

Staying grounded in my integrity, I replied:

That was the last message in our relationship. Of course, he didn’t reply. Showing resistance in the face of his post-discard manipulation, I laid out the uncomfortable truth, and to it, he had nothing to reply.

He clearly chose comfort over truth. He held on tight to that choice in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end of our relationship. I’d rightfully assume comfort over truth was José’s way of walking through life – he chose “to travel lightly”, in his own words.

EPILOGUE

You don’t get closure in abusive relationships. Instead, you have to decide: this is closed.

Technically, I could continue chatting back and forth with him about trivial matters. Because formally, our “friendship” wasn’t ended. Narcissists never give you closure – even after discarding you – because they always count on you as a supply, just in case.

But I respected myself enough to close this relationship myself. Yes, I still had no one else on the horizon to help me with the book. Yes, I was still trapped in my multilateral trauma in Russia. But I’d been stuck and traumatized by him enough to make sure there was no space for doubt anymore. People like José are exceptionally good at performing and pretending. But whether he liked it or not, my vulnerability, practiced honestly and consciously, made his true colors fully come out as well. Basically, that’s the only guarantee you get with vulnerability.

Of course, I was devastated. By the fact that another relationship where tons of effort, time, and emotion had been invested ended up in disaster. Because this person turned out to be no different from those before him. Because I wasted almost one year of my life on him, and he got me believing him so much that I stopped looking for other relationships (isn’t that a classical abusive tactic?). Because now, I realized it had been a manipulative game right from the start. For months, he smothered me with friendship statements never really seeing me as a friend. Never seeing me as a fellow, equal human being, for that matter. Sniffing my vulnerability and my need, and using it to convert me into a supply for his grandiose, shallow ego.

I mean, why would a normal person say Of course I want to help you on New Year’s Eve and then avoid the conversation about it in one month later?

Is that healthy?

Even if he disliked me as a person, for whatever reason, he could have put an end to our relationship the moment he realized it. We weren’t bound by any contract or legal commitments. But no, he didn’t do that. His tactic was thoroughly manipulative. As you saw in previous chapters, he devaluated me gradually, but after each step he again became his normal self. He again made me feel our friendship was real. Why would an honest and self-aware person do that? Why complicate things so much?

In August, I directly asked him whether or not he was okay with my vulnerability. I gave him a civil, honest opportunity to break up or remain acquaintances rather than friends, and I comminucated I was okay with it. But no, he chose to keep me on the hook, by never replying to that email and making me feel like nothing was wrong in the next FaceTime.

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. That's the thing we should always remember about relationships: where there's no clarity, there can be no benign intentions either.

It would be clear if after listening to my story and finding what kind of help I needed, he refused to contact anyone for me. But no, he didn’t allow even that.

It wasn’t that he denied me the help I needed. He didn’t even bother to learn what kind of help I needed.

He denied me any help preemptively, by simply avoiding the conversation where I could put my needs on the table. That's what José's friendship and spirituality were really worth.

---

Once back in autumn, trying to figure out who José really was – because his behavior already made me question my original impression – I was reading his Website. Aside from the info about his agency and his newly launched podcast, there was a Press section with his interviews in various media. Aside from The Hedonist article I’d already seen, there were paparazzi videos of him hanging out with his A-list celebrity friends, and a few articles about the projects he’d produced.

No, to my great disappointment, there weren’t any projects related to social justice.

But there was one that particularly caught my attention.

It was a professional panoramic shot, showing a group of well-buffed, well-groomed, smoking hot men in Speedos, José himself included. As the description indicated, many of them were his pals from the wealthy, fortunate gay America. There was a successful entrepenuer, a gay porn producer, etc. – you get the picture. The picture was a parody mimicking Vanity Fair’s cover that years ago had shown a group of famous Hollywood actresses in swimsuits. José’s idea of creating a mock version of that cover, with well-buffed male bodies like his own, was obviously an important achievement in his life, deserving of being showcased on his Website.

I felt deeply disturbed by that picture, and I didn’t immediately understand why. Like many times before in my life, I thought my disgust had something to do with me – blaming myself for my feelings had been my long-term conditioning growing up. I thought I was disturbed because of being triggered around beefness. Because of having been bullied in school for being skinny and underweight. Because of still being underweight, still not having acccess to gyms, and still living in food insecurity fifteen years later. I thought I just envied these fortunate men their money, their bodies, and their security.

This hypothesis, as plausible as it sounded, still didn’t resonate enough. Because imagining myself in this smoking hot picture, I didn’t find myself wanting to be any of them. Obviously, envy wasn’t on the table. Then what was it? What was actually going on for me emotionally?

Doing therapeutic work for years, I knew sometimes it takes time to dig deep, rumble with the first draft stories that we make up about our experiences, and find the truth within. This picture reminded me of something, and I just couldn’t put a finger on it. No, it wasn’t the original Vanity Fair cover. It was something more meaningful and important.

It wasn’t until my and José’s “relationship” ended that I understood what it was. It was an epiphany, and a big surprise at the same time.

---

This goes back into the years when I did my comprehensive research on homophobia. I studied it through the lens of critical awareness, which meant exploring very specifically four pieces: 1) where the problem came from; 2) how it worked; 3) what impact it had on society, economy, and culture; and 4) who benefitted from it. The first piece had to do with historical roots of homophobia – essentially misinterpretations of ancient Judeo-Christian religious texts, over the centuries spreading metastases of hate and ignorance into the majority of the world’s religions.

Particularly, I had to reality-check the famous piece of the Old Testament most often cited in justification of homophobia: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah from the book of Genesis. The story about an attempt of same-sex gang rape – the story about violence and inhospitality – had been for centuries culturally misportayed to condemn homosexuality, although it was no more about homosexuality than the story of an axe murderer was about the axe. Remarkably, for all the certainty with which church homophobes used that story to justify their hateful beliefs, this story didn’t even have the word homosexual or or homosexuality in it. In fact, mentioning the ‘abominable sin’ of Sodom many times, it never specified what that sin was.

Well, maybe because this got unambiguously clarified later. Just a few books further in the Old Testament, the story of Prophet Ezekiel contains a very straightforward reference to Sodom. The reference that, despite being Christian my entire life, I’d never known about. The reference I’d never heard about in church or mainstream Christian media. Because that reference effectively called bullshit on what with centuries had become part of our church’s cultural doctrine and a big pillar of its oppressive power – the kind of power Jesus never called for. The kind of power Jesus was in fact killed for challenging.

So here’s what the Bible really said about Sodom. In the story, God addressed Jerusalem through the mouth of the prophet, predicting the city’s forthcoming destruction. As the Hebrew language had grammatical gender, God addressed the city and its citizens as females, which makes the translation sound somewhat weird in modern English. The idea is clear nevertheless:

"Here was the sin of your sister Sodom. She and her daughters were overfed, arrogant, and unconcerned. They didn't help the poor and the needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me, so I did away with them, as you have seen."

When I read this, I was dumbstruck. Holy shit! The whole thing finally made sense. Now it became clear what the abomination of Sodom was about. Now God’s rage against Sodom was in perfect alignment with the moral doctrine of the Bible. No, God was never enraged at people who were homosexuals because it was never their choice. Instead, God was enraged at people who chose to be selfish, inhospitable, and indifferent to the suffering of their fellow humans. Modern language would use words like ‘privileged’ or ‘narcissistic’ to describe such people, but the book of Ezekiel said the same in much simpler, although less politically correct words.

So now, in March 2019, it finally dawned upon me why José’s Vanity Fair picture had disturbed me so much. When I’d seen it in autumn, I didn’t know for sure what kind of person José was, and I stuck to positive assumptions. But I’d known who many other upper-middle-class American gay men were, from my experiences with them over the previous years. Those experiences had happened before I discovered the Ezekiel piece referring to Sodom. And the piece described those people – their values, their behavior, and their lifestyle – with such striking accuracy that it just gave me goosebumps.

Now, I was looking at these men in this picture, and José among them, after he’d fully revealed his true colors in our relationship. And here was the epiphany.

Despite his official job title, José didn't represent artistic talent. José represented the overfed, the arrogant, and the unconcerned. José represented those enjoying security in their privilege bubbles, dismissing and rationalizing systemic trauma, inequality, and oppression because they lived on the upside of it. José represented part of America — part of its culture and part of its people — that exactly corresponded to the Biblical definition of Sodom. Importantly, his homosexuality had nothing to do with it.

José never chose to be gay, just like I never chose to be born in poverty in Russia. But how we showed up in life, what values we put first, how we treated the people we crossed paths with was entirely within our choice and our accountability.

They say you can’t judge people before you get to know them well. Before knowing all the foibles and idiosyncrasies that inform the complexity and messiness of being human. So reading this story, some will argue that I have no business putting down José as a person because I hadn’t known him well enough. Because I hadn’t known him long enough. Because, after all, we never even met “in real life”. Because the judgment of his “real-life” LA friend, who called him her “ride or die” and “the person always showing up” was more accurate than mine. That, after all, he didn’t do anything critically bad – because he never owed me any help in the first place.

Here’s the problem with this superficial logic. It turns out that how well you know people doesn’t strongly correlate with how long you know them. The depth of connection with another person, and the consequent accuracy of seeing their true colors, depends far more on your intention in the relationship, on the authenticity and vulnerability you show up with, on the quality of situations you go through with that person, than it depends on the time after you met them or on how often you see their physical, bodily presence next to you.

Yes, after one year of weekly FaceTimes with José, across eleven times zones, I got to knew him better than his Hollywood pals can ever know him. Why?

Because following his trust-building signals, I gradually opened my vulnerability to him, and I could fully see how he treated it. His privileged friends, even after knowing him for two decades, could never reach that quality of connection simply because they never got nearly as vulnerable. Whatever their needs and emotional struggles might have been, their privilege matching José’s prevented this power imbalance where José abusive colors could come out as transparently as they did in his relationship with me. With them, he simply couldn’t be his real self because he would be held accountable – for lying, gaslighting, and failing commitments. Because there would be broken deals, lawsuits, shitty reputation – in other words, there would be some consequences. And with me, there would be none. So he could freely be himself. He played with me and treated me like garbage because he knew he would eventually get away with whatever he was doing. Because his privilege over me gave him that license. Because he was a fortunate guy in Hollywood, and I was a poverty-stricken guy in a third-world country. I obviously wasn’t the one who’d bring him to court for his manipulative, sleazy relational tactics. It’s the same reason why big Hollywood executives systemically harrassed young actresses – they knew they’d get away with it in the culture of Hollywood’s patriarchy, corruption, and power over.

Therefore, as short as our relationship technically was, because of the vulnerability and power imbalance inherent in it, and perceived freedom of action on José’s part, it provided a more accurate picture of who he was than the picture his American (or Venezuelan) friends could ever see. There’s no reason to believe that his friendship with them was any less phony and supply-driven that it had been with me – and just like me, they couldn’t suspect anything bad before getting really vulnerable with him. Except that, because of their privilege, they never got as vulnerable as I ended up being.

THE REVOLUTION

Needless to say, despite the intellectual understanding of abuse, I was emotionally crushed after such outcome of another relationship, so promising and inspiring in the beginning. With clinical depression lurking around the corner, just like one year before, I went straight into #RisingStrong – a highly effective, evidence-based cognitive-behavioral practice of composting failure, guided by Brené Brown’s research. No matter how many walls had been built in my face, no matter how many doors had been shut in my face, I knew the worth of my work, my dreams, and my purpose. No matter my disadvantage, no matter time ticking against me, no matter my health falling apart – until my last breath, there was no way I was going to leave the race. I had to rise strong and continue running.

A week after everything was over, I came to my hairdresser’s to get a fresh haircut. Despite my constantly staggering finances, it’d been two years now that I trusted my hair to a very experienced, highly artful premium hairdresser. His name was Stan. Five years my senior, Stan was just as passionate and talented in his art as I was in mine. I never regretted one penny I paid him. Struggling mightily with hair loss following my years of clinical depression, I’d had trouble finding someone who could understand how to treat my hair right. Thank God, I’d finally found him. Every time we met, Stan brought small but so much needed sparks of joy into my life. Because with me still being underweight, getting a good haircut for years remained the only way to look in the mirror and remind myself that, after all, I was physically attractive. Despite all the socioeconomic disadvantage I was born into, I won many aspects of the genetic lottery. And whether I liked it or not, for my long-dreamed career as a performance artist, how I looked mattered a lot. As my experience of networking showed, it mattered far more than my talent, my thoughts, and my vision. Especially given that the majority of my interaction happened with gay men, whose objectifying comments and backhanded compliments only exacerbated my body image insecurity.

Now, I sat in the chair with my eyes closed, as Stan was silently, scrupulously doing magic on my hair. One of the reasons I liked him was that, being just as extroverted and talkative as I, he was also empathetic enough to understand when I wasn’t in the mood to talk. From our regular communication, he knew I had an important work relationship keeping me in tension. As we got closer over the years, I also knew he’d faced many abusive relationships with sponsors and investors trying to get his own business off the ground. He knew what it was like to be diligent and passionate about one’s work, to be excited about scaling it and taking it to the next level, serving others beautifully and at the same time committing to a higher standard of one’s own living. He knew what it was like to be encouraged to invest time and emotions, and then have people turn your investment against you. Right now, without me telling him much about the outcome of this relationship I’d spent one year focusing on, he obviously understood it all. He wouldn’t touch my fresh wound. He was just doing his best to bring another spark of joy into my life. All the while I was sitting with my eyes closed, thinking about how to rise strong and what to do next with my life.

“Jorge, we’re done,” Stan said after drying my hair with the Preptonic and applying final touches with the sculpting clay. “Look at yourself. Is the front hair’s length okay? And what about the height of the fade line? I made it somewhat different this time.”

I opened my eyes, saw my reflection, and after a second my eyes started welling up with searing, scarce male tears.

This was the best haircut we ever got to produce. The guy in the mirror was smoking hot, although still underweight and not having fashionable clothes on. I just couldn’t believe this handsome guy was me. His features were so familiar and so attractive, and after one year of being manipulated, gaslighted, and diminished by the abuser, it somehow slipped my understanding that my looks could have been the reason why José started communicating with me in the first place.

“It’s perfect, bro,” I said to Stan, through a lump in my throat. “Exactly what I needed to see today.”

Yes, this guy in the mirror didn’t have as thick of a hair as he did in his early twenties. There were first signs of aging showing up on his face. But he still had the looks. He still had the chance of becoming the next Ricky Martin. After one year of living in the West, eating enough protein, having access to adequate healthcare, hitting the gym, and rocking dance and singing classes on a daily basis, he would be most certainly ready to walk out on stage with confidence. To fully show up in the arena. To connect to hearts of others with his big, bold, loud voice and his passionate, extroverted Hispanic personality. Even more important, he had integrity, courage, and strong spirit behind his looks. He had a clear vision of how to use his voice on that platform, speaking truth to power and truth to bullshit. Creating measurable, observable, lasting change in the world through his art.

That guy was here, in the mirror before me right now. And music, his loved one, was standing beside, holding his hand, anticipating their moment of truth together in the arena.

Because, in my underweight body there was still a heavy heart. It was heavy because it was full of truth. And truth demanded to be told.

That’s where the idea of #TruthWarrior, my future YouTube blog, struck me. Yes, from my relationships over the years, I’d learned huge lessons about connection, empathy, courage, oppresion and privilege that deserved to be shared because they could bring healing to people going through the same contextual experience: following their dreams from the place of huge disadvantage, honoring the truth within their hearts, daring greatly and showing up with their gifts, having their wings broken by systems of structural injustice, rising strong and staying in the race despite overwhelming odds.

I had a lot to say about all of this. I had evidence-based research, not just poetic bullshit, to share around personal development and social justice and spirituality.

Why the hell did I keep it from being seen by the world?

Why the hell did I only try to share this depth and substance with shallow people like José, who only valued hot, fun, fast, and easy in their lives? Whose capacity for connection was limited to performing, preteneding, and manipulation? Who couldn’t see and think any deeper than non-sensical, empty, fast-food rhetoric about sprituality, employed to maintain a public image and make them comfortable with their privilege?

I realized I had to start out with YouTube videos. No more writing. I didn’t have access to big creative platforms in America, but I had access to social media. And there, I had to show up as my truest self – as a performing artist, not as a writer. Because these were my genuine creative roots. This is where my calling lay – in being in front of the camera and forging connection looking my audience in the eye. In being in front of my people as I communicated my message, with my hands flying around over my emotional speech, with me at times cussing, at times crying, at times joking – in one word, just being my fucking wild self, still untamed and unsilenced by the oppression I went through over my entire life.

I didn’t know if anyone would ever watch these videos. I was fully aware that, unlike the hijabi poet, I didn’t have thousands of dollars to invest into promotions. I didn’t know how much time and what kind of effort it would require to produce them – unlike José, I wasn’t in Hollywood, knowing right people, having access to space and equipment. But I was driven by truth and love and courage – so I knew I’d somehow figure it out. I knew I would have this channel created before reaching out to new people around my book. Time was still ticking. My tumor could still become metastatic. And over that, I had no control. I only knew I would stay in the journey towards my truth until my last breath, whenever it came.

Because, after having my dreams abused again and again by privileged Americans like José, I saw that it’s not those corrupt, greedy, cowardly, and shallow people who belonged in the world’s biggest and most influential creative industry. It was people like me – not going after big money, fame, or power, but in pursuit of creating meaning, connection, and making a difference.

KEY LEARNINGS

Our biggest lessons in life lie in our regrets – things we’d do differently if we could go back to our past. They also lie in the difference between the stories we make up about our relationships and what those relationships actually turn out to be. As I processed the traumatic experience of the abuse José inflicted on me, I owned my part in it.

Yes, the choice to perpetrate violence, fraud, or abuse is never made by the person who gets targeted. And, as a target, my choice was to stay or leave when I started noticing his toxic, manipulative behavior.

Because, remember, you never get closure in abusive relationships. It can, and should, be only your decision to walk away.

There was no way I could change the person who José was. There was no way I could know for sure he was an abuser until I got really vulnerable. So those things cannot be my regrets. And yet, I would’ve walked away with less emotional damage and less wasted time if I’d done the following things differently.

1.

The first time he made sexual advances in a FaceTime call – I should have clarified that it was inappropriate instead of laughing it off. Doing such things, framed as jokes, is the way abusers probe how far they can stretch your boundaries. Can this behavior be also benign? Absolutely. But how a person reacts to you setting boundaries tells a lot about their intentions. Setting boundaries always makes sense.

2.

In August, when he ignored my straightforward email about me feeling like my vulnerability was not welcome, I shouldn’t have let it slide. I should’ve confronted him about it in the nearest FaceTime, instead of playing along to his casual chatter. Because whether or not you can practice authenticity is a fundamental question in a relationship. There’s nothing wrong in sustaining fun, fast, and easy connection with someone – as long as this is what you’re looking for. But you don’t frame it as a friendship. When you see your vulnerability being encouraged and then rejected as something disgusting – chances are you’re in abuse.

3.

In October, when he rationalized homophobic violence in Russia and normalized the homelessness of LGBT teenagers in America, I should have sent him a goodbye email after hanging up, pointing out flagrant bullshit and hypocrisy in his arguments. Yes, we all can say stupid and offensive things sometimes. If those things reflect a mistake or a slipup, rather than entrenched beliefs driven by shame and scarcity, we will apologize instead of doubling down on our BS. My leaving would also test the reality of his words about “appreciating my friendship”. And most of all, I should’ve understood that a person with such beliefs, and such solid preference for comfort over truth, would never be willing to help with my work regardless of his power, privilege, and connections. Because he was obviously greedy about his privilege and power. He was among those people who, living on the upside of inequality because of random circumstances, want to make sure that the world stays exactly the same – their comfort is endangered by folks like me, whose work creates meaningful, lasting change towards justice and equality.

4.

In February, in our last FaceTime, I should have been more assertive and held him responsible for his own words, so eloquently professed just one month before. I should have asked him about why he was never paying attention when I spoke, although always feeling entitled to my attention when he spoke. I shouldn’t have accepted “Let’s stay in touch” and instead made a clear schedule for continuing the conversation. No, all of that wouldn’t have changed the sneaky, phony person that José was. But I would have felt better, looking him in the eye as I confronted him about his shit before walking away from him forever.

5.

I shouldn’t have allowed him to shift the frame of the conversation by putting me in contact with a Russian immigrant. Playing a fool while discarding me allowed him to be comfortable with his betrayal, cowardice, and hypocrisy – and I shouldn’t have enabled that.

6.

This is the big lesson I learned from all of my abusive relationships:

We should never force ourselves to stay with people who constantly make us feel small, irrelevant, and worthless. With people who never clearly communicate their intentions. With people who value their own comfort over the quality of connection. This all can be felt over time, and when you feel it, it doesn't come out of nowhere. We should trust our gut feeling.

I felt José’s toxicity already in autumn, exactly after I made my first bid for clarity in that vulnerability email he never replied to. And instead of making excuses for him and gaslighting myself, I should’ve shared with him how I felt immediately – and if that hadn’t produced an appropriate reaction (which it most probably wouldn’t have), I should have left. Interestingly, just seeing the other person apologize is not enough. As research shows, abusers can be pretty good at delivering apologies and speaking empathy – except their toxic behavior doesn’t change in the long run. And that leads me to the last, most important point.

7.

No matter what values we profess and how eloquently, what we practice is observable and measurable.

That applies to everything from friendships to love to professional integrity. Observation and measurements may take a while, and we cannot think of a person as a hypocrite the first time we see a discrepancy between their words and their actions. But when that discrepancy is constant and systemic, when there’s gaslighting and rationalization around it, our trust in that person legitimately collapses. In the absence of trust, there’s no possibility for building profound connection. There’s no room for empathy, loyalty, collaboration, partnership, and meaningful help. The only kind of connection remaining possible without trust is fun, fast, and easy - i.e. superficial. And, unless you’re a psychopath, this kind of connection will just waste your time on Earth, keeping you in deprivation of your basic human need – to be seen, respected, and loved for who you are.

I'm sorry José settled for that deprivation.

---

I’m good at creativity, and I’m not good at estimating time. Going into full production cycle for more than a hundred videos has taken me almost a year, and many of them are still not released. Even though I’m not getting many views or much traffic from my Instagram (which I never hoped for in the absence of advertising funds), this work allowed me to reclaim my artistic voice and my confidence in front of the camera – exactly where I belong, and always have. Also, the lessons from the experience with José allowed me to put a quick cap on a few relationships this year that would have otherwise resulted in new layers of abuse and trauma in my life.

My hope is that for all of you, who mustered the courage and patience to read this long story, it has provided actionable insights into the inner dynamics of emotional abuse – and prompted a reflection about systems of oppression that inform its outer context, making abuse possible and so prevalent in our culture.

I encourage survivors of abuse to come forward with their stories, just like I did with mine in this series. Sharing those stories will not reverse or undo the harm done to our lives. But it will empower those going through abuse right now. It will heal those whose sense of reality is still shattered in the wake of gaslighting. And, most importantly, it will challenge the systems in our culture that create contextual setting for abuse. Zooming out of your individual experience and finding its relation to sexism, classism, racism, homophobia, or any other system of oppression, is how you to get transform your trauma – which you never got to choose – into a contagious, viral particle of truth contributing to the critical mass that catalyzes lasting, meaningful cultural change.

Be brave, show up,
tell the truth,
and take care.
Love y'all,
Jorge