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 most 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 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 the 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 the 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 gaslit 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.

I wrote and shared this story with José, to make him 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 the greatness I had within me and the scarcity of opportunity available in the circumstances I never got to choose.

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