“How do you know that what you’re feeling is real, Jorge?” I got asked once. “Oh, it’s really simple,” I said without hesitation. “You just put it to the test of time and see what happens. Time will tell.”

Back in those years of my youth, in my beliefs about the world, people, and relationships, I operated far more on cultural mythology than I did on critical thinking. And yet, some pieces of wisdom emerged from somewhere deep within me and made themselves manifest.

This was one of them. The truth inherent in it, itself, did withstand the test of time.

Constantly questioning the reality of my feelings was part of my upbringing. Looking wider, it was a cultural constant in my generation – millennial kids, growing up amidst the devastation and chaos of post-Soviet Russia. We were gaslit by our parents, our teachers, our clergy and all power structures above us – and trust me, in gaslighting us, they were all doing the best they could, with the resources they had. Whenever our feelings made adults and their systems uncomfortable, we were told authoritatively that what we felt just wasn’t real. No, the suicidal ideation of a classmate bullied for her appearance wasn’t real – she was just too sensitive. No, the anger of a boy who stormed off to the principal’s office after months of being constantly humiliated by a toxic teacher wasn’t legit – it was misplaced and misdirected. No, the taste of spoilt food at our public school’s cafeteria wasn’t real – we were just expecting too much of a great taste for free.

This gaslighting had less to do with people’s ill intention and far more to do with the shame and scarcity they’d grown up in and didn’t even realize. Amidst the political and economic oppression of the Soviet Union, shame and scarcity were foundational to the culture and the structure of power – with all the beliefs and behaviors they drove, everywhere from families to organizations to whole industries.

That’s why, it hardly surprises me that I was subject to the same gaslighting, and the same enforcement of limiting beliefs, in my family.

According to my most significant adults at the moment, my talent for music wasn’t real – I just ‘overestimated myself’. My vision to make a career out of creativity was ‘a sinful, selfish fancy’. My desire to develop my athletic abilities wasn’t relevant – I was just ‘too preoccupied with my body’s appearance’.

My parents were doing the best they could, with the resources they had. And when people’s only inner resources are shame and scarcity, you can hardly expect them to practice empathy and kindness towards others, even their own kids.

But as a kid, I had to find a defense against gaslighting, especially around my most important feelings. That’s where this truth came from within me despite the oppression.

You’re telling me what I feel isn’t real? Well, time will tell better.

Time did tell, in fact. One month after learning the seven notes, despite never having a teacher and practicing all my by self without even having a musical instrument at home, I played the first movement of Moonlight Sonata. Three years later, at the age of 15, I got my first job as a music arranger abroad. The limiting belief about me ‘not having enough talent’ just didn’t survive the test of time and the hard work I’d put in.

Around the same age, remaining a complete autodidact and making my transition from classical to contemporary pop music, I had another feeling whose reality had to be questioned for more than a decade – the feeling of my Hispanic identity.

It first came to me through Spanish and Latin American music – one where, unlike Russian music, I saw the clear reflection of my personality. Then, it only got stronger with my discovery of Hispanic cultures and my learning of the Spanish language – just like music, all by myself. All of it felt native to me at some primal level.

I didn’t know the word belonging at that age, but looking back, I can surely say that I never felt like I belonged in Russia. Neither in my family, nor in school, nor amidst the larger culture. It all felt foreign to me, but before I learned there were alternatives to the confined, oppressed, shame-and-scarcity-defined reality I’d grown up in, I couldn’t fully verbalize how I felt.

And even when I did somehow verbalize it, imagine the gaslighting I experienced.

Do you identify as Spanish? It’s ridiculous. No one in your family has Hispanic ethnicity.

Come on, it’s just another fancy. You’re just trying to look cool and get attention – because no one at school wants to be friends with you.

My feelings got pathologized along the lines very similar to those employed to pathologize the experience of transgender people. Intuitively, I already knew better than to argue with people who gaslit me. If they responded that way, they never deserved to see my feelings in the first place. I just walked away.

But the inner response to my reality being questioned was still the same: Time will tell.

---

Ten years later, it did. No, I didn’t spend those ten years, from 15 to 25, ruminating about my Spanish identity and my unbelonging in Russia. This truth, just like the truth about music as my true calling and many of my innermost truths, got increasingly buried under new layers of trauma, oppression, and gaslighting. Under a threat of state-organized physical violence, after high school, I went on to study the profession I’d never wanted, and then, after graduating from university, was faced with the employment realities of a third-world country’s government-controlled industry: that which, regardless of your talent, effort, and hard work, implied nothing more than permanent conditions of semi-slavery and a lifetime of poverty.

Like, in this reality of Russia, where my job and my existential glass ceiling, just like those of most people, were merely about survival, what busisness did I have thinking about higher, spiritual matters? Like the meaning of life, belonging, creativity, and my sense of purpose?

But time still did its job. The truth within me had waited a long time to be heard and acted upon, and it wouldn’t wait indefinitely.

At 25, by the mere luck of a pharma company sponsored trip, I got my first opportunity to go to Spain – the kind of travel I wouldn’t be able to afford on my own. I know it sounds so unrelatable to most normal people, even in my generation in Russia, never mind to normal European people: to be 25 and to have never traveled beyond the confined horizons of your city, to have graduated with the highest distinction and be working your ass off full-time as a doctor at a ‘highly prestigious’ academic clinic and still stay poor, with things like travels to Europe, restaurants, gym memberships and movie theaters staying way out of your economic reach, and no prospect of this situation changing ever, no matter how long, and how hard, you work.

My life was so not normal. And if you’re one of those normal – especially Western, especially white, especially middle-class, especially college-educated – people, you’d rather think I’m crazy or lazy or otherwise the one to blame for my never-ending misery than to believe that my never-ending oppression and trauma with all their implications weren’t my fault.

Your disbelief, though, doesn’t stop me from telling the truth. Including the long-denied truth about my belonging and my identity.

Because the moment I first put my foot on the Spanish land, the moment I took my first ounce of air, imbued with the salty scent of the Mediterranean, the first minute I walked into their airport building and was surrounded by the sounds of my beloved language, this feeling came flooding over me.

Finally, we’re at home, my heart said.

Sure as hell, after decades of gaslighting, I myself first pathologized it instead of believing it. At home? Are you kidding me? I came there with a tourist’s visa, for mere five days, on the occasion of attending a multidisciplinary medical conference. I came there for work, not for feeling.

But the feeling was just so strong it couldn’t be denied. Instead, it was further catalyzed by the evidence of the socioeconomic reality I observed. The prevalence of middle-class life. The inclusive society. People walking around with smiles on their faces and asking strangers, not Google Maps in their phones, for directions. Passengers striking up chats at bus stops instead of barking and discharging anger on one another. Senior citizens leading decent lives instead of struggling for survival. Motorists respecting cyclists on the road, instead of honking them off the lanes. Road police looking out for safety, not for chances to shake people down. And yes, the exemplary healthcare system, free from ubiquitous corruption, the culture of embezzlement, nepotism and underfunding. In other words, there was a normal life, in a striking contrast to Russia. The kind of life I had only imagined but was conditioned to believe couldn’t exist.

Because this is how oppression works -- it gaslights you into believing it is necessary, inevitable, and immutable, and most importantly makes you think that this belief was your own to start with.

On my last day in Barcelona, my heart just roared the truth into my mind: “You’ve got to move over here, Jorge, at any cost, and start from scratch. Leave all your trauma behind in Russia, and start growing here where you belong.”

How did I know I belonged there? Because of the definition of true belonging: it’s the feeling you have in a place, situation, or relationship that doesn’t require you to change who you are so you could fit in and survive but demands that you be who you are so you would grow and thrive.

That’s exactly how I felt in Spain – I could just be myself and walk through this reality without wearing tons of armor. And here, unlike Russia, survival wasn’t the best kind of existence I could get. A life of thriving was a palpable alternative.

It was there, during those numbered days at home after which I had to come back to the jail of my oppressed existence in Russia, that I got inspired with the idea of what later became my first book – the story of dreams triumphing over trauma, love triumphing over shame, and faith triumphing over death.

Spiritual people could say that the idea of the book was that ‘wake-up call from the Universe’, or ‘my creativity’s first serious bid for collaboration’.

I would put it much simpler: above all, it became my only opportunity to get a breakthrough in my life in order to move away from Russia and start the career I’d always dreamt of. Unlike normal people, from my position of intersectional disadvantage, I had no evolutionary, linear path towards that career.

And, that wasn’t a writer’s career. As much passion, quality, and social relevance as there were involved in writing Souls of Silence, deep down I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life writing fiction, poetry, or screenplays. I was a performing artist at my core. Being onstage and creating connection through song and dance was what made me feel most vulnerable, most expanded, and most alive, and that’s how I knew it was the way to go. This book whose glorious idea came to me was meant to be the piece of evidence showcasing my creative talent, my values, and my artistic vision. It could earn me a budget and necessary connections for a belated yet still possible start in the music industry. It was the only way to that goal available at my age and my particular circumstances – the only way to subvert the multilateral oppression I was born into and allow my biggest talent to materialize and serve the world.

Because that’s the thing about true belonging: it brings out the truth about all aspects of who you are. The rush of true belonging in Spain brought me back to the truth about music being my highest purpose, no matter the years of oppression and trauma that tried to erase that truth. It brought out the truth about what I was worth, what kind of life I deserved to live, and what kind of opportunities I needed to grow from – and put all this evidence right in front of my eyes.

And once I’d seen it, I could not un-see it. Time had told what it was supposed to, and time couldn’t be turned back.

---

As many of you know from my blog and my videos, I wrote this book through two episodes of terminal, multi-drug-resistant clinical depression which followed as I came back to Russia after my spiritual awakening in Spain.

Previously, it had been chronically painful to never have a normal life and to never see it. But now, it completely, acutely devastating to have seen what normal life looked like, and to remain locked out of access to it. Unlike for my privileged peers, for me, there were no options like moving to the West through the support of my family and pursuing a medical career there.

For me, the book and its potential success were the only hope for a better future, but they certainly weren’t going to pan out shortly. It was a long-term investment of time, effort, and emotion with no guarantees whatsoever – all the while my oppression in Russia, due to both political and macroeconomic circumstances, was immediate in its toxicity and only grew worse when the war with the Ukraine broke out.

I finished the book at the bottom of clinical depression, and, just like any spiritual person, I did expect results. Because, just like any spiritual person, at that moment I ascribed meaning in my traumatic past. I believed and, far importantly, by then I had fully lived the tale of American dream – a narrative about hard work, commitment, resilience, and courage earning you a future despite the past of overwhelming adversity. I had answered the Universe’s call and acted upon it. I showed up to creativity. I actualized it through multilateral trauma, terminal depression, and increasing oppression.

I expected justice to be rendered in my life so that through my career I could bring justice to the lives of others.

Little did I know about the ugly realities of the Western creative industry. Little did I know about the fact that prioritizing privilege and profits over talent and meaning, it would keep the doors shut in my face for years. That all its ‘progressivist’ messages about equality, social justice, empathy, and spirituality were just a polished facade of systemic lies disguising greed, cowardice, and hypocrisy of people in power. That people standing at the gates of my dreams would routinely pathologize my courage, dismiss the social relevance of my work, ridicule my artistic vision, and treat my vulnerability like garbage the very moment they learned about my class and my geography – all the while eloquently professing those things as their topmost values in their books, podcasts, and social media feeds.

The level of gaslighting I went through at the hands of my ‘fellow activists’, alleged advocates, and self-portrayed allies in America was epic – and far more devastating than what I experienced during my early years in Russia. Now, my abusers weren’t poor people who had internalized shame and scarcity from their oppressed lives – they were affluent, privileged Western people invariably sugarcoating their hypocrisy and abuse in niceties. As these abusive experiences happened with tens, and then hundreds of agents, producers, publishers and other people from 2015 through 2021, my trust in the American progressive leadership and its statements around social justice progressively corroded. Just like hair fell off my head and wrinkles appeared on my face, my aging reminding me of the closing window of opportunity for the career I knew I belonged in.

The system denied me that opportunity. To protect its privilege, its ignorance, and its meritocratic hubris, the upper-middle-class, gay, feminist, BLM-hashtagged America made sure my talent would remain unclaimed and wasted.

All the while my life in Russia, quite predictably, brought new traumas my way.

---

As my critical thinking evolved, I could no longer mislead myself into believing that my never-ending traumas had meaning. That there was some kind of God above who “sent” me all that shit for some higher, greater purpose and that this God had a plan for me rooted in love and kindness. No, this kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, all-loving, omnipotent God above sold by the Christian religion for centuries just never showed up in my life.

Make no mistake: I didn’t expect God to give me anything good because of my suffering, with me sitting around and doing nothing to change my life. This. Never. Happened. I just expected His cooperation as I put years of effort into effecting that change. I expected Him to bring me justice because of my work and my resilience. I got none. Just false hopes, crushing betrayals, and broken dreams.

It would be easier for me to be angry with God. But the tougher truth I realized was, there's no one to be mad at. God above just doesn't exist. God above is all but a comforting lie that's been told by the privileged to the oppressed throughout history. The lie that's allowed the privileged to stay comfortable with what they have and turn away from the suffering of others. The lie that the oppressed have easily swallowed because it helped them numb their trauma and make sense of abusive experiences that, in reality, made no sense at all.

In reality, all my trauma had nothing to do with God or any spiritual matters. It had to do with the shame, greed, cowardice, and hypocrisy of people that had power over me – from my parents to corrupt bosses at my academic clinic in Russia to my potential talent agents and producers in America. My trauma had to do with structural inequality. My trauma had to do with the makeup of systems that consistently portrayed power and opportunity as scarce resources, supposed to be hoarded in the hands of the few. The systems that privileged some people over others, that denied millions of people like me any opportunity from the start, no matter the talents we carried and were willing to put forth, that then reinforced their deceitful messages saying that everybody gets what they’ve deserved and worked for.

There’s no spirituality or God involved in there. And there’s certainly no God above who’d intervene, uplift, and empower people like me so we could fight this systemic injustice.

---

My Christian faith, which for the majority of my life felt like its most solid cornerstone, heavily declined over the last few years, and by the end of 2020, it finally filed for bankruptcy. The meaning that religion ascribed to people’s lived experiences, including the toughest ones like my own, didn’t withstand the test of my research, my increasing critical thinking, and most importantly, the test of time.

And yet, I didn’t stop seeing meaning in all of my life experiences. My God was no longer God above, but it was God within. It was the God roaring from inside of my lionheart. It was the God whose voice I heard the first time I came to Spain and discovered what true belonging felt like. It was the God whose spirit I sensed the first time I fell in love. It was the God with whom I first connected at 12, learning to play the piano all by myself in my public school’s classroom, and realizing that music was my life’s purpose.

Now, that God, not the God sold to me for two decades by the Christian church, had to be loved and revered.

This God, unlike the imaginary God above, didn’t have all the control, all the answers, and all the plans. But that God was real. That God’s existence wasn’t a question of faith – He was observable and measurable. He was the truth that made my heart heavy. He was the anger coursing through my veins. He was the lion seeking freedom in the wild, untamed by three decades of oppression. And that God demanded justice to be rendered in my life and the lives of others. No matter how long that justice was overdue. Justice was in the center of what I saw as the meaning of my journey, as a human and as an artist.

Countless times throughout my life, I had my meaning-making abilities pathologized. And now, not only do I know from years of research that making meaning is one of our neurobiological needs as a species. I also understand that my ability to contextualize, analyze, see meaning in things and processes many people don’t even notice largely enables my creative process. Just because I lost my religion, the core of who I was didn’t change. I am a critical thinker and a storyteller. I’m a believer in the immense power of human connection who makes it manifest through art.

I felt that power when, being a bullied, unbelonging, unloved, and uncared-for teenager in Russia, I found my home and my reflection in Hispanic music. When, in the deepest corners of my heart, I realized I could make such music too. Today, I see clear meaning in my sense of true belonging at Spain. There’s huge substance underpinning it, although it’s invisible to so many people who are unable, or unwilling, to understand my experience. And no matter how traumatic my life away from Spain continues to be, today I fully honor this meaning instead of pathologizing and questioning it.

That’s how this Christmas, with my faith lying in smoking ruins, the Biblical Magi visited my life with their gifts. The Jesus above me was no longer there. But the Jesus within me called upon them to come.

---

Back in 2012, I brought some souvenirs on my way back from Barcelona. For me, they all carried the spirit of the city that, for the first time in my life, gave me the sense of true belonging.

Among them, there were three small paper stickers representing the flag of Barcelona. Last year, I found them by accident in the pocket of an old, worn-out bag, as I prepared it to be dumped. The moment I saw them, I instantly felt searing tears in my eyes. I realized they were the only material memories of my home city that survived up to that day. Everything else was only in my heart, and it all was heavily damaged by depression and other trauma that had happened since. My sense of reality, including the reality of my true belonging in Spain, had been massively torn apart by the gaslighting and abuse I experienced during the years of my networking in America.

But the stickers, in one moment, put it all back in place. I closed my eyes and for a couple of seconds remembered myself walking down the sunlit Columbus Avenue, enjoying the salty scent of the Mediterranean. Discovering this reality, just like learning the Spanish language in my teenage years, didn’t feel like something new. It felt like remembering something native and long-forgotten.

It wasn’t a discovery, in fact. It was a homecoming. Barcelona brought me back to myself, my roots, my values, and my dreams.

And now, amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic in 2020, with me still being stuck in Russia amidst poverty, oppression, and trauma, these stickers were the last pieces of evidence that my life once, for a mere five days, assumed real meaning and had real joy in it.

Every Christmas since 2012, my wish was to get out of Russia by next Christmas. To get the book published by next Christmas. To have my scholarship earned and get my music career started by next Christmas.

None of it ever came true. Instead of celebration, which obviously was the privilege of normal people, every Christmas was a day of mourning for me – the calendar mark of another year of never-ending work and aging, yielding no results, no justice, and no sense of meaning.

This Christmas was different. I no longer had any wishes or prayers – because I no longer believed there was any God above to hear them. If there were such God, he would, most of all, have seen not just the wishes but the titanic work, commitment, and integrity I put into my book’s project – from the writing itself to years of doing multidisciplinary research to building relationships with people who could help get my work out there.

But there was no God above to reward any of it. And God within me didn’t need to hear any wishes or prayers. He knew my needs perfectly, because He was their source.

Instead, this Christmas, feeling the piercing longing for my homeland as much as ever, I remembered about Los Reyes Magos – that how we call the Biblical Magi in Spanish. They’re not just the characters in the Biblical narrative. They’re also linked to a tradition very specific to Spain.

Unlike elsewhere in the Western World, many Spanish kids don’t get their presents on the day of Christmas, put under the tree by Santa Claus. Instead, they have to wait until January 6th, when the Three Kings (or Magi) came from the East to visit the newborn Jesus and bring him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Spanish kids, therefore, have to wait longer than others for their gifts to arrive. Because the Magi, as parents tell them, come from afar. They have a very long way to go. Spanish kids have to be patient.

And so was I.

---

I never had truly loving and caring parents, nor had I ever been a kid in Spain. But this year, I chose to be one, as part of honoring my identity. Now, I was the parent to my inner child. There was no one else to give him the love and care and empathy he’d always deserved and never had.

This Christmas, my inner child wanted something from our homeland. Something that would remind me and him of the joy we felt during our first, and only, homecoming. With continuing COVID restrictions, and no way out of poverty in sight, I had no prospect of traveling to Spain in the foreseeable future.

But then, I thought about the Magi. I could ask them to come.

On January 1st, 2021, the first thing in the morning, I Googled the name of the typographic firm written on the back of the stickers. Eight years later, the firm still existed, and moreover, offered international delivery of all their products, which, as the information on the Website indicated, took five business days.

“Perfect,” I thought. “Today is January 1st. If I place an order today, I’ll get my gifts exactly by January 6th. Just as all Spanish kids do.”

My heart was heavy as I put stickers, postcards, and magnets with the images of Barcelona into my online cart. I didn’t care about their price, nor about the cost of the delivery. I was buying them for my inner child. For him to remember how beautiful his hometown was. For him to remember how beautiful his spirit manifesting there was.

Now, unlike in 2012, buying these souvenirs I was nowhere near sure I would one day make it to Barcelona again. COVID restrictions, for sure, would be lifted soon. But there was no way out of poverty for me in Russia. And the book, my only breakthrough opportunity, just like my long-dreamt career as a musician, would most probably be wasted. I lacked privilege, and the Western creative industry systemically refused to take me and my work seriously. As my depression and trauma progressed, dying from suicide was the most probable outcome of my useless, worthless, meaningless life. Or that’s how America, with its hypocrisy, cowardice, greed, disguised by niceties and bleached smiles, made me feel.

The order confirmation arrived at my mailbox in less than an hour after my card got charged. The same evening, the envelope with postcards, stickers, and magnets was shipped over to Moscow. I got the tracking number. Today’s Magi, as I humorously thought, should have GPS antennas and Google Maps on board.

---

Right after ordering the gifts, I drove fifty miles across the city to Sheremetyevo, Moscow’s oldest and largest international airport. This place still felt sacred to me. When I was a poverty-stricken teenager, who unlike his college peers never had the opportunity to travel to Europe, in summers I came to this airport to dream about a better future. I watched ‘normal people’ check in for the flights to the countries I dreamed to see. Hispanic countries in the first place. And I prayed to God that one day, when I finished my education and started to earn my own money, I could finally afford to travel. To have vacations by the seaside. To explore different cultures and see the wonders that the world held.

Believing in God back then, I didn’t know my prayers dissolved into nothingness. Over the next decade, I put forward far more effort, grit, and commitment than normal people do in their normal lives, but I never became middle-class. The corruption and structural inequality of Russia wasted everything I carried and created, while God failed to show up in my life and cooperate.

It was also from that airport that I boarded my life-changing flight to Barcelona, with my heart beating in strange anticipation, as if knowing about the revelation that was to come.

It was to that self-same airport that I came regularly on Sundays, after rising above my almost lost fight with clinical depression and starting to do networking for the book. Every time there, I manifested the book project’s success. I manifested my long overdue departure from Moscow. The start of a new life, in a better place, the place of opportunity and freedom.

My friends used to joke: "On Sundays, normal people go to church. And you, Jorge, go to the airport."

And they were right. Sheremetyevo was my last church. It was the last place in the Universe where after all years of trauma, I could still feel the connection with God. The only place where I could still feel His presence.

I didn’t know I was feeling the presence of God within. Yes, it was the same God that in my late teens wanted me to travel and see the world. It was the same God who made my heart flutter and sense the oncoming miracle boarding my flight to Barcelona. It was the same God who suffered and screamed with me in terminal depression and yet ordered me to stay in the race and not give in to suicide.

This God – not the God above that I’d been taught in the Christian church, with its inherent hypocrisy, gaslighting, and oppression – was real love and real justice.

---

Due to the COVID situation, most international flights still remained canceled. The once busy terminal where eight years before I’d stood in the line checking in for Barcelona, was now empty and dimly lit. Few people, mostly airport workers, would pass by every other minute, heading from the adjacent domestic flights terminal to the administration unit. Now, I was alone there. Wearing a mask, just in case.

I sat down in the empty, silent hall, remembering myself. I remembered that 25 y.o. Jorge who was boarding that life-changing flight. The Jorge who believed in the inherent goodness of all people. The Jorge who believed that most people meant what they said. The Jorge that believed that courage, empathy, and kindness – not hypocrisy, cowardice, and greed – would prevail in the end. The Jorge who believed in the power of dreams and the power of human connection. The Jorge who believed staunchly and wholeheartedly in God as a conscious entity, an infinite source of love, and the administrator of justice above.

This Jorge was no longer here, no matter how much I missed him. That Jorge had died, slowly and painfully, over the next few years as he stayed locked in Russia. Repeatedly betrayed by the God he’d trusted in, and then by tens of people who encouraged him to be vulnerable, and then treated his vulnerability like garbage, enabled by their privilege and power.

That Jorge didn’t know that God was only within Him, and nowhere outside and above. And although God was also within other people, most people he’d meet along his thorny way would refuse to connect with, and act from, their God. Most people would instead act from their ego and their comfort. All the while thoroughly portraying themselves as empathy gurus, equality champions, and social justice advocates in order to gain money, publicity, and status.

As I sat there, I couldn’t stop thinking about the enormity of my life experience. Looking back, it was one continuous, never-ending struggle, with anything ‘positive’ quickly turning out to be a hoax, a false hope, or a broken dream. First, a childhood spent amidst poverty and abuse. Then, bullying at school. Never having the opportunity to cultivate my biggest talents. Then, being forced through violence into studying the profession I’d never wanted. Then, being stuck amidst poverty after ten years of studying that profession and graduating with the highest distinction – with no alternatives because of the corruption in the industry and the stagnation of larger economy. Then, following ‘the call from the Universe’ with the book and writing it despite new trauma and terminal depression. Then, spending five years dedicating most of my time to finding, and building relationships with, American social justice leaders – to only face their invariable betrayals in the end.

“Why did God hate me so much? How have I deserved it all?” my thought was.

“Come on, Jorge,” critical thinking replied. “The God you’re talking about just doesn’t exist. You haven’t deserved any of it. It’s just a result of the great randomness of life. Too many systems and structures have been stacked against you. Your life was stamped from the beginning.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” the old, dead Jorge insisted from the afterlife. “God makes no mistakes. How could God make me? A person with these talents, these dreams, this freaking outstanding amount of courage, and then put me in Russia? In the reality where none of my potential could be actualized? Where it all was only going to metastasize and eat me up from the inside, all the while thousands of people elsewhere could benefit from my voice, my contributions, and my messages? Why did I have to do all this titanic work to get out of this oppressed reality, and God still kept me trapped in it? Why couldn’t He send me one person – just one person – who’d be honest and have enough integrity to lend me a hand? Is my entire life a joke?”

Critical thinking drew a deep sigh. “God didn’t make you, Jorge, nor did he send, nor fail to send, anyone your way. This BS only happens in Christian narratives. Your parents made you, and yes, people like them never had business having kids. But there was no God above to make them infertile. People who abused and fooled and frauded you – from your academic professors in Russia to American bloggers and potential producers – weren’t ‘sent your way’ because the real God resides within you. God within cannot control and foresee who you meet along the way, how shitty these people turn out to be, and how systems allow them to get away with it.”

The answers of critical thinking, unlike the good old lies of Christianity, weren’t pain-relieving. They were honest, contextual, nuanced, but they weren’t in the least comforting.

“Does it make any sense for me, then, to still pursue an artistic career? Isn’t it too late?” I asked myself. “My body has aged. I’m not looking as hot and handsome as I used to be. My physical health, after three decades lived in poverty in a third-world country, is quite compromised. Most importantly, am I still able to write poetry and songs? With my vision of spirituality and God having gone bankrupt, corroded by my own life experience? How can I sell people what I no longer believe? What turned out to never work in my own journey? Do I even belong in the creative profession? Or is it only privileged, eloquent Western bullshitters who belong there?”

And then, I remembered my own words: time will tell. I remembered that at 14, when I discovered Western pop music, I had this feeling of finally finding myself. That it was what I wanted to do for a living. That song and dance were what brought out the best, the brightest, and the biggest within me. What made me feel most vulnerable, most expanded, and most alive.

Now, almost two decades later, I didn’t feel any different about it. Yes, my body has aged. Yes, there were now wrinkles on my face and my hair wasn’t as gorgeously thick. Yes, my soul has been torn apart by rounds of meaningless trauma and abusive experiences with people portraying themselves as my friends and allies. My sense of reality has been shattered by multiple systems of oppression, the classism, nativism, and hypocrisy of the American creative industry being the latest one.

And yet, my sense of belonging was still there. My sense of belonging in Spain. My sense of belonging in the music industry.

Because true belonging isn't negotiated with the external world. It comes from within, and it doesn't fade because of how the external world treats you. You may question it, but in the end, time invariably brings you full circle to your truth.

Maybe, it was this idea about true belonging that the aging, traumatized, burnt-out, faith-deprived Jorge Oros was still meant to tell through his music. Or maybe, it wasn’t maybe but was for sure. I would no longer question myself. What I learned, literally by heart, over these years of being brainwashed by ‘spiritual’ Western people was to never outsource defining the meaning of my life and my journey to anybody else. I was the only meaning-maker in my life, because I was its author and its protagonist at the same time. God within me was the source of real meaning and real justice. It was no longer God above, nor were it oppressive systems represented by privileged people with their greed, hypocrisy, and cowardice, disguised under the polished rhetoric about equality, empathy, and social justice.

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Despite my expectations, I didn’t receive my gift package from Spain on Jan 6th, the day of Los Reyes Magos. My inner child was disappointed, and I had to check the tracking number to figure it out. The Magi were coming from afar, I remembered, and I had to be patient. But with AliExpress phone spare parts arriving within a week from China, with the delivery being free, I was confused to see the gifts delayed in their premium-cost delivery from a European country.

Was it COVID? Or what?

The airplane icon on the tracking Website showed that the package departed from Spain on time, and then there was no information available.

Emailing the company’s office in Madrid brought no news. They confirmed they’d shipped the package. People at my local mail office shrugged in confusion too. “Maybe it’s stuck at the customs. Or the logistics route somehow failed. You hardly have any choice other than to wait.”

Awesome, I thought. I put so much meaning into making it the first purchase in the New Year. I paid quite a sum from the premium, express international delivery, to give my inner, Spanish child, a spark of joy on the holiday. And now what?

Conditioned by my dominant life experience, I believed that again, my meaning-making and my expense have been in vain. There were no guarantees I’d ever receive the package. And, sure as hell, there was already no refund option available.

I forgot about the package quickly, as most of my days were now dedicated to writing my own podcast platform for the YouTube videos. I was preparing for another round of networking. One particularly big piece of correspondence – to the person who was basically my last beacon of hope in American social justice leadership – had to be recorded as a podcast and wrapped into a Web app so that she could listen to it instead of, or along with, reading. Becoming a full-stack Web developer to create this platform had taken me months already, and there was a lot of work lying ahead. The intricacies of CSS, JavaScript, and PHP now occupied more of my mental bandwidth than thoughts about meaning and belonging. I spent nearly every day coding and debugging, stuffing in two remote jobs that somehow allowed me to make ends meet. With Christianity having died off, the American work ethic was still deep in my bones. Grind harder, soldier on, push through. Going towards my artistic goals now required a detour into Web development, and there was no one else to delegate this technical work to.

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One night in the end of February, I walked into my apartment block at 11 p.m., exhausted after another hectic workday, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this receipt paper in my mailbox.

A small parcel from Spain had arrived, with my name and address written above. I had seven days to pick it up.

The next morning, I was at the mail office, with my heart beating in anticipation. The same anticipation it had beaten with boarding the flight to Barcelona many years ago.

Now, it wasn’t me coming to my homeland. A gift from my homeland was coming to me. I couldn’t wait to lay my hands on it.

It was the first day in months where I styled my hair and put on a new, clean shirt. It was a festive day for my heart. Amidst the burnt-out desert of my soul, now there were again sparks of joy and meaning.

I handed the receipt to the mail clerk and waited for a minute as he got up and headed to another room for the package. My inner child, probably, was expecting to see a small pretty box with a red ribbon tied in a bow across it. It was a Christmas present, after all, brought by the Kings coming from the East.

Instead, I saw the clerk show up with a dirty, creased envelope. Worse, it had a huge, one-inch-long tear on one side, with the stack of postcards peeking out.

“I see the package is damaged,” the guy said, handing it over to me.

“Obviously,” I said in confusion. An awkward pause followed. “What about the contents?” I asked. “Everything in there is fragile enough. Something could have been lost and bent and broken.”

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s no good. They probably tore the envelope open at the customs and were just neglectful to tape it back.”

The reality of a third-world country. Little surprise.

“But listen,” he said, “you don’t have to accept it. I see you paid for premium delivery. According to its terms, we can ship it back to the sender if the package is broken. They will then re-package your parcel and send again, with no additional cost on your part.”

I considered it for a moment, but almost immediately I had a primal, almost visceral response. I think this was one of those moments in my life where God within me manifested Himself with utmost ferocity and strength.

Because as I was holding the broken envelope in my hands, I somehow no longer cared it was broken. I only cared it was from Spain, my home country. Within it, there were pieces of my beloved land. Those which carried its images and its spirit. Those that reminded me of my true belonging, still felt as clearly as ever, indestructible through the years of trauma and oppression. Yes, this gift arrived with too much of a delay, despite the huge cost paid for it. Yes, its outer package was dismembered by the Russian customs. But it was finally here, in my hands.

It belonged with me. There was no way I would hand the envelope back. For me, its contents were sacred. Regardless of the delay. Regardless of the wounds and scars it got along the way.

I signed the delivery papers, left the office, and got into my car. I cut the envelope wide open and carefully pulled out the contents. And then I started crying. No, not only because I saw postcards with the images of Barcelona, my breathtakingly beautiful home city. But because despite the heavily damaged package, nothing in there was affected. The paper was perfectly glossy. There was not a single crease or stain anywhere. In form and spirit, these gifts were as precious for me as those that the Magi brought to Baby Jesus, according to the Biblical legend.

And then I thought, I am myself much like that envelope. Yes, my outside is worn out and burnt out heavily. I’m long overdue in my journey towards the profession where I belong, and I’m still locked out of the country where I belong – both for no fault of my own. But my inside hasn’t changed a bit. My spirit is still the same

If you asked the 14 y.o. Jorge why he wanted to be a pop artist, already at that age, commonly defined by shallowness, ego, and comparison, he would not say, "for girls, money, and travels." He would say, "Because I want to make this world a better place through my art." And, importantly, he would mean it.

Today, almost two decades later, I have the same response about my purpose, and, just like then, I mean it. Moreover, this purpose at my core, as my experience showed, is truly rare and precious – because I’ve come to know far too many people, far more privileged than me, far more eloquent in their statements, and far more recognized and rewarded publicly who say the same but don’t mean it, and never have. I’ve fully experienced this culture of ‘social justice movements’ defined by hypocrisy and driven by people’s hustle to stay in the spotlight and capitalize on being seen as good and morally superior. The culture employing bullshitting and gaslighting to drive its divisive, trivialized framings, canceling and silencing meaningful conversations, and building walls in the face of emerging talent like me.

Just like there was no guarantee the gifts would ever make it to me, there’s no guarantee I will make it to the profession where I’ve always deserved and been meant to be. And yet, if it happens, there’ll be no such thing as me getting denied entry because of arriving too late or being too damaged on the outside.

What’s inside me will still shine through the broken, worn-out covering. And this is what defines my belonging as an artist. It’s not about how handsome and hot I am. It’s not about how artfully I can sing melismas and vibratos and how ample my vocal range is. It’s not about how much or little privilege I carry.

It’s about the truth that I have within, and the courage to fight for it from the platform of art. The truth about love, joy, belonging, courage, and their opposites. In a world inundated with bullshit, in a world where creativity has largely become entertainment, in a world where social justice has turned into a currency of marketing and publicity, truth spoken through art is needed now as ever.

“Time will tell,” my 14 y.o. self said. And holy shit, it did. Truth is timeless. That’s how you know it’s the truth. I’m Spanish. I have everything it takes to be a successful pop artist, and no, it’s not too late. That’s the truth, and so it has always been.

When our external reality doesn’t align with our inner truth, we’d rather work to change that reality than try, and predictably fail, to change our truth.

No matter how late or early time brings you face-to-face with the truth about who you are, what you’re worth, and where you belong, act upon it. Regardless of your age. Regardless of how many systems of oppression are stacked against you. Regardless of how many people will try to overwrite your reality and the meaning of your journey, protecting their power and privilege, abusing using their status, credentials, or acheivements.

It’s through this truth that God within us manifests Themselves. And if the concept of sin still has any meaning for me, it’s not the shaming, onerous meaning taught by the Christian church for centuries. Sin is not smoking, cussing, or masturbation. It’s the action of betraying your God within, of turning away from your God within, of suppressing your God within – including when you do so to fit in with the God above they sell you in church.

God within doesn’t know all the answers. God within doesn’t foresee and control everything. God within doesn’t promise certainty about the future.

But God within does exist. Within you, and within me. Even within those people who betrayed and abused me over the recent years. Yes, even within my parents, for all the horrible job they did bringing me up. We can’t delete this God – God within, if you will, is part of our neurobiological wiring as a social species.

The only difference is whether we listen to this God, or drown out and numb Them. Whether we choose this God or we choose Their opposite, ego. Whether we honor this God’s voice or pathologize, ridicule, and trivialize it, following the messages that come flooding from the outside.

For the world to become more spiritual and connected – and less mired in sin – we have to commit to listening. We don’t need to hear more sermons delivered from the pulpits. We need more skills to listen to what already lives and speaks within us. And, we need to have less fear of people who recognize, and unapologetically follow, their truth. Because in supporting their truth, we end up seeing our own – and then realize it’s all essentially the same.