This is a longer article than I’m used to writing, it will also be an article that may lack coherence, it’s more a way of letting go of certain things, organizing my mind and expressing things I want to write down a bit to sort out my ideas and thank myself as a form of personal healing. I don’t think it will be of interest to many people, but rather it will be for myself. 2025 has been one of the most beautiful years of my life, it has also been one of the most difficult, and the first makes the second even harder because it adds some guilt.

In August 2024 my son was born, and with this I can affirm one hundred percent that it has been the best thing that has happened to me, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it has been difficult. It turned out that the little guy decided to be born a few weeks earlier than planned, and since his lungs weren’t fully developed, he had to stay in intensive care for a week. Now, a week sounds like very little time, but I always say it felt like a year, going to the two daily visits allowed every day, I easily aged everything I hadn’t aged in the last 10 years. Thank God he was always improving and came out perfectly.

Added to this was that tremendous violence broke out in my city. My state has never really been peaceful but this has been the worst of all that I’ve experienced. Those who know me know that the violence in my state has always affected me emotionally. I remember one of the days we went to visit the baby and when we left, the doctor told us to be careful because there were shootings in various parts of the city, and the night they gave him to us to take home I remember going worried about not getting caught up in a shooting. That clouded the experience of the happiness I felt at finally being able to take our son home.

And there’s something else to add: my mom has suffered from facial paralysis for years, and in the same month (September), she announced that the doctor had offered her brain surgery with the risks that head surgery entails - yes, the highest ones. First they would operate on her in October, but then they moved it to February. So there were 4 types of stress:

  1. The stress from my son’s hospitalization (which by the way didn’t go away immediately after he got out, you’re always left “on edge”), from being a new dad, worrying if he was sick, checking him continuously in the crib, sleeping poorly and always being sleepy. I remember it was the time I felt most tired. There are some children’s songs that to this day make me feel bad.
  2. The stress of the immense violence, bad news everywhere, about someone being killed, a missing person poster, a family caught up in it, houses being burned and nobody knew if it was random or targeted (I remember being awake at 3 am watching to see if anyone strange was passing by), opening WhatsApp or any social media and seeing nothing but tragedies.
  3. The stress of my mom’s imminent surgery.
  4. The stress from the guilt of feeling all the previous stresses and not enjoying being a new dad to the fullest.

And let’s add other things:

Having a newborn baby makes it very, very difficult to go out with friends. If you add the violence to this (in my city it wasn’t possible and even today it’s very risky to go out at night), I’ve never been much of a “going out” person, but at that moment my few outings became none. I was really exhausted, that’s what I remember most, entire nights in a row without sleeping either because the baby was crying or because we heard some noise. The daily conversation with my wife was “This happened today in the city, should we move? But how if all the family is here and we just bought a house, plus there’s your job, but how are we going to let our son grow up here” and so we kept arguing in circles daily.

The accumulation of all these emotions is summed up in an event that happened to me:

I had a panic attack.

I’ve never considered myself a fearful person, but since my son was born, many fears that I didn’t have before were unlocked, like the fear of death, which I didn’t even think about before. But the accumulation of stress triggered other fears that might seem more irrational, even silly to some. Among the many, one example was the fear of going out in the car. I think it’s understandable given that shootings and car robberies were the order of the day (they still are). I remember following a reporter on Twitter who published statistics: “This week there have been X cars stolen.” I would get in the car and immediately feel my heart pounding strongly, I looked in all directions, constantly checking my mirrors. The fear of police, soldiers or any authority also arose, “they’re colluding, they’re the same,” I thought, so every time I saw one, and especially in the car, my heart would race too. I remember once I looked out my house window and saw many soldiers. I was alone with my son and I thought “they’re going to get the wrong house and come in with their guns.”

Well, this kept accumulating and growing in intensity, to the point that one day in mid-January 2025, while I was taking my car for service, at a traffic light my heart started racing, my hands started sweating and very strong thoughts began to invade me that something was going to happen to me, they were going to take my car, a policeman was going to extort me, I would get caught up in a shooting - in short, many different things but all bad. My vision became tunnel-like and I started hyperventilating. I thought about pulling over and calling my wife or my mom to come get me, but I also remember thinking no, that for my son I had to be brave because he needed me. So somehow I made it to the car dealership. By the way, a few blocks before arriving I saw a patrol car in the mirror that almost made me stop again.

A funny aside: I got to the dealership and it turned out my service wasn’t due until next month, so I went for nothing. I went back home and I think it was one of the saddest and darkest moments of my life. I kept thinking about how that could have happened to me, whether I was a coward, whether it would happen to me again.

My birthday came and my wife gave me an Asian cooking course (I really like cooking). I remember the first thing I thought was “Damn, it’s at 5pm so I’ll leave at 7pm when it’s already dark and I have to drive back.” I really enjoyed the course but to be honest, much of the time I spent thinking about when it would be time to go back. One of the days I came across a checkpoint on my way back. There was a street before where I could turn around and I thought about doing it but I thought “No, either I go through or I go through with all my fear.” In the end they didn’t stop my car but my heart was racing.

Those who have gone through a similar experience will know that after what happened, there’s a latent fear that it will happen again, so in subsequent events that fear always arose. What’s more, now it was more the fear of fear than real fear - I hope I’m making myself clear.

I’ve been working from home for almost 10 years. I’ve always loved my job and working from home has given me many more advantages than disadvantages. I wouldn’t go back to an office unless necessary, but this time this factor worked against me because since I don’t need to go out much, I had the excuse not to do it and I think that increased the problem even more.

But well, let’s move on to the positive part. I’ve never been someone to sit with my arms crossed, so without wasting time I started thinking “Let’s see, what can I do?” and the clearest solution was to go to psychological therapy. It wasn’t easy. The first thing I thought was “am I weak for doing this?”, “what if someone finds out, what will they think?” and of course the most common of all “am I crazy?”

I started a few days later and immediately connected with the psychologist because she validated what I felt: Instead of telling me “Nothing’s wrong, look, take a deep breath,” she told me “Given your situation, it’s understandable that you’re going through this.” Something I didn’t know but wanted to hear and she said it intrinsically was “You’re not wrong, it’s normal for this to happen to you given your circumstances, anyone in your shoes would feel the same, you’re not weak.” I don’t know, maybe my masculine ego makes me think that weakness is something bad.

The truth is that I immediately started seeing improvements. I discovered that I had to relearn many things, since as I said before, things that didn’t scare me before now did scare me. One of them that I’m embarrassed to say but I feel I’ve overcome today is going through airport security. I felt like they were going to plant something on me or I don’t know, it was something irrational.

I’ve applied some things that have helped me a lot, some of them recommended by my psychologist.

First, I’ve tried to focus on the present. I think this has been one of the most important things - being in the moment, instead of thinking about future or hypothetical situations.

Simply talking about the problem helped me a lot, knowing I’m not the only one. There’s a whole state feeling something similar, some stronger than others but we all have some fear about the situation. It reminds me of the phrase “misery loves company,” but in this case that’s how it is. By the way, I remember something the psychologist said that made me feel good: “with this situation, it’s normal to be a little nervous, not to the extreme, but a bit alert to be able to react.” This made me calm down about getting nervous when going out, which still happens sometimes.

I’ve stayed away from the news, especially news I have no control over. Many other things have happened and of course I stay aware when something happens in my neighborhood, but if I can, I try not to watch bad news all the time like I did before. Someone once said that if you don’t watch the news you’re not being responsible, but 99.9% of the time there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.

For the above, I deleted Twitter, which was my news source. It turned out I haven’t needed it at all, so I’ve been without the account for several months now. Very soon I’m also thinking about deleting Instagram. Putting the phone aside is still a habit I haven’t achieved, but I keep trying.

Meditation and exercise: They’re the most common, the most cliché, but I still wasn’t following them. Although in my defense I must say I’ve always done both but I was at a point where it was impossible for me, but now I practice them much more again and I’ve felt great.

I also have a friend I talk to a lot about these topics and he’s been a great help, although I would have liked to talk about them more in person (he also has a young daughter so sometimes one or the other can’t go out).

The topic of whether we’re leaving or staying still comes up, but not as much as before. This hurts me a bit because I feel it’s a way of resigning to the problem, but we’ve looked at many options and none have convinced us to the point of leaving, considering that we have to change many things - work, leaving family, our son not seeing his grandparents, and currently the country isn’t going through its best moment in terms of security, so nothing guarantees that if we leave we’ll arrive at a much safer place. I’ve gone out more, still with fear. I’ve seen my friends more, I’ve enjoyed just being more.

Now I feel much calmer. There are things I remember and think “Did I really have fear of that?” For example, seeing an authority figure. I’m still learning and improving. Sometimes I still go out and my heart pounds. Sometimes I’m somewhere and start thinking about when I have to go back. It’s like the first times you fall off a bike - the pain goes away but the fear of falling again stays there, like a thorn that hasn’t completely come out. But it’s much less now and with less intensity, plus I already have tools to get out of there. I feel like I’m learning many things from scratch, for example the first time I went through airport security after the panic attack and saw that nothing happened. Now they seem like irrational things to me, even silly, but back then they didn’t seem that way.

I could talk much more, like one day my wife said jokingly in a conversation that wasn’t even related “life is a risk, bro” and the phrase, funny as it is, connected with me immediately. “Really, simply being alive is already a risk, and I can’t spend the whole journey afraid.”

But well, I’ll take this post to thank the people who have been with me during these times so full of nuances, sharing the happiness and understanding my situation, and especially I want to thank myself for having been resilient, not letting myself fall for a single moment, being pragmatic and looking for solutions instead of sitting down to cry, and moving forward as a better person.

And it will sound cliché because it is, but it’s true what they say - when something like this happens, in the end you feel stronger.