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My dad is a musician, is what I would say if music had ever paid his bills. He’s always been in bands as a bassist playing in weddings, parties and small town festivities, but he’s never been able to pursue music further because that’s basically the ceiling for a musician in the area we live in. He talks with me often about how excited he was when he was sent to Madrid for his obligatory military training, because he was so passionate and inspired by La Movida Madrileña. After covid, he’s been back at producing songs on his own at home, with a computer program that was discontinued in the 90’s. His songs have a tint of someone who’s doing it as a hobby, but aside from that the mixing is pretty close to sounding pro and he explores many different genres. I think his songs are genuinely cool. I only ever tell him he could improve on his songwriting, but he insists he’s got nothing interesting to talk about. Like a lot of dads he wasn’t able to pursue studying very far, and has been working since he was 14 on minimum wage jobs or helping his dad with his truck. Their family used to live in a city close to Barcelona, but my grandparents moved to a hometown close to mine after my grandpa ran over a disoriented man at night with his truck on an unlit highway and started working as a taxi driver instead. There really isn’t a lot he’s been able to choose to do here, so he’s always worked in jobs that haven’t been well paid in factories all his life.
His last factory job was a nightmare; he’d tell me how stressed and anxious he was over it every time I called him, but he insisted he was only 3 years away from retiring. So it really surprised me when two months ago he told me he had just left his job, it made me very happy too. He did the same week someone found the body of a girl who had been murdered really close to my parent’s home. He told me that he was friends’ with the girl’s dad, and that he was so shaken by it that it finally woke him up. I never questioned it, but this weekend I went back home for a few days and he confessed to me that in that same week, a young guy at the factory threatened to hit him and kill him at work. That he had been feeling so stressed out at work because people who didn’t like that he was reserved had told everyone not to talk to him, and they were changing his things and making it look like he was incompetent. That he had been having lunch in his car for a while.
My dad is a very thin 60 year old who still looks younger than that, and aside from having a lot of hyperfixations and never fitting in with how everyone in these small towns is, he’s never been an asshole. He’s the only person who has never questioned my looks, my transition, my hobbies and who has only encouraged me. I don’t know, nobody deserves something like that but he’s definitely not evil in any remote way. He’s probably not going to get hired anywhere else because of his age, despite having worked as an architect assistant and a draftsman for so many years, but he had to leave knowing that because it got to a point where he was fearing for his safety.
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When I came out to my mum, she begged me not to transition. She was having a really hard time understanding it (she went through a lot of phases with it, but that’s not a topic I want to talk about) but the biggest reason she gave me for not transitioning was that because I was away living in Barcelona, she would be the one to get all the heat and all the comments and looks from everyone in town and she felt like she wouldn’t be able to take it.
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One of my best friends was taken to the only doctor we have in town by his mum, where she asked the doctor to fix him being gay.
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My school was very small, my class was just 12 kids and we basically grew up together spending a lot of time in each other’s houses every time anyone’s parents were out working. We had always been very close. In a town so small everyone knows each other and says hi in the street, but after I transitioned I would try to say hi to them in the street and every time they would look away.
This town has always been very left-leaning. When there are elections, the number of right-wing votes is around 8 out of 3000 people. I think it has gotten better for queer people here, because they now participate in the town’s festivities held by young people who are very into politics. But I think I miss the people I grew up with even more when I see that.
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When I was 14, I was disqualified from my high school’s writing contest. My literature teacher asked me to stay after class one day and explained to me, with her voice breaking and without being able to look at me in the eyes that the reason I was disqualified was because the other teachers judging it thought it was so good that it was impossible a young person had written it, despite my teacher telling them that the things I would write in my exams and homework were the same style. They had told her that even if I did, they couldn’t let me be considered. I never realized how at some point after that, I stopped having the strong urge to become a writer. It just didn’t speak to me as much anymore.
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I love living in a small town. I do, I love the feeling of brotherhood you get in a small community, the local shops, the events focusing on local issues. I love planting my own food and pickling it for having veggies all winter. I love bird watching so much. Whenever my friends ask me why then I don’t want to move out of the city to a cheaper, nicer house I would enjoy a lot more, my mind goes blank and I don’t know what to say.
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I had two days of holidays, but I feel like I’ve spent them on the sickness of the brain the change of season gives you. I hope this is what healing feels like.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to read my thoughts!
This post was written as part of my newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.