I want to Sit down and Cry

A recent tik tok trend has had my heart in knots but I guess that could also be the picease season upon us. “Quiero sentarme a llorar…Mil cosas que te quiero decir…que el amor se acabe y vuelvas a querer,” y todas las primeras hijas chingonas y independiente sintiendolo todo hasta el alma como si Carla Morrison estuviera hablando te a ti solamente. Sorry code switch. Bloop, boop boop. Maybe it was always meant to be our struggle to carry.

When you start doing the internal work of self healing either through therapy or non traditional methods you learn about something called generational trauma. The thing is we all go through our own trauma, even our parents, but sometimes life doesn’t give us a break to heal, and other times we just keep running because the pain of stopping and feeling the pain of all that we’ve been through might be too much for us to bear at that moment, so we run. Running for a lot of us looks like working until our bodies give out, out drinking the thoughts late at night, or the demons we carry with us because truth is the fear of the unknown is scarier than being exhausted from running. From colonization to crossing boarders on land that belong to their parents and grandparents, our own parents carry their trauma sometimes hurting their children with their words and critiques because they were unable to allow themselves to stop and feel. Fortunately for every family line there is a generational curse breaker, and the ancestors know it is those who can give life that are most in tune with it, so they send in a first born a girl who will feel it all, heal it, and prevent it from continuing to be the family legacy.

Ancestors to these women must send the biggest warrior spirit in the linage and cast it upon her because to bear the pain of everyone that came before me has the ability to break any normal human being. The thing is our ancestors knew that with each generation that didn’t heal the pain they carried, they also passed along a resilience they had built to keep moving even when the pain was begging to be heard. To be felt. So while the rest might fold, there will always be a first born daughter of immigrants who wouldn’t buck at things that would have the rest in a coma. Unfortunately a lot of us also grew up in households hearing, “deja de llorar or de veras te voy a dar algo de que llorar,” and so we learned that pain wasn’t to be heard or felt, but our ancestors didn’t send in the big kahuna of warrior spirit for it to fall into the shadows of the pain so we challenged all of it, authority, our parents, society, and when we grew distance we cried behind closed doors and we went to therapy to let out decades and centuries of pain. But maybe that’s why that line, “me quiero sentar a llorar,” hits a cord so deeply within us, as we’ve all been in the gutter when life takes us by the box braids like we’re in the live version of Matilda, and yet we wipe away each tear in the most gangster first gen way that we know how and we keep it moving because we’ll be damned if feeling it all is the thing that breaks us once and for all.

The thing that no one explains before the therapy gets too much to bear and you want to go back to coping and no longer can because the flood gates have been opened and everything demands to be felt. Fact is once you’ve touched the gates of hell, cried with the devil, and danced with him too you learn to forgive and on the other end is this life full of light, beauty,  and grace. And it’s oh so worth all the pain. Maybe it wasn’t even our ancestors who hand picked us but rather instead, if I know it to be so, my first born child energy in every universal plane of existence that knew change like this doesn’t happen without her in charge planning it all. So even if sometimes we can’t help but fall apart into a sea of tears from the front seat of our car in a parking lot somewhere, as they say, “ayer llorando, pero hoy perreando.”

XOXO,

E. Alvarado