Me by Ricky Martin Page B

right. I’ve come to believe that he simply wasn’t ready for the relationship I wanted us to have.
    It might just be that I loved him more than he loved me, or maybe he still had to find himself in several other aspects of his life. Who knows. The fact is, we shook one another; while I was with him I stopped fearing my sexuality, and I was ready to confront it and announce it to anyone and everyone who was willing to listen. It was because of that relationship that I came out to my mother. When it was over, she noticed I was very sad and she asked: “Kiki, are you in love?”
    “Yes, Mami,” I answered, “I am completely in love.”
    “Aaaaah,” she said. “And is it a man that you are in love with?”
    “Yes, Mami. It’s a man.”
    When the relationship ended, I told myself that maybe this was not my path. My soul was in pain; I felt abandoned, alone, broken. So much pain didn’t seem natural, so my instinct was to convince myself that being with men was a mistake. I locked my feelings even deeper inside, and started to date women again, with the hope that with one of them I would finally find true love. Even though my instinct tells me to wonder what would have happened had I decided to accept my sexuality at that point in my life, in reality I see that it did not happen this way because it was not my moment, and there were still many things for me to live before I would get to that point.

IDENTITY CRISIS
    THE RELATIONSHIP WITH that particular man taught me a lot about emotions, but in the years to come I learned even more. I learned that it is very easy to lose yourself in the pain. Pain comes, it seduces you, it plays with you, and you identify with it to the point that you start to believe this is how life is. When you feel that heaviness in your heart, most of the time the parameters of pain and relief become blurry, and it is very easy to stay stuck in what you already know, pain. We lose our memory and forget the peaceful moments when everything was light and gravity was an ally. It’s okay to feel hurt—it’s human. It’s important to feel, but you cannot cling to sadness, distress, or bitterness for too long, because they will inevitably destroy you.
    Something a friend once said to me helped me a lot: “When you feel stuck and everything feels heavy, struggle!” It’s so true. You have to struggle. You have to feel. You have to move forward. When I am not feeling my best, emotionally speaking, the last thing I want is for people to know how I am feeling. My grandfather always told me, “Go through life with your hands in your pockets, making fists so everyone will think that they’re full of money.” What he meant was that you should never let people see you down. I think that lesson stayed with me, because to this day I would rather not be seen at all than to let anyone see me when I’m feeling down. I am a very private person, and I have always lived through my joys, pains, and struggles only with a few people who form my innermost circle. Of course I live, feel, and suffer, but it doesn’t make sense to carry my pain around everywhere I go.
    But that said, today I feel I know how to be aware of my pain, and to work through it, spiritually, with strength and confidence. Throughout my life, I have little by little acquired the spiritual knowledge I need to do away with whatever hurts me, and move forward only with the things that nourish me.
    Of course, I know there is always room for improvement, but at the very least I know I have stopped fearing pain. If I encounter it in my life—and I know there will always be pain and that there is no way to eradicate it—I know what I have to do to face it and overcome it with strength and confidence.
    However, when I broke up with this man, I was feeling very lost, and all of the energy I had invested in loving him was now invested in thinking. I overanalyzed everything. I tried to make sense of what had happened to me. What I felt for him was