Self-Worth as a Catalyst for Change
Posted on | January 9, 2009 | No Comments
My life began as a last resort: my mother’s final, desperate plea to escape the 80s as they crashed all around her.
Noemi Mendez led the fast and dangerous lifestyle of every recreational drug addict of her era. Married and divorced at 15, she’d been using since her early teens and had three abortions before 23.
After years under an abusive father and the subsequent lovers she founded in his image, her sense of self-worth had tumbled to the point where personal well-being was no longer a compelling enough reason to change. She resolved to create human life that, precious and dependent on her for its survival, wouldn’t deserve the consequences of her self-destruction.
I was conceived with help from one of her friends—an Irish firefighter who until that point had only served as a Saturday night disco partner. She said later she was looking for a man who wouldn’t stick around and that he met her requirement.
We spent the early years of my life continually moving where ever my mother could find work. Secondary suites, my grandmother’s house, even a recreational vehicle: all of these were temporary residences that shared only their settings in seedy neighborhoods. Inevitably, the thugs from her former life would track her down and we’d have to move again. But she never lost faith in the idea that her hardships would one day make a better man out of me. She always told me in my youth that she was “merely surviving” in hopes that I could live.
Of course, I don’t remember much from these years, save for what family accounts and a few photos tell me. But I like to think my mother’s struggle served in a way as the foundation of my eventual understanding that the impoverished find purpose in various forms of validation. The fundamental confirmation needed by those living in neighborhoods like mine is that they’re a part of something that makes them feel significant, because they’ve been steadily made to believe they don’t matter. Once a part of something meaningful, they can willingly become a force for change not only in their communities, but also in their own lives.
It took my own application of this theory to first recognize the phenomenon, when I coaxed myself out of my humble surroundings and joined the Marine Corps. My experiences as a military journalist in the Third World forced me to reflect on the patterns of poverty that led me. The chance to participate in world poverty as a benefactor and not a victim empowered me and helped greatly in shedding my earlier preconceptions regarding my caste standing in society.
It wasn’t so much that the new surroundings that lifted me from the crumbling infrastructure and lowered expectations of the ghetto, but the new perspective such surroundings spurred. I wanted to be that catalyst for others and have since determined to incite the understanding in others that we as Americans do not have to settle for the conditions into which we were born.
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