Nicholas Gomez's Blog

Even though being alone never makes me feel better it’s always what I seek out. I think, fuck, I don’t want to have to explain to everyone what’s going on. I’m ashamed of what’s going on. I’m so afraid to not look put-together all the time that I isolate myself from those who care the most. I tell myself no one can know about my flaws.

Penny falls back and asks me if I’m doing alright.

The truth pours out of me involuntarily. I regret everything I say seconds after it leaves my mouth. And Penny just listens. Then Ben and Evan listen. Until the three of them are walking by my side, hearing me tell them about Nat’s panic attack and how weak I feel for not being able to go a day without her.

“But you have,” Penny says. “It’s almost been a full day since we picked you up and you’re still here with us.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about us,” she adds. “I mean, obviously we wish you weren’t feeling this way, but you’re not doing as bad as you may feel. Chin up, friend. We love you.”

I’m glad it’s out in the open but still, I only feel sadder from it. More in my head than I was before. Their perception of who I am is no longer in my control. They know the truth. They know how attached Nat and I are and how bad this relationship is for both of us. Even if they’re not saying it, I can tell they wish I wasn’t here.

Or maybe that’s the voice in my head.

Fuck, man, being vulnerable sucks.


When I was younger I used to cry a lot. At the time, a narrative was built around the crying. I was called a spoiled brat by my family. Often. Nuance didn’t exist regardless of the situation. It was always my fault when I cried and thus, my responsibility to figure out what I had done wrong.

My dad was rarely around to discipline me, so that role fell on my mom, who was dealing with a separation from my dad and the pain of having been cheated on. She would say to me, “You can cry all you want, but go do it in your room! And don’t come out until you realize what you’ve done!”

I never learned anything from those interactions. I just went to my bedroom and cried for hours. I cried until I forgot what I was crying about.

What followed the sadness was an intense feeling of guilt and shame. I feared leaving my bedroom because I was embarrassed of what I had done—even though I didn’t know what that was. All I knew was that I had been bad and gotten punished for it. I didn’t get to spend time with family when I was bad.

And the lack of unconditional love I received as a child affected me on a deep level.

It taught me that love and attention are the same thing. It showed me that there is not enough love to go around for all of us. That we must fight for what little love we are given. Protect it out of fear that we won’t find another source.

I also developed shame around feeling angry or sad because anytime I felt that way my family rolled their eyes like, “Here goes Nick being a brat again.” As if all of my anger and sadness boiled down to one word.

What that looks like in present day is what you read in the excerpt above. I hate making mistakes. I hate hurting other people. I hate talking about my feelings and being vulnerable with others because at my core I believe that I am a burden, or that I’ll be rejected for doing so.

The times that I do open up to others I become hyperaware of the fact that I am asking them for support. Intellectually I understand that we all deserve love and support, but on an emotional level, I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel lovable and I don’t feel loved.

Even when friends, family, and loved ones go out of their way to show me that they love me.

The dots just never connect for me because I bypass the feeling of love and jump to deep fear of abandonment.

This has been my greatest struggle in life.

All three of my past romantic relationships suffered because of this. At times I was jealous, possessive, enraged, spiteful, a liar, a cheater, and a child.

Throughout most of those relationships I acted out of fear. I never accepted that these women loved me. And if I felt the relationship had gone on too long, I didn’t act on that feeling and end the relationship because I was scared that nobody else could love me like they did. So I endured miserable conditions and thought that was better than the unknown—than being alone.

At work I have always suffered from impostor syndrome.

I worry that I cannot make mistakes or else my supervisors will realize what they knew all along. That I’m a fraud and that I don’t deserve to work there.

When I was promoted at my current job and told I now had a free shift meal every day, I wondered when they would take the privilege away from me. I still wonder that.

In social situations I become anxious because I don’t want to feel rejected. I don’t want to stand around, alone, while everyone moves around the room, hops from group to group, interaction to interaction. I did that in high school and I was shamed for it.

“You’re not going to dance?” my friends would ask. “Come on! Don’t just sit there the whole time like a bore!”

It’s like a catch-22 in a way. When I become anxious, I tend to avoid conversations or keep them brief. Then I think, “Well, everyone in this room thinks you’re an asshole because you aren’t talking to anyone.” And that anxious thought convinces me to flee the scene, thus creating an actual asshole out of me, the kind that never says goodbye and doesn’t ask about your day.

But one won’t change until the other does.

And it’s a process. A slow one at that, but a process nonetheless.

Every day I write in my gratitude journal that I am lovable and loved.

I don’t feel that I am.

But I believe that, in time, I will.

Morning comes and Sabrina goes.

The phone rings.

Mom’s calling.

We haven’t spoken since the whole dinner debacle.

I pick up.

Hearing her voice again feels weird. It’s become difficult for me to see and think of her as my mother. The only visual of her I have left is from when I turned around to yell at her that things aren’t always about her. She was crying, panicking, really. It reminded me of breaking up with my high school girlfriend at three in the morning in a foreign state, when she dropped down to her knees and said she wasn’t going to move unless I took it back. Sure it was dangerous leaving her there, sobbing on the sidewalk of a poorly-lit street, but she was no longer my responsibility.
The same goes for my mom, except that she was never my responsibility.
And her throwing a fit like that was a perfect reminder of how selfish she is.

But we still talk. Try to, at least.

What starts out as an attempt to understand one another quickly turns into stubborn arguing. She defends her point of view and I defend mine, both of us thrown back to that night, to those feelings.

I don’t tell her that it wasn’t all internal, that I was hurt when they passed on my suggestion for going to an improv show. I don’t tell her that I was enraged because of how little they seemed to care about getting to know Austin from my point of view. And I don’t tell her that when she and my sister decided to go shopping at an antiques bazaar instead of finding something all four of us could enjoy, I felt forgotten about, the same way I felt forgotten when I found out at seventeen that my parents had been separated from the time I was four, or five, I still don’t fucking know. When I asked my siblings about it they laughed and said, “You didn’t know?”

Maybe now I can look back and I too can laugh. I’d moved to a different country and left my dad behind for a year. Then I moved back in with him and lost my mom for the rest of middle and high school. It should’ve been obvious, and part of me knew, “OK, clearly my parents don’t live together anymore. They must not like each other.” But my mom convinced me that the reason we were leaving Mexico was because her teaching job at the high school turned into a nightmare. She couldn’t stand it any longer. So maybe mom and dad were just deciding it was best for their relationship if Mom followed her dreams elsewhere.

I know it sounds goofy to hear that, but I was eleven, man, I wasn’t supposed to know what a healthy relationship looked like.

And because my parents never sat me down to talk about it, I isolated myself for the next seven years. I dated several girls they never found out about because I was afraid of what they would think. I found dead cigarettes and ashes floating in my mom’s toilet even though I’d never seen her smoke a cigarette in my life. One summer break I visited my dad and watched him and a woman’s silhouette scream at each other outside my brother’s bedroom window. I still don’t know whose silhouette that was.

I watched everyone get better and better at keeping secrets and learned to keep my own. Often I would get home from school hours before my mom and my brother. I had the house to myself and loved using that time to explore my sexuality. I put a tampon up my ass one day and watched it pull out blood when I came. I wore my mom’s heels and thought of what it would be like to be a woman, to be wanted so easily.

When my brother and I moved back to Cancun I started masturbating on camera for strange men all over the world. I slept in the same bed as my dad, but had my own area of the apartment during the day. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in so the masturbating happened late at night, after both of them were sound asleep.

It was a learning process, but eventually I found a chatroom for gay men. You were allowed to create your own username and short bio. Mine would always be:

YOUNG BOY SEEKS DADDY/MASTER

Dozens of men would message me as soon as I joined the chat, all of them asking the same thing. How old was I? At first I lied and said I was eighteen ‘cause I knew I’d get away with it. Then one night someone asked if I was really eighteen, said it was OK if I was younger. So I told the truth. I told him I was thirteen.

Just what I was looking for, he wrote.

After that I gave him my Skype name and let him boss me around through text.

Take off your clothes.

I looked over at the rest of the apartment, no door in my area to give me privacy. I took my clothes off and immediately got hard.

Start touching yourself.

I started rubbing my cock up and down.

Ten minutes passed.

Are you close?

I told him I was.

I want you to come in your mouth.

I was one of the smartest kids in my physics class but when he asked me to do that I had no idea of where to start. So I asked him for help.

Find a wall.

I found a wall.

Point the camera at the wall.

OK.

Stand on your head with your ass against the wall and aim for your mouth.

I looked around the apartment again, dead quiet. All one of them had to do was get up to pee and they would find me naked, jerking off in front of my computer camera. How would I explain that?

It didn’t matter. That wasn’t going to happen. The adrenaline was too much for rational thought to stop me.

So I sat with my ass against the wall and pulled myself up with my feet, inch by inch, until I was high enough that my head was resting on the pillow I’d propped on the floor. Blood rushed to my face. My cock was throbbing. My audience was pleased, rewarding me with degrading insults about what a little slut I was.

But they were here with me. They wanted focused alone time with me the way none of my other family members did. I felt so strong and in control knowing how much they wanted me.

I closed my eyes to avoid getting come in them and opened my mouth and came all over my face and neck. It was the first time I tried my own come. I got off the wall and back to a normal seated position. I cleaned my face with a rag.

Every time was slightly different than the last because every man has different fetishes. Some wanted me to take my time stripping; some liked it when I used my microphone to talk like a submissive boy should. But all of them ended the conversation the same way. As soon as I came, they would come too, and then disconnect right after. I never knew if I would see them again until the next time they reached out to me. And by then I almost always had someone else in line.

When I got all the come off and finally opened my eyes again, the call had ended.

So when I realize my mom isn’t listening to me, I end the call and go searching on Craigslist for someone who will.
-----------------------------------
I was sexually abused when I was thirteen.

But I have a hard time accepting that I was.

What you just read is one of many encounters I had with older men at the age of thirteen. Around 2009 when I moved back to Mexico from the Bay Area to live with my dad, I was given a freedom that none of my friends had. My dad owned his own business and thus worked days, nights, and most weekends, too. I owned a computer and a sexually curious mind. I also didn’t have anyone to talk to about the shit I experienced.

And I experienced a lot that year.

I met a seventh-grader that invited me to his parent’s beach resort two hours from Cancun and then proceeded to serve me shot of tequila after shot of tequila—thirteen of them altogether. I blacked out and woke up with the worst hangover I’ve had to this day.

I was in a car accident that resulted in two months of crutches and a lifetime of dental work—a literal lifetime.

I fell in love and got my heart broken twice in the span of four months.

I walked from my dad’s apartment to a grocery store nearby and got a homeless man to go inside for me and buy me condoms.

The list goes on and on.

The point is this—I was basically moving through the world having to reconcile things on my own as a thirteen year old. And I was pretty fucking sad through all of it. So, when I ran out of ways to cope, I turned to the internet for answers because, after all, the internet had taught me how to masturbate, how to win money playing online poker, and how to build real-life friendships in the online videogame world.

I turned to the internet but also to my sexual curiosity. I had seen enough movies about depressed teens that did the same so it wasn’t hard to research different chat rooms and start my voyage down the rabbit hole.

As soon as I found a website that allowed me to chat with real humans, I didn’t care whether they were men or women—all I cared about was the attention. And boy did I get A LOT of it.

Guys were messaging me left and right asking to chat privately. They wanted to know my age, my location, and my sexual interests. Most of them didn’t know I was a teen because I was smart enough to know that that would make our chats illegal. The ones that knew were the ones that insisted on knowing the truth. And at that point I thought, well, illegal is just a word grown-ups throw around the way my teachers tell me that wearing a baseball cap in class is “against the rules”. Illegal sounded stupid and boring.

But telling them the truth and doing something that I knew was considered by most to be “wrong” was exciting.

Do you get where I’m going with this?

For me to sit here and say that I was sexually abused feels almost like saying that when I lost $1,000 dollars on an online poker bender I was taken advantage of by the website that I played on. At thirteen I was very aware of what I was doing—THAT’S WHY I WAS ABLE TO DO IT WITHOUT GETTING CAUGHT!

Now, I know a lot of this is my own ego trying to stand his ground. “I must have been so goddamn smart and street savvy that I chose to do those things. I wasn’t sexually abused! I knew I wasn’t old enough to give consent where consent was needed, so if I was aware of the implications, how could it possibly be abuse?”

I still have those thoughts sometimes. That it wasn’t what everyone says it was—that I wasn’t sexually abused just because I was under age when I allowed men in their fifties and sixties to boss me around on my webcam. And maybe the scale doesn’t lean one-hundred percent in either direction.

Sure, maybe I can accept that I wasn’t old enough to make those decisions. But does that also mean I have to ignore the fact that I played a part in it?

I once heard a quote that went something like this:

“If I was hit by a drunk driver I would blame myself.”

I’m not saying I wasn’t victimized. But to move forward with my life and decide not to view myself as victim is a choice that I get to make. And that responsibility undeniably falls on no one else but me.

Last year, when I officially started working on my memoir, I was in a relationship that was as codependent as the one that I wanted to write about. My partner and I were experiencing hardship and it took a heavy toll on our communication. I felt uneasy moving through the world knowing that she and I weren’t on great terms. I started to obsess over what was going on because I didn’t have answers and when I tried to force them out of her, my anxiety grew exponentially.

My mother was in town and we had agreed that I would spend the night with her in her hotel. That night I broke down in front of her and confessed everything that was going on in my relationship. I unloaded all of the emotions that I wasn’t able to get across to my partner. I cried uncontrollably and felt weak because of it.

“Oh honey,” Mom said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You’re doing it,” I said.

But I could tell that she still wanted to help. She wanted to fix things so that I wouldn’t have to feel sad, even though feeling my emotions was exactly what I needed.

“You shouldn’t hold it in like that,” she said. “My therapist told me that it’s important to be loud when we cry or else we create stress in our chests. Really try to let it all out.”

When she said that, my first thought was, “Really? You’re going to tell your sobbing child that he’s not crying properly?”

What followed was a deeper sadness, but one that I was able to subdue because I no longer felt safe crying with her. I’d reopened a wound I’d been trying to let heal my whole life — one that reminded me that I’ve never had a safe place or person to fall back on. That for so long I have tried to change this about my family and never once succeeded.

I didn’t tell her any of this because I felt bad for her. I was the one who had opened up to her and asked for a shoulder to cry on, yet somehow I felt I needed to take care of her by shutting down my pain and my emotions. I also knew by then that this was her version of trying and that part of my anger stemmed from my inability to rely on myself.

So I took what I could get.

The next day I saw my girlfriend and told her what had happened. But she was just as emotionally unavailable as my mom and I were. The day was a Thursday and I remember that only because I had weekends off, which meant that after work tomorrow I would have two days to let things settle.

I left my girlfriend’s house and went to sleep that night thinking in terms of the end of the world and how I could help it come sooner — a catastrophic dance I like to play with myself before bed sometimes.

Friday at work came and went and nothing changed. I locked up and stood outside of my workplace wondering if any of it mattered anymore. I blamed everyone around me for how I was feeling and made up excuses for the things I was thinking about doing. I rationalized my way into the bar across the street from me and ordered a vodka tonic. I opened my notebook and wrote a poem about infidelity. I ordered a second vodka tonic and looked around the bar for distractions.

Nothing.

Two vodka tonics later I left the bar and walked to the next one over. I drank a shot of whiskey and a fifth vodka tonic.

I crossed the street and entered a third bar and now I wasn’t feeling any of the things I’d been feeling earlier in the day. My sadness was replaced with excitement — the kind I felt when I cheated on my girlfriend in high school.

I drank two beers and got a text message from a friend about a party at a co-op on campus. I took a Lyft there and talked the driver’s ear off about having voted for Donald Trump, even though I didn’t vote at all. I don’t recall why I chose to do that other than thinking it was funny at the time.

When I arrived on campus and met up with my friend, he took me to a corner store where we bought a six-pack of Shiner Bock. I carried it with me into the co-op.

Inside this den of college students were smaller groups of three or four all drinking different beers and smoking cigarettes. Whereas when I am sober I tend to avoid conversations with strangers, this time there was enough alcohol in my system that I turned into a social savant.

“Is that a joint?” I asked one kid. “I’ll trade you a beer for it.”

“It’s a cigarette.”

“That’ll kill me faster,” I said. “Even better.”

I approached a second group and asked them if they knew the band that was playing and why the hell it was taking so long for them to set up.

They mumbled something I pretended to listen to and then asked me for a beer.

“I have four left and three of those are my dinner, so you’ll have to share this one between the three of you.”

A tall blonde appeared next to me and laughed at what I said. “I’m Hannah,” she said.

“Nick,” I said. “Your friends here don’t seem to like me.”

“That’s because they don’t understand you.”

“¿Qué?”

“Mis amigos no te entienden,” she whispered in my ear. “They don’t speak Spanish.”

“How the hell do you understand me?”

She winked at me and said, “I’m cultured, honey.”

From there I abandoned my friend and stayed with Hannah for the rest of the party. We danced and made out and had the college fun I missed out on. She invited me back to her apartment under one condition: “You can’t spend the night.”

As soon as I undressed her and started to have sex with her, my twelve drinks bubbled up to my throat’s surface and forced me to stop.

I ran to her bathroom and vomited into her toilet. I sat at her toilet for twenty minutes in between vomits. I apologized for the embarrassment and she told me not to worry. “I took three Valiums before going to that party so I’m feeling pretty ill right now, too.”

She gave me her number and asked me to leave. “Will you text me?” she asked.

“I will,” I lied, because I wasn’t sure what the hell tomorrow would bring or if I’d even see a tomorrow.

Then I ordered a Lyft home and collapsed in my bed.

The morning after I reaped what I had sown. I felt guilt and shame and anger for what I had done. Even more so, I felt sad because I thought for sure that I had ruined yet another relationship, this one more meaningful than all the previous ones combined.

I started to think about solutions the wrong way. I thought of ways to avoid hurting my girlfriend by keeping the truth from her because I thought that being honest with her would be more hurtful than pretending I hadn’t cheated and continuing to be in a relationship with her.

I kept it to myself for one day.

Then another.

That turned into a week.

And by week two, I convinced myself that I could make it work.

Three months passed before I told her the truth. I even lied to her face once when she asked me straight up if I had cheated.

I did all of this thinking I was protecting her when really I was protecting myself. I didn’t want my relationship to end, but that boat had sailed already.

By the time I told her, the damage was done. We spent the next two months thinking we could fix it by addressing it head on, but other problems started to surface from it and her trust in me I had broken so blatantly that we weren’t able to make it work.

Not together, at least.

My third relationship ever ended because of the same reason my previous two had.

I was unable to deal with my emotions and thought, yet again, that escaping them was the answer.

But this time I didn’t end it on a lie or an absence of truth.

It ended with a hard truth.

And though I’m still ashamed of how I approached this whole mess, and the hurt that I put her through, I know that at least this time I managed to be honest with her.

Even if it took me three months.

From the ages of 17 to 22 I prostituted myself to older men. I charged them money to dominate me and let me perform oral sex on them. I felt like I mattered when I did this for them, like their validation of me and what I was doing was the love I never got as a child.

I felt something…

Growing up I was never allowed to feel or express my emotions. I was a very sad and angry child because my parents neglected me. I tried any which way I could to get their attention and all that got me in return was them yelling at me or sending me to my room. How I felt and acted out was my fault and it was up to me to fix it.

I hated it. I hated myself so much because all I heard was how I continuously put a strain on the family by acting like a “spoiled brat”.

My dad was never at my birthday parties. Or school events. My mom once told me to “go fuck yourself” when I asked her for help on my math homework.

At a certain age I stopped asking my parents to support me at these events because I knew they had more important things to do. Dad had to work so he could put a million dollar roof over my head and mom had to figure out a way to cope with the pain that dad inflicted on her.

Asking them to attend one of my soccer games or dance performances seemed like a burden. These were silly things, sports and social activities. I started to see things as they did, even though I still felt the way my friends did. Deep down I wanted them to want to go to all of them, not just show up and be looking at their watch the whole time, or talking business on the phone, like my dad.

What I’m trying to say is that I never felt worthy of my parents’ love because they liked to pick and choose when they loved me. If I felt angry or sad they rejected me. I became too much for them. And if I was happy or excited I never wanted to share it with them because I feared what they would think. I was deeply afraid that they would judge me for acting my age.

Instead, I started to act their age and treat others the way they treated me. At friends’ birthday parties I was the kid that was too self-conscious to dance and run around with everyone else. When I entered my first serious relationship in high school, I became possessive, jealous, and an asshole. I cared a lot about my then girlfriend but I was ashamed and afraid to own up to that feeling. I feared that she would reject it the way my parents rejected me.

I grew up fast and sloppy.

I grew up thinking that love was unavailable for someone like me.

I grew up amidst a web of secrets and lies.
I found cigarette butts in mom’s toilet even though I’d never seen her smoke a cigarette in my life. I saw my father and a strange woman’s silhouette through the curtain in my bedroom and heard them yell at each other for a half hour. I still don’t know who that woman was. My sister was sent to boarding school around the age of thirteen for something I’m still in the dark about. And sometimes I had to bribe my brother just so he would spend time with me.

I was about as emotionally isolated as a child can be.

And as I grew up, the issues I faced became more and more serious.

First it was drugs and alcohol, to which I said yes almost all of the time. Something to numb the pain, you know?

Second was the complexity of an intimate, monogamous relationship with another person. I didn’t know how to navigate that, so I took from what my parents showed me. If I was upset at her, I avoided physical touch and words of affection. This was how I communicated to her that I was upset. If she hurt me, I made sure to let her know how much she had hurt me, and then proceeded to hurt her twice as much. I cheated on her a number of times, one of them with her best friend, and one of them with a stranger I met through Craigslist.

That was the first time I ever made another man orgasm.

Third, and worst of all, was learning how to be alone—which I am still working on to this day. In high school I learned that I could masturbate on camera for men all around the world. They really liked young boys and I really needed the attention. I probably did this for over one hundred men in the span of four years.

After high school I moved to Southern California to go to college. I made a couple of friends and enjoyed my classes, but when I wasn’t doing that, I fell back on my old habit, only this time I actually met with men instead of doing it all virtually. I searched the personals ads on Craigslist three or four times a week and met with over twenty men in one year, some of them more than once. And I didn’t use protection with a single one.

Then I dropped out of college and moved to Austin. I thought the worst was behind me, but it was only just beginning.

Since moving to Austin I have met with just as many men—if not more. I didn’t use protection with any of them, either. I met and fell in love with two different women and cheated on both of them. I developed addictions to weed and psychedelics at times. I did everything I could to avoid feeling my pain.

But when my most recent relationship ended—the third woman I ever cheated on—I started to feel my emotions differently than I was used to. I knew what mistaken expressions of hurt looked like and where those led me. I was aware that if I repeated the same pattern, I would find myself here again in no time, only the pain would be greater, like it is now.

It took me three months to tell her the truth and break her heart. It took me writing a 70,000+ word memoir about my pain to build up enough courage. To rid myself of the shame I have carried my whole life. To work against the voice in my head that wakes me up every morning to tell me that because of the decisions I have made, I am not loved, nor am I worthy of love.

For twenty-three years I’ve been chasing my parents’ validation and support. For twenty-three years I haven’t gotten it.

When I told my dad I wanted to pursue writing and poker as careers, he made fun of me for it. When I bragged to my mom about a $1,500 dollar scholarship I won for something I wrote in thirty minutes, she changed the subject. When I dropped out of college and told my dad after the fact, all he had to say was: “Well you did it already! What the hell do you want me to say?”

Anytime I experience anger or sadness, it is compounded by this twenty-three year pursuit. I am reminded of all that I never got as a child. I am reminded of all the women I’ve hurt because of pain I had yet to process. I am thrown back to age three and that king sized bed I slept on with my parents, as I rolled around in between them, fighting to get their attention, the two of them busy ignoring each other because of pain THEY had yet to process, because they were emotionally unavailable even to themselves.

Today I am still a very angry and sad person. I haven’t come to terms with the fact that these were the cards I was dealt. I resent my parents for a lot of the decisions they made. I resent myself for the same.

But I am also many other things.

I am a leader at my job. I am a friend to men and women in my life. I am someone who no longer wants to live in fear.

And because of that, because I’ve been tied down by shame for so long, I wrote it all down and decided to share it with the world.

I turned my pain into meaning for all of the other neglected men and women that don’t feel worthy of love either.

I did this for you just as much as I did it for myself.