Chapter 1 - The broken woman becomes a broken girl
"It’s better to be dead than to be without life".
My father was a man who loved his catchphrases. He had several, but this one was his favourite. It followed me all my life as a motto, an inspiration to keep pushing forward and fighting. At first glance, it might sound silly or nonsensical, but it is anything but that.
It means that literal death is preferable to a life without meaning, without spirit, without actual life. It means that we should always strive to follow our dreams even if we risk death in the process, rather than just accepting whatever lemons life throws at us.
We were poor. Like, really, actually poor. A single father, an immigrant, and his daughter, in a third-world country, fighting for survival, living from scraps. But what he lacked in financial means, he had in culture, and he passed on that culture to me.
I grew up in the favelas of Brazil, but my eyes were on the stars. I strived for knowledge, for creating beautiful things, and for one day leaving this planet. At some point, I began to understand the unfairness of the world I lived in, so I redoubled my efforts. If space travel wouldn’t happen in my lifetime, I would create other goals.
I became a poet, a musician, a revolutionary, an anthropologist, a game developer, and kept pushing, kept fighting.
I lived in the streets, I slept on plazas under the moon and stars, I also lived in simple homes, sometimes in middle-class apartments, and finally in a rich neighbourhood.
My life was a constant struggle to get a better quality of life, a constant loop of getting ahead, then having everything crashing under my feet, only to go at it even harder, and have a peak higher than the last peak. Between the peaks, the valleys of despair.
More than once, I found myself in a position of losing everything and having to start from scratch again.