Do you still need friends at 53 years old?

His name is Angel. He grew up in a small town in Ecuador, his first language is Spanish, he went to school until sixth grade and then decided to leave the school to help their parents with their life in the fields, taking care of animals and cultivating plants. As money was scarce, he was forced to go out and look for a job to be able to provide money for his family. It was then that he started to be a policeman and had to move to a new city. He always mentions that adapting to this new place was not so difficult since it was only a few hours away from his first home, and the lifestyle was almost similar because he worked as a policeman in a rural area, and that made him feel as if he was still at home. After some years he built a family, and he was happy in his life but his world changed when his wife decided to move to another country, he had to leave his job as a policeman and sell his belongings to be able to get enough money to move to the United States.
When he arrived in the U.S, he tried to look for a job. Maybe the problem started at that moment because the company he went to was a garbage collection company. He had never worked in that, his job was all night, but his main problem was that he could not communicate with his coworkers because he didn’t know how to speak English. Every day, when he went to work, his bosses and his coworkers, who were mainly from Asia, talked to each other in their language and laughed in their groups. Angel always had to sit in a corner of the room or be the silent person in the garbage truck, not understanding anything, not knowing what to say or what to do. This was hard for him because he was friendly and liked to create bonds with people, so one day to try to make friends he thought that maybe if he used the cell phone translator he could communicate with the workers around him, but he never felt so humiliated since his co-workers laughed and started writing rude things on his phone. In that social circle at work, he felt lonely and excluded day by day, as he could never participate in the conversations of his co-workers, and also he was treated unfairly because he didn’t get the right amount of money in his checks, every time he complained about it he did it by showing his phone translator, but his bosses scolded him. And when he came home from work, he was alone since her daughters were studying, and his wife was working. I can’t imagine where he felt more alone at work surrounded by people he couldn’t communicate with or at home with no one around him.
One day, he found a new job which he had hoped, maybe it could be a new beginning. Maybe he could meet new friends, he thought. When he went to the new job, he met many people who spoke Spanish like him and this made him feel more comfortable but his co-workers were not good, they used to steal his shoes at work, and complained to their boss about Angel for no reason, all of this because of his nationality, since there are some conflicts between countries in Latin America, and is incredible that this affected his life, he could not fit in that group either. This job was not ideal, but still, he kept working there for the reason that being able to have people around him that spoke the same language made him feel more comfortable. He was willing to settle for being there so he wouldn’t feel like an outsider in another job with people he couldn’t communicate with.
Sometimes also he feels like he did not belong in this country when people on the train look at him strangely, just because of his physiology, skin color, and height, which shows that he is an immigrant. All of these acts of xenophobia are due to the anti-immigration mentality in the political climate has led people in the United States to have unrealistic stereotypes and prejudices of people who immigrate, making it more complex for any immigrant like him to be part of any group.
If we put these experiences together, we can see how he is lonely and isolated as he is far away from his home in this unknown place, trying to start his new life at 53 years old, considering also making friends in this first-world city, New York, with the current pace of life, marked by haste, it is even more complicated to focus people’s time on creating bonds of friendship. He feels so small in this big city, full of skyscrapers, and people from different parts of the world with different cultures, beliefs, and languages which have nothing to do with the village surrounded by mountains, extended fields, crops, and friendly neighbors where he grew up.
Angel, the outsider in this story, is my father and I have seen him go through different crises during his process of adapting to this new city, not only physical crises due to the exhaustion of his hard work, but also mental crises that led him to take pills to stop his depression. Until a few months ago I didn’t understand how much it can affect you not to be part of a group of people until I saw my father crying like a child, who wants to have friends or at least someone to talk to while he works. And due to this, he has created a barrier between his life and other people, he has decided to isolate himself, which has made him change his personality, his behavior, and having a diagnosis of emotional absence, which he has to deal with every day.

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