Me

how I look at it—the bottom line is that it was not my moment. Why? Because it wasn’t. It just wasn’t.
    The truth is that it was not just for me that I remained silent. Although I accept full responsibility for my decisions, I also felt that I needed to think about how my actions might affect my family, my friends, and all the people around me. I have always taken care of those around me, and I do it because I love to do so. That’s how my life has always been, and it genuinely makes me happy. Some people think it’s not healthy to be this way, and I agree. It’s something I have to work on, but that’s just the way it is. It is clear to me that what I do inevitably has repercussions on other people’s lives, and in that moment I felt that if I spoke about my sexuality, people would reject me and my career would likely be over. And if my career was over, who was going to support my family? Now, many years later, I realize how absurd it is to have even thought this, but that’s how I saw it then. So I continued having relationships with men, but I always kept them hidden. It infuriated me to think that people thought they could walk into my house and see who was in my bed. Regardless of what my sexual orientation may be, I should still have a right to my privacy.
    All the pressure from work as well as the media started to become so oppressive that the stage was the only place where I could feel any sense of peace. But after a while, even that started to lose its appeal. For the first time ever, even onstage, I often felt uncomfortable, unsatisfied, and empty. I did not understand why I was doing what I was doing. That’s when I said to myself: “Wait! Hold on a moment! This is the only thing you really love to do, and even here you’re starting to feel bad? It’s time to stop.” Performing onstage was the only thing I had left, the only thing I loved about being an artist, and I was even starting to lose that.
    I don’t know if the general public felt it, but I’m pretty sure they did. In other words, if someone saw one of my concerts in New York or Miami that took place at the beginning of the tour, when I was enjoying myself, and then saw the same show in Australia, when the tour was starting to wrap up, they would have definitely noticed the difference. By the end, I was there and I was doing my job, but the whole time all I was thinking was, “I cannot wait for this to be over so I can just go home already.”
    All I wanted to do was sleep. I wanted nothing more. So the moment came when I took Madonna’s advice and disconnected. We were in Australia and the next stop was Argentina. A stadium full of people awaited us in Buenos Aires, but I canceled it. I just couldn’t take it anymore. This was only the second concert I had ever canceled in my life, and the first was due to illness.
    Everyone in the band kept asking, “But what happened? What do you mean we’re going home?”
    “Yes,” I’d tell them, “we’re going home. I am totally beat; I simply cannot take it anymore.”
    “But, Ricky, we only have one more week left of the tour,” they would say to me. “Come on, it’s just one more week.”
    Under normal circumstances, I would have made that extra effort and forced myself to use every last bit of energy I had left. But this time it was different, and I knew they would never be able to convince me. I simply did not—could not—go on, and there was not a soul in the world who could convince me of the opposite. All I wanted in that moment was to go home.
    I guess it was an anxiety attack. I was tired of everything, and not even the stage was enough to remedy my discomfort. If I didn’t want to do the shows anymore, what was the point of it all? I had to stop, because who knows what could have happened to me had I gone on for even one more week at that pace?
    I had been working practically nonstop for seventeen years—but the last four had been brutal. First came the tour for A medio vivir , then Vuelve , and almost right away came the Grammy Awards and all the craziness of “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Four years of touring is a lot. It made complete sense that I was feeling this way.
    Besides, I didn’t like who I was. I didn’t like what I was feeling. I started to behave in a way that I had never done before. It’s not that I showed anyone disrespect; I didn’t scream or yell or do anything like that, but I did begin to lose my discipline. I would arrive late. I