Riverdale resident David Diaz turns a life of moving and rebuilding into a new memoir

Although born in New York City, Diaz, pictured above with his son in 2001, spent most of his life as a child and young adult moving between the Bronx and Puerto Rico.

​Diaz, a father of two, moved to Riverdale with his wife in 2013.

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For much of his life, David Diaz had a habit of moving. Between New York and Puerto Rico, between schools and jobs, and from one attempt at stability to the next. Leaving, he said, often became easier than staying put when life grew uncomfortable.

Now, more than a decade after settling in Riverdale, the 47-year-old is looking back at those years in a new memoir, “The Weight Worth Carrying: A Memoir of Resilience, Faith, and Rebuilding a Life Worth Leading.” The book traces his path, while examining the patterns he said he had to break along the way.

“It’s totally two different people, who I was and who I am today,” Diaz said.

Diaz started out in the Bronx. At nine years old, his family moved to Isabela in northwestern Puerto Rico. About a year later, they returned to New York, beginning what would become years of moving back and forth between the city and Puerto Rico. As a teenager in Puerto Rico, he fell in with what he described as the wrong crowd and eventually stopped regularly attending school.

After another move to New York in 1994, he again struggled to settle in and returned to Puerto Rico within months.

Those repeated departures later became one of the ideas Diaz examined most closely in writing his book — the difference between making a change and simply escaping discomfort. Looking back, he said he began to recognize a pattern of leaving when things became difficult and starting over somewhere else.

“I have understood that I need to … stick to things rather than quitting and starting something new,” Diaz said.

His life began changing again around 1999, when his first wife, Ada, became pregnant with their son, David. Years later, when Diaz was 32, Ada died of cancer, leaving him to raise their then-12-year-old son as a single father.

“The Weight Worth Carrying” follows Diaz from a childhood of poverty into adulthood, when he became a husband and father while still trying to make sense of his own direction.

At one point, Diaz said, he and his son had no permanent residence and moved between relatives while carrying their belongings with them.

“I was bouncing from home to home,” Diaz said. “I stayed with my brother. I stayed with my cousin. I didn’t have a home. It was just me and my son and our luggage.”

After Ada’s death, Diaz met Leilani, who would eventually become his second wife.

He considered 2013 the beginning of a new chapter, when he returned to New York, settled in the Riverdale area and found a basement apartment.

Having a home of his own became a dividing line in how Diaz remembers his life today. Although his finances and career were still far from where he hoped they would eventually be, Diaz said the stability of having his own place brought a sense of peace he had rarely experienced before.

“Ever since I got that first basement apartment on Irwin Avenue, I feel extremely happy, even if I wasn’t where I wanted to be in life,” he said.

The book also explores Diaz’s evolving relationship with religion. He grew up believing in God but without much familiarity with the Bible, while also being exposed to spiritual traditions through his family. Later, he began reading scripture for himself, partly because he had grown frustrated with being told what was right or wrong based solely on someone else’s religious authority.

“I was tired of being told, ‘Hey, this is good. This is bad. You shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t do that,’” Diaz said. “I just wanted to know for myself.”

Diaz began writing what eventually became his memoir about three years ago, though initially without plans to publish a book. He simply started typing out stories from his life. For years, he said, he assumed memoirs and personal-development books were written by people who had already reached some obvious measure of success.

Eventually, he reconsidered. Sometimes, Diaz said, useful advice can come not from someone who has already reached the summit but from a person “a few turns ahead of you” who can warn you that “the bridge is out.”

A longtime reader of personal-development books, Diaz began combining his stories with reflections and prompts meant to encourage readers to examine their own lives. The result was self-published in August and is part memoir, part workbook.

“I don’t care for people to learn about me,” Diaz said. “I care for people to reflect on what I’m saying, on what I went through, and reflecting on their own life, you know, breaking cycles of things that we don’t notice.”

His own rebuilding has included returning to school after dropping out as a teenager. Diaz said he earned a bachelor’s degree in business in 2019 and later a master’s degree in childhood education. He said he initially entered education because, as a single father without stable housing, he needed a job with a schedule that aligned with his son’s school calendar.

Diaz eventually decided to pursue teaching more seriously after the birth of his daughter, who recently turned 3. He said he still hopes eventually to work for himself and achieve enough financial freedom to spend more time with her. But the difference now, he said, is how he thinks about progress and what he wants to pass on.

The stability he once struggled to create — a home, an education, a career and a family — has become part of what he considers worth carrying forward.

“Through this journey, I have felt nothing but gratitude, nothing but peace,” Diaz said.