After Everything Fell Apart, Jordyn Ruiz Diaz Rebuilt
By Demetra Paizanis,
Communications Coordinator –
The news reached Jordyn Ruiz Diaz on a closing shift and made the rest of the night impossible.
He was on break at his job, scrolling through Instagram stories, when he saw that a high school friend, an international student from his AP Physics class and a young man he believed he would not have passed without, had been killed by shrapnel in his home country. Another former classmate had posted photographs, memories, and a farewell.
“My head was spinning bad,” Jordyn said later. “My heart was shattered.”
His coworkers saw the change in his face, came over, and stayed close until the shift ended. When he got home, his parents knew something was wrong. It was their twentieth anniversary, and he hated bringing grief through the door, but he was already sobbing. They got out of bed, held him, and prayed with him for a long time. Later, he reposted the memorials and other classmates did the same.
“I still remember the last text from him saying, ‘Happy Birthday Jordyn!’ That was four months prior,” he said.
Before his death, that friend had become an influencer in his country, someone known for urging people to keep their heads up and keep going.
“He may be deceased, but his soul and spirit is still here,” Jordyn said.
Watching People Go
By the time he found this devastating news, he had already spent years watching people go. Army moves. A father deployed overseas. Friendships cut short by distance. Classmates turned to strangers.
At home, they called him JJ. He was born on April 1, 2005, in Sierra Vista, Ariz., and grew up in a military family that moved through Germany, Kansas, Alabama, Georgia, and finally Texas, where they arrived in August 2014 and decided to stay. His father’s family is Honduran; his mother’s is Mexican and Spaniard, with a distant Japanese line. Every move taught him to learn the room, learn the names, and start over when necessary. And it was always necessary.
One of the first major absences came in Kansas, where his father deployed to Iraq for about a year. Jordyn was in kindergarten. His younger brother was barely one and his mother was working full-time with the Army’s MWR family-support system while earning an online degree in healthcare administration. During that stretch, little JJ had been given a new, yet grand title.
“I was given a duty to be, ‘the man of the house,’” Jordyn says.
He helped make dinner, cleaned, watched his brother, and tried to give his mother room to breathe when the day ran long. When he saw her stressed, he answered in the ways a child could with a hug, a smile, and the innocently courageous line of “It’s okay mom! I love you!”
Around those same years, he first heard about suicide through a friend of his father’s.
“I didn’t understand it,” he said, “when one took their own life.”
Learning to Express Himself
In elementary school, he found one of his first ways to process that confusion. A teacher prompted the class to write about a hero. Jordyn wrote about his father, who had served in the Army for about 12 years and had recently returned from Iraq. He wrote about his father defending home and country, recording himself reading books, one Jordyn remembered as “The mouse ate cookies,” and the Build-A-Bear monkey with a recorded message from 5-year-old JJ stating, “I love and miss you daddy!”
Though he did not know it at the time, his teacher handed him an invitation to an awards night where he found out this essay was submitted to a class contest in which he received an honorable mention and a medal. Present at the award ceremony was his father who read the essay, shed a tear, hugged Jordyn, and said, “thank you, I’m so proud of you.”
Moving to Texas
The move from Georgia to Texas was the first time life felt steady. Nintendo games, art, volleyball, and kickball were common ground among his peers at school. Friendships seemed to be blooming and this time, he stayed in one place long enough to feel like he had an extended family. Hang-outs, parties, calls, and church. But even when things looked stable, connection didn’t come easily.
“I was never good at making conversation when I was a kid since I was very shy, and introverted,” he said.
So alas, at his young age, he developed a strategy. First, talk about an assignment, then drift towards an outfit comment, perhaps an upcoming movie or video game, and BAM!
“Next thing I knew, a friendship was born.”
Unfortunately, the abundance of naively joyous and uncomplicated friendships halted in middle school.
“I dealt with bullies, fights, and fake friends which had me develop anger issues and very negative thoughts about myself.” Jordyn said. “There was an altercation where I stood up for a student and threw the bully onto the wall. I felt power since no one attempted to mess with me anymore and things got better as I finished up.”
For the Love of Art
Elsewhere in the building, a teacher was paying attention. Jordyn’s seventh- and eighth-grade art teacher watched him grow not only as an artist, but as a person. Despite his rigid exterior, she checked on him, pushed him forward, and gave him one class period where school let up for an hour. Under her encouragement, he entered Junior VASE, a Texas visual-arts competition for middle-school students and won a gold medal in his division. Soon after, Jordyn received an honorary theatre and art award at his eighth-grade graduation. The back of the plaque he received read “As a scatterbrained artist that I am, this student has always kept me on my toes,”
He had always wanted to be the best artist in the room. The way his teacher saw him changed that.
“If I was perfect in art the entire time,” he said, “what journey of progression can I say that I had?”
With that in mind, Jordyn decided to explore other avenues of interest throughout high school beyond his creative anchors. From classes and clubs to competitions and work, he stacked one thing onto the next and soon he found himself in junior year with six AP and dual-enrollment courses, four clubs, art competition, and a job at Whataburger.
“I thought I could do it all but ended up falling on my face hard in both school and work.” Jordyn said.
Grades slipped first. Then class rank. And eventually, his last straw at work.
One night, a coworker began yelling at others behind the counter, orders were backed up, and the manager had sent several people home early, leaving Jordyn on drive-thru duty alone. Fifteen minutes of this chaotic nonsense had already passed. Then thirty. Then forty-five. The line kept growing and he was already considering leaving when he witnessed his father inside the restaurant, speaking to the manager, begging for them to let Jordyn go for the night.
“The day that I quit, well I didn’t exactly quit,” Jordyn said.
He clocked out and walked out.
Return to Education
School became simpler after that. Turns out, with fewer commitments and obligations pulling at him, he was able to refocus. By the end of senior year, he had climbed back into the top 11 of his class, graduated with honors, and finished with a year’s worth of college credit.
“If that still isn’t ‘good enough,’ then oh well,” Jordyn said. “I found my fire and it blew up.”
After graduation, he traveled to Japan on an educational trip with his class. At a STEM museum, he moved through exhibits on engineering, biology, computer systems, and medical technology, stopping where the displays held him longer than the rest. Screens showed how data moved through systems. Nearby, machines used in surgery were broken down into steps he could follow. He watched how each part connected to the next.
“Both displays had an impact on me,” Jordyn said. “I want to build and design equipment like these and learn advanced techniques.”
Chasing His Calling
Back in Texas, he had to fit those ideas into tuition, transfer requirements, and course sequences. He worked two jobs and planned a route from Central Texas College to Texas A&M University–Central Texas to study Computer Science.
That is, until the mandatory physics course changed the plan. He went to class and tried to keep up with the pace of the lecture. After two days, he dropped the class.
“I realized this wasn’t high school anymore, and that I had to make an adult decision as I was paying out of pocket,” Jordyn said. “Kudos to the people that can do physics, because I cannot, but it’s not for me, and that’s okay.”
Remaining resilient, he adjusted the plan and kept going. But with multiple jobs and online classes, he found himself isolated again.
“Since I was by myself,” Jordyn said, “I would sometimes think very negative and shame myself for not handling it better. I felt invisible.”
For a long time, losing people made Jordyn feel like something was wrong with him, but when friendships ended, work crashed, and everything he depended on for a sense of purpose collapsed at once, it became clear that these external relationships were never meant to hold him in the first place. What remained was the sturdy internal foundation he could finally build forward from.
A New Beginning
By the time fall approached, he decided to attend in-person classes.
“I believed that I would make new friends and meet nice people,” Jordyn said. “I got nervous as it was about a year since I attended any school in person.”
When the semester started, he went to class, began staying at school longer than he normally would have, talked with peers, and found himself returning to the same people week after week.
Eventually, he joined the Warrior Influencer Network, a student-led program that creates social media content and shares real student experiences on campus. Members attend events, produce photos and videos, and work together to represent what student life is actually like.
“They helped me be put back together. They shined the light when I was lost. They helped me get back up on my feet and dust me off.” Jordyn said.
From there, his focus began to take shape. He is working toward his bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems and plans to continue into graduate school. At the same time, he is learning Chinese, Japanese, and Korean with the goal of exploring opportunities in international trade. Merging his interest in technology with his passion for art, he is even considering becoming a game designer and programmer in the future.
“I’m not afraid to make big moves and take risks,” Jordyn said. And now, instead of trying to hold everything together, he is building something for himself that doesn’t collapse when others leave.
