I don’t consider myself an interesting person. I’m not eccentric in any obvious way. I write because I feel a need to do it. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was young. We didn’t have any money to be more precise. My dad struggled for years to find a job. My mom did what she could to make a little money and raise five kids at the same time. I am the one in the middle, a good place to do what you want without being noticed. My uncles, my mother’s brothers, one of them in particular, took care of us financially when we most needed it.
We moved to my grandma’s house when I was seven or eight. It was going to be temporary until things got better, but they never did. Things were better before, when I was younger. My dad had a descent job then. I was put in a good private school and made great friends. Friends for life. By the time I was seven money had completely given up on us. We were broke. My mom managed to keep me in school through scholarships, with help from her family, and the spotty income my dad managed to get.
I knew we had no money. I was smart enough to tell the difference between the refrigerator at my friends’s kitchens and ours. I knew the reason we didn’t go skiing every spring was not because we were afraid of flying. I knew the reason I got to wear my cousin's (and best friend) used clothes was not because some unique family tradition. I loved wearing his clothes though, my aunt had good taste. I can still smell the neatness of washed new (used) clothes coming from my aunt's house. I love my aunt, she's a second mom to me. My cousin (and best friend), the one I used to get my clothes from, later in life, when we were nineteen, was driving back home one night when a fifty-something year old drunk man ran over a red light at 60 miles per hour, hit his car, and killed him. But that's another story.
This didn’t bother me. The lack of money as a young child that is, not my friend's death. My friend's death did bothered me, but that's another story. Not having money didn't bother me. It only became an issue during my coming of age when people around me started driving, going out, dating. I (my mom) managed to get a scholarship to a good high school, the one all of my friends were going to, so my circle of wealthy acquaintances only grew. Now I was surrounded by a larger crowd of people with a lot of money; at lot more than me at least. My friends not only were going out, they were dating, traveling together. I felt a crack opening underneath my feet. On one side were all my friends, all the fun, all the good life; on the other it was me, alone.
I was a creative and naive young man. I tried different approaches. Maybe girls were not interested in all that stuff that money can provide. Maybe my friends could pay for my drinking and eating when we went out. Maybe I could just borrow clothes from other people. Maybe, if I’m nice, they could even take me skiing on spring. I quickly realized the reality of the world. I got an afternoon job counting boxes in a small warehouse owned by one of my uncles. I made enough money to pay for transporting myself to and from the job, and a night out with my friends once a week. I little money bit for my mom too. It felt good having a job, like a move in the right direction.
This was a dark period in my life. I say this in a good way. Just like evolution happens after an environmental push, the search for light is a consequence of finding yourself in a dark place. I was searching for something, I wanted to find answers, a truth, a rock to hold myself onto, be happy. It was lonely on this side of the crack. The absence of money, the obvious difference between me and my friends, caused me to turn inwards to search for answers. My fifteen year old rational brain told me that if I didn’t have enough money to get a girlfriend, I should invest my time in cultivating my brain. Maybe, just maybe, girls could be attracted to that.
I was a popular guy during exam season in high school. I was the most sought after student a day before Math or Physics exams. I didn’t have a problem spending hours teaching a group of friends how to solve algebraic equations, then going to another house and do the same thing all over again, and then another. More than one time I started teaching early in the afternoon to a group of friends and ended well past midnight with a fourth group. My friends will take care of picking me up wherever I was and feed me. I enjoyed doing this. Besides the joy of teaching, which I truly love, I was able to be around nice people. Since I got to pick the groups I was going to help, these were almost always women.
The academic attractiveness towards my person quickly proved not to be enough to have a girlfriend. My friends were all good people, they didn't ignore me during non-exam season, but I was just a friend, I was in the friend zone, permanently stuck in the friend zone. I was a nice guy, always willing to help with Math, with no car, really funny, and no money. Maybe even they wished I had money, just like I did. So I thought, if it's Friday night and I am not going out because I have no money, I should invest my time on becoming something better. I needed to have something my other friends didn't, I needed to have something to offer besides math and science classes. I was going to read books, a lot of them. I was going to learn much more than is taught in school.
There was a small bookshelf at home (my grandma’s) with no more than maybe a hundred books. I never saw anyone reading a book at home. Most of the books in the humble bookshelf were business, academic, accounting, management, etc. One night I skimmed though the books in the shelf and saw one that caught my eye. It read: “A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley”. That’s what I was looking for.
This marked the beginning of the journey I am still in today at forty years old writing this. A journey of life, of self discovery. Started with Huxley, then Hesse, then Goethe, Borges, Nietzsche, Einstein, Sartre, and Dostoyevski. It hasn’t stopped. It’s not the reading that's the journey, it’s the search for value, for quality, for truth, or the path for truth. A path to be made, inside of me, waiting to be traveled. An adventure. I was lost because I was looking in all the wrong places.
I write regularly to complete thoughts, find answers, and solve problems. This is my rational brain saying why I write. The truth is I do it because I have to. The same force pulling me inwards is the same force pushing me to express myself, to act. I painted for a few years in my early twenties for the same reason. All I painted was a bit scary, at least for my mom. She would look at my finished masterpiece, make an worried face, turn to me and ask me, “what’s wrong with you sweetie?”. It was funny to watch, there was nothing wrong, maybe there were a lot of things wrong, but I was in the move, I was not stagnant anymore, I was not waiting for the world to be better around me, I was looking for truth, for quality. It was fun.
Reading transformed me, it still does. My wife laughs when I tell her we are all artists. She thinks I am joking, but I am not. When I read Hesse for the first time I was fifteen years old. It was magical to see there was another human being, many years before me, feeling the exact same thing I was feeling. This connection through time and space can only be done through art. There is a primal, human force asking us to do this exact thing: connect with others in a deeper level, through time, through space. It's counter intuitive, but the same thing that made me realize I was not alone, made me see myself as unique and authentic. Like a sterling, a unique sterling, in a flock of sterlings. Truth became my highest value. True to myself. I new this was going to be an endless road, a rough road, a sometimes painful road, but the only road worth traveling. Like peeling an endless onion, or zooming into a fractal. The answers, though never complete, are always inside of me. My actions, my art, is what would define me.