beginnings i.

I have thought I was different ever since I can remember. When I was young, I jumped down a whole flight of steps every day to get downstairs for breakfast when my mother was calling me. I remember doing that when I was 4. At 7 I was making deliberate social choices, knowing the concepts of gain and loss and that friendship was neither inevitable nor natural, that I could choose my friends or whether to have them at all. I began to be singled out as jewish around this time. What that meant to me was twofold. 1. It meant something sacred and inside, untouchable and beautiful for its very irregularity, unknowability. It was light flickering in someones eyes as they stare at a flame, not the flame itself but the graceful and immaterial thing that through various signs gave us notice of its presence. It was the one night a week my family made sure to be together for dinner and that all of a sudden, despite all the stress and argument, we would release our fists clenched over the damp sand of life and sing together. This was especially notable given the amount of stress my father was dealing with at that point in his life, traveling all over the world in what he saw as not only the necessary moves to advance his career but also to uphold it in an effort to support two elementary school kids and one newborn without another income in the house. Plus his worth was measured by his dual capacity to earn and serve as a father-figure in a mimicry of his father. The second thing being singled out as jewish meant was 2. Suddenly having an external image or persona whom I was constantly in relation to. Bankers, movie producers, accountants, moses, the jewish people in other school kids lives. Not only was I compared to them, but my every action was related to them as if they cast the light by which I might be seen, and the difference, was a shadow cast along the schoolyard. How did my actions relate to greed, to physicality, to success, to being American, to Israel, and most importantly how did my actions manifest my difference from everybody else at school. Even if at first glance none of my actions did, I began to see them through the light of difference.

            It was at this time that a superiority complex began to take root, egged on by my academic success as well as uncanny ability on the football field. Let me start with the latter. I was aggressive. Actually that applies to both fields. Ever below average in weight and height, I was widely known as the hardest hitter on the field and was consequently given the position where I got to make the most open-field tackles: linebacker. Despite being relatively scrawny, bookish, and unsocial, I was able to intimidate the other plays and through sheer abandon of the precipitation of impact or pain level players with much more momentum, despite their greater mass or velocity. This ability in me was noted, praised, but most of all it was taken by me to be central to my identity, this irrational strength,  this talent for overcoming which seemed to exist outside of the realm of sense.

            Academically, I was smart. Smarter than anyone I knew at that time. My mind seemed to move even more quickly than the teachers at times, though I have since attributed this to a lack of reponsibilities and multiple tracks in my mind and a plethora in theirs. I would finish problem sets with time to spare, write paragraphs in minutes when it was supposed to take an entire class period. But more important than the speed differential, was a true difference in effort. I did not know what it meant to struggle with a problem. Each new mathematical procedure or book to read seemed keyed into an inner process that for me was already running at high capacity. Any task given to me became an outward manifestation of my abilities rather than a challenge which brought them out further or nourished them.  And in the absence of challenging tasks, mastery of every aspect of the classroom became my goal. I began observing my classmates behaviors and how they spoke to each other and their parents. I carefully noted romances as they developed, curiously noting the void from which they emerged and how they rewrote their own histories after proving to themselves that they had roots and some form of longevity. And though I was not popular nor could contrort myself into the social form of leader of the pack, I mechanistically broke down the reasons for which and by which people obtained such positions of power. Joey cookson, talia zizza. Briefly kaela edson and zanni. Bryan pierce for a time before his physical difference began to make this more difficult as everyone grew taller and he stayed the same. A desire to make manifest my power became a priority. Whenever given the chance I would dominate academic competitions, seeking out, facing off with, and eventually embarrassing whoever promised to be the closest competition, thereby making the gap between myself and those who were struggling with the academic material appear even larger than it was. I knew I was seen as a force and I liked it.

            At the same time as my will to power manifested itself in the academic arena in public school ,as my sense of difference grew larger through bullying and fights at school, and I released my aggression on the football field, I had a separate world full of new social dynamics and what felt like a reinvented persona through my jewish community about a 20 minute drive away. In Winchester Massachusetts, I had a strong group of friends, mostly young males, of whom I was the unquestionable leader. We were loud in class both in discussions of material and during break times. We were boisterous and joking, we were unafraid. And it felt like we were this way because of a choice that I had made. I do not remember the moment, but I remember the thought process coming out of my social deductions in public school not that it was objectively better to be popular or outgoing, but that the experience certainly appeared to be better. Like the common people in siddhartha’s experience, I had seen the brutish pleasure by which my peers enjoyed each other and the world around them, seen the way they could share space without desiring to dominate or destroy, or at least when they felt and acted on these things that they could not do them. They appeared slightly out of reach always and therefore the interaction was sweet and unrequited in absolute terms, but always fulfilled in relative terms. There was no expectation of completion, or even a perception of what that would mean. There was only the action and its result. I chose to be that in my new world. I chose fun and popularity and extroversion. And for a time, felt like my best self, before the wearisome self-flagellating id of self-improvement imposed itself on the perceived differences between my two personas.  I sang and ran and argued with gusto, and without an outside voice or eye comparing what I was doing to anything else, to my parents, family, other jews. Because I was among them. And I was the greatest example of myself, the platonic aaron growing and developing as the first flower from the first seed did in the garden of eden, showing the world what it might be.

            Then came highschool and the great collision. Sexuality, depression, adulthood ( at least in the sense of true force in the world and consequences both by and on me), the truest kind of friendship, peers, an explosion of interest in the world, spirituality, and open defiance of the father and of the laid out path.