Origin Stories
My father was born in a New York hospital on a spring Wednesday in 1948. My grandfather was a salesman who before starting his own shoe store in South Hampton and later Palm Beach, worked at the original Saks Fifth Avenue just south of St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York’s midtown. My dad was brought home, however, to a Bronx apartment on Anderson Avenue close enough to hear the crowds in Yankee Stadium when the borough was still more Death of a Salesman (which would win the Pulitzer the following year) than Jenny from the Block.
On a recent visit to New York, between the food pilgrimages that punctuate such trips, Dad and I journeyed together to the apartment he called home as a toddler in those post-war years. Getting off the subway at 167th street, I imagined my grandfather traveling down every day to sell high-end fashion to those with the means, and then traveling back to the neighborhood to wife, daughter, and new son, building America’s middle class.
From the roof of my apartment today, where I scale the fire escape on balmy evenings to drink in the city, I can see the blue title signage and night-game halogens of Yankee stadium, and I’m rarely unaware that one half of the roots of my family tree runs through that hill.
On Thanksgiving morning this year, I left my apartment for a pre-dinner run to get a head start on metabolizing dinner and to muse on the day’s Hallmark intention of gratitude. Starting west towards my usual Hudson River path, I stopped.
It felt increasingly vital to move through streets, to stand on steps that decades before provided the support and safety needed for a man to decide to start a family, trusting that those streets, storefronts, merchants and neighbors would reinforce his own values and parentage.
Yankees stadium is east and north, across the East River from where I live in Morningside Heights, a sub-neighborhood of Harlem. I reversed course towards it, and found myself running up to Fredrick Douglas and across the Macombs Dam bridge into the Bronx. I cut up the side of the ballpark, and continued up the hill to the yellowed building my Dad and I had visited earlier in the summer.
I ran past the families hurrying back home to their kitchens, the friends enjoying each other outside bodegas, churches, or just on a random corner. There was a warmth of community and I thought of the criticality of the space around one’s home and neighborhood. These constellations of community support us by the connections and invisible lines connecting home, work, friends, family and all of the other humans we encounter along the tracks.
While my grandparents, and later parents, worked to provide the material needs of a family — food, shelter, clothing — these of course represent only the foundation of our needs as humans. We need only reflect on our Freshman Psych’ class and Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs to know that. After physiological needs, effectively answering “am I hungry,” our other needs become far more subjective, less visible, but equally contributive to our development; safety, belonging, and esteem. And at the highest level stands our ability to self-actualize; to dream a better life and act towards that vision.
Early “nutritional” deficiencies in these areas can lie dormant for years, stunting growth, or they can metastasize with ferocious speed. How we experience and internalize these are a huge part of what creates each of our personalities. These experiences form the lens through which we see the world, asking (and answering) the most basic question asked by every living creature when encountering any situation: “friend or foe?”
As I ran, not once did I feel unsafe. But I didn’t feel safe because I wasn’t in danger, I felt safe because I was taught to feel safe, and I’ve had enough positive reinforcement of my place in the world as well as validation of my own actualizations of identity that no matter where I go, there I am. That is the definition of a truly privileged inheritance. Sometimes it’s epically stupid, but as the scorpion says to the frog having just stung him as they both swim and will both shortly drown, “it’s in my nature.”
But the shaping of the lens through which we see the world, and the mirror in which we see ourselves never ends. Scientists call this neuroplasticity; our brain’s constant breaking and reforming of neural connections. Like an immense switchboard, we’re continually adjusting how our filter sees the world as well as iterating and conditioning our reactions to that world around us.
I live in a city, and so rub elbows with hundreds of people I don’t know personally every day. These small tangents impact my life as much as my family and home existence forged it initially. Seemingly meaningless Moments accrue. The random smile, the door held open, the forgotten scarf picked up and run through closing subway doors to its owner. And similarly, the rough edges and barnacles of these intersections abrate, pierce, and inflict.
With a solid foundation — loving home, family, friends, community — our resilience against the friction and threatening moments holds firm, steels our len’s ability to not shatter under the darkness and doesn’t irrevocably alter how we’ll respond at a future, similar time.
But without this foundation, or even more challengingly, with any neurological predisposition to more subjective or hyperbolic mental states (states commonly referred to as anything from “on the spectrum” to schizophrenia) these sparks can set off a wildfire that consumes the entire mind.
And so I know that part of my privilege is not just the nurtured lens I see the world through, but also my inherited nature, my biological hardwiring that, to date, usually resists the more toxic challenges to my reality. Too many are not as fortunate, and even worse, have that “natural” side of the deck — their physiological predisposition to challenging mental states — stacked against them.
My dad’s childhood home sits on a hill. At the end of the street, not fifty feet from that front door are a set of stairs. These stairs plunge downward, a full city block down towards Jerome Avenue. I imagine my grandfather walking down these steps on his way to work every morning, and ascending them at the end of every day.
The buildings lining this path are stone and brick, and I imagine they haven’t changed in the nearly 70 years since he walked them. There are urban cuts like this all over the city, and in cities all over the world. Invisible conduits where people are brought together as they come and go, confluences of humanity.
Except these stairs are no longer invisible. They have become a tourist attraction, geo and hash-tagged, Insta’storied and profile pictured, and the juxtaposed metaphor and symbolism they carry both challenges and inspires.
In the 2019 summer movie Joker, the audience watches helplessly as the title character, the antihero Batman’s nemesis, descends from Everyman citizen, like the hundreds of people we pass everyday (or see in the mirror) to protovillain and is reborn as the “comical” moniker. The descent comes not from a single great shove off of a cliff. Instead, it is caused and exacerbated by a series of unrelenting tampings down upon what is obviously a fragile but initially coherent mental state, to one that manifests violence and injury to match the internal inhumanity and pain the subject has experienced.
While explicit violence upon him is exhibited, the audience watches, just as we have from within our own theaters within our own minds of our own experiences, the accumulation of compounding smaller moments that cleave weaknesses in his mental integrity. Critical moments of misunderstanding, the tiny betrayals of everyday life, leaps for connection that are left unmet, and the attempted jokes and jests that leave wounds and scars rather than levity.
In what is regarded as the transformative scene, our character, having not only descended to, but is emerging from total darkness, corporeally and metaphysically, performs an exuberant dance down those same stairs, my grandfather’s stairs, where he, likely for the first time, feels an integration of external and internal state and character. His only possible human reaction is to become the aggressor upon everything, because what alternative is there when everything is a threat and untrustworthy?
But the inhumanity is not only in the title character, but in the contribution of so many supporting characters encountered along his journey. Never have I seen the writer Audrey Lourdes’ insight that “to those whom evil is done, do evil in return” so viscerally illustrated.
So even more than a study of one man’s light fading to the darkest version of himself, it’s a study of the compound effect of every other character’s incidental impacts, ignorant or intentional, on one’s already fragile mental health through casual (or is it causal?) dismissal to outright inhumanity.
And so moving past my father’s building, I descended those steps and sat in the cold early winter air. Like us all, I’ve had challenging times, the rarest of which have tested my resilience and ability to return back to what I hope is the best version of myself.
What makes the difference between finding our way back or not, for each of us, is a combination of both knowing that safety is not scarce, that danger is not the norm, and also having the resources (material, social, emotional) to still feel one’s agency to change.
I was fed as a child, always had a warm (or cool) home, and even in my challenging times, I was buttressed by family, friends, and extended support. These fixed and unwavering stars served as the guiding constellation that things do get better, that people are good, that I exist, and that I am entitled to pursue my happiness. This lens is a gift and a privilege, even if it should be inalienable.
Sitting on those steps, greeting those ascending and descending and receiving greetings in return, it was clear how significant every one of those interactions are. “Everyone,” writes American novelist Brad Meltzer, “is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” And so we can choose to fight for each person’s victory, through active engagement with their humanity, or can practice ambivalence, or worse.
This is a conditioned choice. While we can exercise the muscles to see and engage in the world with more kumbaya every day, we inherited our starting point and the first set of rules we play by.
On the nurture side of the coin, my opening state on the board commands extraordinary gratitude. How we honor our advantage is up to each of us. And to conspire for the victory of as many people as possible, through micro-moments up to significant engagements feels like the only tithe imaginable.
There are those who didn’t start with such faith, or family, or mental resources. And so part of our opportunity is to reassure and ensure that the next step, and the next step after that is safe, secure, and that we all belong there.
Finally, we must hold space for those graced by the near infinite shades of humanity’s nature. Mental health is still a pariah of epidemic proportions. What happens in the recesses of our often fragile consciousness is terrifying territory to many, and it’s still too easy to dismiss at best and aggress upon at worst.
It remains terrifying because these states, this diversity, is either frequently invisible, or if visible, challenges rational understanding. That which we can’t see or understand is read by our lizard brain as a threat, and it takes concerted effort to extend a hand into that darkness, through our desire to delegitimize, because if real it would call to question the subjectivity and legitimacy of our own daily experiences.
So many of those battles being fought around us are by those wrestling with themselves. Depression, especially in the darker winter months, can be suffocating, and those nudges with or against can prove just as tempestuous or gentle as wind on a leaf.
Ultimately, we are each, always, on the stairs. Hopefully in most moments climbing, but assuredly in moments descending. And so is everyone else around us, each equally navigating their own set, both connected and isolated, like some expansive yet interlocking Penrose steps, like an endless M.C. Escher drawing.
So as I rose from the steps and made my way home, it was irrefutable that I was both a guest on those steps, but also a beneficiary of them. I bowed my head that enough kindnesses were bestowed on my father’s father as he came and went on them that he still believed the world good enough to bring a son into the world, and to teach him to be a good man. And so on.
