At the risk of sounding self-important, I could go on for hours and hours (write a book even, fingers crossed) about the events that have occurred in my life and what I think about them. Under normal circumstances, I don’t really think it matters all that much that people know the specifics, just as I usually don’t mind people sparing me the details of their own lives. We’re all just people at the end of the day.
Since I plan to post my thoughts on a variety of topics, it occurred to me that those thoughts would be ‘even more’ out of context from the get-go. Same as you, my experiences / knowledge inform my thoughts since those are the ‘things’ I have with which I can compare and contrast. Long story short, I’ll share a simple overview of my life upfront in the hopes that it’s additive to any message / point I try to convey in future posts. I’m sure I’ll revisit some of these topics in more detail later.
It All Started...
I am Mexican-American. Both of my parents grew up in rural Mexico in the state of Hidalgo before immigrating to the United States to become agricultural workers. I have an older sister and four younger brothers, as well as a lovely niece. When I was growing up, it was really my parents, my sister and me (my youngest brother is in second grade right now). I grew up poor – my whole family did. Neither of my parents completed the equivalent of high school in Mexico, which I share for context when I say that my parents placed a lot of value on education.
I think a lot of immigrant families value education – it’s a ticket up in society and perhaps even a way to achieve the American Dream. Growing up in Florida, my dad picked oranges / worked in the fields to provide for the family. In the summers / early fall, we lived on a farm in Michigan picking apples, blueberries, cherries and other produce. Later in my life, we migrated to North Carolina instead of Michigan. It was a yearly thing for my sister and I to enroll in school up north to then transfer back to school in Florida for the rest of the school year. When we weren’t enrolled in school, we did our fair share of work in the fields (arguably, any share is too much for a kid). Come middle school summers, I was working 70 hours plus per week on a tobacco farm just to put it in perspective. It was not great. I think I was about twelve at the time.
To be honest, as a kid I both knew and didn’t know what my life was. I knew it wasn’t normal, but it was normal for me (and millions of other children that still grow up against that backdrop today). Anyway, I was a bright kid. It wasn’t long before I got tested into the gifted program, but even before that I really loved learning. I didn’t have friends – we kept it super tight knit in our household. Kind of as a result, it was pretty normal for me to spend five to eight hours a day reading books after school. Read read read. I loved it. I was good at the other subjects, too.
Fast forward. I enrolled in a magnet middle school in my county, which basically means that, on average, I was around smarter, more-like-me students. Then, I was admitted to an IB high school program, which at the time and I think still today is the best public school education you can get in the area. Fast forward some more. I got into a bunch of elite colleges, and I decided to attend Harvard. Yeah, the one in Boston haha.
And Now I'm Here
I’m 23 years old, almost 24, and sometimes I get a bit confused about how I got to today. It’s part of life, right? I have a job in wall street finance. My degree at Harvard ended up being in Applied Math (not that relevant a detail I suppose). I like the direction my life is headed in, which is really by definition because I make all my own choices. I don’t always love it, but I haven’t really met someone that does always love life. When I do meet someone like that, I certainly think they are weird. Regardless though, we only have our one life, and I do think we should strive to live it (virtuously) instead of letting time take the majority. So yeah, welcome to Erick’s Thoughts. It’s really me.
Thank you for sharing your insight–I am anxious to read more. Also, I may be one of the weird ones who always loves life–I mean what is the alternative 🙂 Thank you for doing this–I believe that you have something important to say.