Around puberty, I immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean. At that age, migration is not only a change of place. It is a change in weather, language, rhythm, hierarchy, and expectation. You arrive at the very moment when everyone around you is already learning how to become a person, and you have to do that work while also learning how to belong. Looking back, I can see that much of my development happened through absorption. I took in the voices, tastes, values, and ambitions of the worlds around me. Some of that was adaptation. Some of it was survival. Over time, it became something more deliberate: the way I built a mind.
I noticed that tendency even before I left home. A relative visited my family in the Caribbean, and after spending time around them—hearing them speak, talking with them, listening closely—I began to sound like them. It happened quickly enough that it stayed with me. At the time it was just a small, almost funny change. In retrospect, it feels like an early clue. I was the kind of person who absorbed the atmosphere around me and carried it into myself. Long before I had language for identity, I already had the instinct for imitation. I was, in that sense, a chameleon before I knew the word.
That instinct followed me to New York. I attended middle school near the Museum of Natural History, where the social world was less organized by official categories than by atmosphere. Students sorted themselves into recognizable groups. There were the preppy kids, the urban boys, and the urban girls. Those labels were crude, but that was how the social world appeared to me then: not as a theory, but as a field of forces. I drifted naturally toward the urban boys. Part of that was affinity. Part of it was pressure. Middle school teaches hierarchy quickly and often cruelly. You learn how people talk, what earns ridicule, what signals strength, and what kind of softness has to be hidden. Belonging required adjustment, and I adjusted.
Music became one of the first languages through which that adjustment happened. I still remember English class more clearly than I remember the teacher’s name. I remember Night by Elie Wiesel. I remember Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I remember, too, the possibility of Hot 97 entering that room somehow—through a discussion, through a radio, through the general seepage of the culture into school life. However it happened, that was one of my first real encounters with Hip-Hop and R&B. For a kid trying to understand a new country and a new social grammar, that music was not just entertainment. It was instruction.
Music mattered to me because, at that age, I did not fully know how to express myself. I was verbally intelligent, but intelligence and expression are not the same thing. Culture shock can narrow you. It can make you inward even when your mind is active. Music gave me a way around that narrowing. It gave me cadence, confidence, emotional permission. Styles P gave me a language for introspection and feeling. Jay-Z represented confidence, ambition, and a broader horizon of possibility. Later Cam’ron entered that world too, and with him a different kind of style and self-presentation. Those artists did not merely shape my taste. They gave me vocabulary—emotional, social, and aspirational. They helped me say things inwardly before I could say them outwardly.
What is striking to me now is not that I was influenced by them, but how thoroughly influence became a method of self-construction. The same habit that once helped me absorb accents and social codes later turned toward intellectual life.
While music gave me a language for emotion, computers gave me a language for curiosity. My mother attended City College, and while she was in class, I used her ID to spend time in the library on the computers. I was not doing anything advanced then. The point was exposure. I learned familiarity before I learned technique. A machine can become meaningful long before you understand its internals. Sometimes all it takes is repeated contact: the screen, the keyboard, the sense that an entire world sits behind the interface waiting for someone to take it seriously.
That curiosity became concrete when my mother helped me get a summer internship through New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program at LaGuardia Community College. At the same time, I was spending time in IRC networks and around online friends who cared intensely about assembly language, C, Perl, machine-level code, file formats, and operating-system architecture. Those were not ordinary teenage interests, but they were exactly the right influences for me. They sharpened my attention. Then the internship gave that attention somewhere to go.
LaGuardia was a learning lab in the truest sense. I did not first learn computers as abstractions in a textbook. I learned them through tickets, broken machines, parts, repetition, and responsibility. I learned what it meant to replace a floppy drive, a CD-ROM, a CPU. I learned by accompanying full-time technicians, then eventually by being trusted to do things on my own. There is a certain kind of confidence that only comes from touching the thing itself—unscrewing the case, diagnosing the issue, putting it back together, seeing that it works. At some point curiosity crosses over into competence. What had begun as fascination became skill, and skill began quietly turning into vocation.
That turning point became unmistakable later, when I went back to the helpdesk manager to ask for a reference for a job at CompUSA. I thought I was asking for a line on a résumé. Instead, he offered me a part-time job at the college. That moment mattered because it confirmed something larger: computers were no longer simply one of my interests. They had become one of the ways I could move through the world.
The same pattern repeated itself in reading. My social world shifted again through online influences, and one of my acquaintances introduced me to Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters.” I read the essay, then the book, and found in it a way of thinking that was both technical and literary. Not long after, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder made an even deeper impression on me. It did more than inform me; it enlarged my imagination. It made technical work feel not merely useful, but dramatic—full of obsession, craft, ego, and devotion.
Then came Donald Knuth. I bought his books long before I could properly understand them: The Art of Computer Programming, Concrete Mathematics, 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated. In one sense, I was reaching beyond my level. In another, I was doing what I had always done: absorbing not only information, but models of mind. Even the story of the missing volumes—books returned to the sender because I failed to collect them in time—has stayed with me. I could not yet fully enter Knuth’s work, but I recognized the shape of the mind behind it, and that recognition mattered. Influence is not always comprehension. Sometimes it is aspiration.
Other influences entered from different directions. My high school specialized in economics and finance, and I took accounting seriously enough to learn how to keep a ledger. Later, working at the community college, I used that knowledge in GnuCash to organize my own finances. Through one of my social circles I encountered Warren Buffett, and what fascinated me was not just wealth, but method: the idea that discipline, patience, and clear thinking could compound into something extraordinary. That same attraction to discipline surfaced elsewhere too. I loved running for the clarity it gave me, and later I found a similar clarity in weight lifting. Eventually the gym replaced running as my main tool for mental order. Looking back, those interests—finance, fitness, software, mathematics—do not seem as separate as they once did. All of them appealed to the same part of me: the part that craved structure, repetition, refinement, and measurable progress.
By the time I reached NYU, those many influences had stopped feeling like disconnected borrowings and started to feel like an adult life taking shape. NYU contributed to my maturity not simply through academics, but through space—space for introspection, for synthesis, for asking what all these borrowed voices had become inside me. When I was younger, influence often felt immediate and total. I entered a room, a group, a sound, a field of thought, and I absorbed it. Maturity did not erase that tendency. It changed my relationship to it. It taught me that growing up is not a matter of discarding your old influences as if they were embarrassments. It is a matter of learning how to carry them differently.
That, finally, is what I think happened to me. I did not become myself by protecting some untouched original core from the world. I became myself by passing through many worlds and allowing them to leave a mark. Migration sharpened that process, but it did not create it. I was always inclined to absorb the atmosphere around me. What changed over time was that absorption became less passive and more chosen. The social worlds of adolescence gave way to intellectual ones. Taste became judgment. Curiosity became craft. Admiration became aspiration.
There is no pure, original self waiting behind all of that, and I no longer think there needs to be. The voices I absorbed—musical, technical, literary, disciplinary—did not erase me. They made me. What remains is not a contradiction, but a composition: a mind shaped by adaptation, steadied by work, and slowly brought into coherence by the things it loved enough to imitate.
Comments
Post a Comment