Perfection

by Sam Garufi

Everybody, I would imagine, believes that they’re a capable person within the environment that they grew up in. That where they’re placed, their mental character is given a due respect and kindness by those around them. I certainly believed in my early years that I was somehow a capable person just like everyone else. Yet, looking back on the challenges of what I faced in my early school years, I realize how tough it was back then for me to find what that capability was for me as I grew up and acquired a real life.

When I was really young in the early 2010s, I imagined myself to be a curious and smart thinker because I learned to appreciate the leisure of reading from my mother. It had been a thing I was constantly surrounded by as a kid as books were literally everywhere my eyes could see. It had become essentially a routine activity in my early life. By the end of every other week of my speech and language therapy, my mother would take my siblings and I to either a Friendly’s or McDonalds for a quick bite and then on to a Barnes and Noble or the Tatnuck in Westborough to get books. 

My mother had been an active teacher for fourth grade and still currently is. She desperately wanted me and the rest of my siblings to imbibe the importance and love of reading like she had. Instead of letting us watch TV for more than a few hours each day, she downloaded these “reading games” on the family iPad, where, if we completed a special educational task on the app, we’d receive a real reward in exchange. It was mostly either extra screen time or to go and get another book—which I won’t lie, worked very well on me. After many months of fidgeting on the iPad, I had purchased, read, and enjoyed the entire Magic Tree House series from the first book to however many there were at that time. I felt deeply proud of this achievement and I read other series later on that were similar.

I don’t believe I ever disliked reading when I was younger. Of course, there were many books that I found uninteresting simply because of how they looked and being a young kid, too, I would definitely have chosen screen time over having to do any type of reading if allowed. However, there would be brief periods where I would attempt to read at least something whenever I found the spark or if my mom emphasized to me that I should really be spending my time developing my brain more. I don’t believe I really heeded my mother’s notions of the gift of reading as astutely as I do now, and as I transitioned into a young boy a dream of intellectualism as a means of obtaining social respectability began to transform me and how I saw myself alongside my peers as I grew up.

Through elementary and early middle school, I was not as academically upright as I would be in later years. I had struggled, hard, for many years due to my anxiety in learning to process and compartmentalize different subjects and form them into ideas and concepts. It was tough enough that I even had to be removed from the class environment in order to have one-on-one support on basic things so that I could proceed with the rest of the class. It felt incredibly tedious and individualizing, but I understood roughly that it was all towards trying to help me. But still, it always seemed like a burden to me as I missed out on most of the lessons that the other kids were learning. I felt separated from them in a way each time I had to leave and I was ashamed of it. I was removed from people who I could’ve been better acquainted with and who I felt didn’t ever need a crutch like I did in order to get through school. 

By the second half of middle school, things improved (although I was still being taken out of the class). My grades were way better than they’d ever been, but I still felt apart from everyone else. I would feel fine around my familiar group of friends, but I would never know how to talk with anybody who I was not directly familiar with. There was no good approach that I could come up with and it felt so intimidating. I don’t believe I knew what sort of potential I carried at that age, and I tended to just avoid talking with most people throughout the day and let my other friends do the talking. It was a memorable middling period, but one that I remember I walked through in silence.

 When I eventually arrived in high school, I had become ambivalent about my own abilities as a reader and as an academic. All or most of my friends seemed like the best of the very best in school, both socially and academically. Some were in athletics, others were familiar with the popular circles. Those who I’d looked towards the most happened to be placed in all the best classes that I could think of, like math, science, physics, and Spanish. When I was around them, during or after school, it felt to me like some of them knew absolutely everything about almost anything I could conceive. They were participating in town fundraisers, popular extra-curricular activities after school, and making acquaintances my age and older. Just having, overall, the best time of their early academic young adult lives. 

Meanwhile, in my quiet and unmoving state, I was not doing any of those things that I thought were so grand. I was taking courses not as intense as theirs, courses that involved mainly reading and writing, rather than science and figures, which I believed were more impressive. I participated in two clubs: the art club and chorus, and I felt like I couldn’t branch out further like some of them. I had begun to obsess about it often in my mind from day to day. Questioning over and over again why it was possible for them to achieve all of what they were doing, and not me. I didn’t know where my progression or growth was going and it sure felt like it was heading nowhere.

The mental spiral that I created due to these thoughts eventually convinced my consciousness to think that I could never be them in life at all, that I could never achieve anything to their towering level. What I would do in class, I would imagine them doing ten times more. They became the invisible academic idols that I looked up to, not personality-wise because they sucked in that category, but in the way I also wanted to accomplish things with utter ease. To me, they had held everything that I could dream of and were going to go and get opportunities that I wanted to get, where my path was not leading me down. And so with intense stress and determination, I worked hard to be able to see myself as them in their light and be as capable of achieving things to their scale. And the really funny thing about this is that I succeeded and achieved in that category by more than a mile—yet my mind had convinced me that my achievements were simply not like theirs. And my friends had only made those inferior feelings much worse. 

Whenever I was out with them, playing basketball in town or playing video games online, they sometimes joked about how clueless I seemed to be. They didn’t think I had a brain, it seemed, and they found that amusing. I had hung around them long enough to feel the harsh burn of their insults that were in the guise of banter, and I knew already that it was not a new thing amongst them to do. It was a rather typical boy thing to do where I come from: to poke fun at each other's flaws and lightly insult them like they were compliments. I was never fully able to escape them, since they were the only ones I knew well enough and long enough in school to truly put up with. It was either to suck it up and be with them or to be outcasted and walk the halls alone, and so I decided to remain with them for my entire high school career. 

Everyone, whilst I was in that group, had a particularly favorite word that they always shot out with zealous passion when we were all together. It is a word that nowadays has no other significance other than as an insult. And they would be both right and wrong, I would argue. Indeed, it is a word meant to be used as a playful weapon in arguments, but in its original targeted form, its usage could cut deep and wound inextricably. It was the word 

 “retarded”, of course, and it was thrown around casually like a game of hot potato. It didn’t matter who you were or what you did. If you ever happened to say something wrong, like not knowing some trivial fact, or if you were missing some form of common sense that you weren’t aware of in a specific instance, that ugly word was handed to you by my friends generously as a gift. 

It was almost second nature for them to say it in certain conversations, even the ones who I idolized the most. The sound of that word felt like an exclamation point after every sentence they spoke. It became such a normalized thing to say that nobody ever questioned its harm. It was more often than not handed down to a few of my friends who were in the same boat as me, who couldn’t seem to do anything right. What that word spelled to those friends, and what felt like the whole school at that point, was that I and my closest buddies were flawed, broken, and mentally incapable to handle the world…we were in fact considered to be worse than stupid. 

{“Sam, you’re fucking retarded!”}

Race would also be associated with this word too, as I would discover. Although I couldn’t piece it together fully, I knew it was never a good thing when they combined them. That word “Guatemalan” would come up once and awhile. Some of my friends would look at me eagerly, and I would be confused about what they were trying to imply when we were in a conversation. I knew relatively in my head it was just another substitute for something derogatory or insulting towards my intelligence. And so I mindlessly replied back in acquiescence like I didn’t have a clue that there was even a problem with them saying it.

I took their “jokes” aside for the real prize that I desired. How they had achieved things became precious to me, and I carried that covetous gemstone around the most in my mind as a motivator. If we could not meet my eyes equally in person, I definitely could do so at a distance. Between junior and senior year, I began to read harder books, ones that pertained to more serious subjects: like Dostoevesky and Kurt Vonnegut. I imagined clearly that this would be a check to theirs. I was no longer the youthful Magic Tree House reader that my mother once knew. Instead of Sam the Incompetent Bastard, I became Sam the Capable Genius! 

HYAAAHHHHH!!!

I began to walk around the halls carrying all this new and learned information that I collected from reading inside of me. I felt like a secret spy amongst them hiding in plain sight. They didn’t really need to know the things that I knew. And besides… they probably wouldn’t even care if I told them. This hidden belief which I invented for myself felt fresh and newly intellectual, and it looked and worked way better than the physical one that I thought everyone believed (including me) was brainless and stupid. But in creating this persona, a growing conflict soon sprouted. No matter how much I achieved and worked endlessly to see that I could be successful, it never felt like enough.

Those academic and literary assignments that I wrote and read, that I typed, that I honorably handed in to the teacher—it all seemed like it was someone else's work. I couldn’t figuratively search for the name of whose they were, but they didn’t feel truly like my own.

The crisis that I had in that moment was forming a subconscious question that had been trailing me my whole life, one which I was unaware of. What did I think perfection was against everyone else? Who really was I as a person, under this so-called “perfection” that I held in such high regard? I couldn’t find a solution to these questions, because I didn’t possess an identity that could properly address it. As far as I could see, the only identity I had left was my name, which was just a plastic name tag slapped over my breast. The Guatemalan part didn’t exist for that matter. It felt to me like the people I was near in that moment didn’t want to see that other part of me. It became a transparent aspect of me. I was clueless about who I fit in with in school, and I became a human being without a background or a proper sense of himself. 

When I arrived in college for the first time and said farewell to the majority of my old high school buddies, I had no clue at that point who I was truly reading for. I was too busy to see most of them, and without their presence and all they encapsulated, what was my progress all for? Reading serious material had begun to absorb all my emotional essence. I had become too aware, and too emotionally drained to enjoy something simpler than seeing the realities of real and cruel life. Reading had become an unspoken competition that was against nobody but my own conception of perfection and what I thought my identity was: that it should be against everyone else’s. 

Whenever Guatemala or anything related to it came up in conversation, I felt invisible, like a mannequin standing idle in a busy mall. The only thing I remember about it was when I left the airport as a small infant. Besides that, my knowledge had ended there, and I’ve felt embarrassed to look back or I just haven’t questioned it. The things my friends made fun of me for were attached to this dusty identity that I had no knowledge of and what I refused to recognize out of pity. For me to be good in life, I imagined, I felt I had to create something completely out of the atoms and molecules of the thin air surrounding me. And that was a path that has since lost its shelf life.

Reading about Guatemala, it is not a word or a place that seems so distant to me now. What I find is within me, what I read in me, and what I see between my two other siblings growing with me side by side. It is the glimmering opal buried under the mud that has a richness consistent to all other things magnificent in this world. Guatemala and I are not an anomaly upon this Earth. My heritage is complex, creative, perfect, and indeed—capable.