In Brooklyn, NY, I was born November 1984 in the height of fear during the AIDS pandemic. People were dropping like flies. Someone who lived through the time said I was born into danger. If you ever thought I come across as gloomy or serious; this sets the scene for why. When I was a kid there was an air of death. Not just in New York but also in my upbringing. In my childhood, I remember going to cemeteries quite often on Sundays. Other parents took their kids to the beach on Sundays. My parents used to like to visit dead relatives to pay respects. I never quite understood the point, feeling instinctively we could connect to those who passed without having to visit a headstone. I remember thinking even then how morbid this activity was. Born to foreigners, I always felt myself unusual, an outsider. Having a birth defect on my right eye didn’t make me feel more so like everyone else. I spent the first 22 years of my life “cross-eyed,” a topic for a future thread (which I will come back to). But those first 22 years, while very formative, were not very easy. Marked by danger, I often found myself in situations that even at a very young age were quite uneasy. Like one time at the age of 8, when my new live-in nanny brought her random boyfriend over to our home while my parents were at work. How could an 8 year old know, if not by instinct, that this was dangerous? Needless to say, the nanny didn’t last very long and from the 3rd grade on I would take the school bus home and let myself in with my own keys and spend the next 3 hours alone until my father would come home from work. I spent a lot of time alone. I later went to public high school, passed through metal detectors every day that scanned for guns and knives, and took mass public transport by myself from a very early age. There were times when I was nearly molested on trains, nearly robbed, masturbated to or on, and so on and so forth. If you wonder why today I seem aloof or can come across as cold, it’s because I didn’t grow up with warmth. I wasn’t trusting and I couldn’t be. I grew up with a lot of solitude, in Brooklyn, and most of the time I had to figure things out for myself. As a mom now of 3, I look back at many of these experiences with utter shock, as I couldn’t imagine them for my own kids. Back then the experiences were normal, everyday. But ultimately it was these experiences that created a person who can figure things out on her own, can be resourceful and manage the array of “inner-city” personalities and situations with diplomacy and finesse, and these tools have proven invaluable in assessing the integrity of things and people, and reading and navigating situations in every area of life, especially in business. Street smarts. #brooklyn #bitcoin #mother
