What Happened to Chutzpah?

Now that I’ve boasted about my reconnection to my inner chutzpah, you might wonder why it took me 37 years to find it. That’s a fair question, and one that may take some time to answer. Why don’t we begin at the beginning?

Her name was Mrs. Seymour. She was my first grade teacher and she was purely evil. No, this is not just the warped assessment of a five-year old. She could have been the subject of a B-rated horror film. Everyone in the first grade agreed with this, and I’m sure that many of my former classmates also still remember her name.

The experts say that early childhood is the formative time in a person's life. Well then, I was screwed from the start. Sure, I wasn’t the only one who was tormented by Mrs. Seymour, but I was her favorite outlet. I was always frail – in fact, as a child I was prone to fainting spells and other maladies that were all attributed to some sort of personal malfunction and simple lack of endurance. It wasn’t until years later I would realize that these were signs of worse things to come. But, we’ll get into that later.

My frailty made me an easy target from day one. I internalized everything. When Mrs. Seymour aimed her anti-Semitic ire at me, I stayed silent. When Mrs. Seymour assigned me to a learning disability class, my silence tricked everyone into thinking that I actually needed the special attention. I never threw tantrums. I never told Mrs. Seymour to leave me alone. I sat quietly with my notebook and my Hardy Boys lunchbox, yet somehow that behavior seemed to invite Mrs. Seymour’s rage. The persecution became a daily ritual.

After making it through the first grade, my family was notified by the special education teacher that she actually planned to recommend me to the gifted program. She had been using the time we had together in our daily tutorial sessions to teach me advanced material. It was her opinion that there must have been a personality conflict between me and Mrs. Seymour. I would agree with that because Mrs. Seymour was evil and I was, um, five.

My parents fought with the school board to get me transferred to a better school 30 minutes away in Alexandria, VA, where I easily tested out of the special education program. I thrived at that school but it took a while to outgrow lessons from the first grade.

I don’t mean to suggest that I have gone through life incapable of navigating the hardships. On the contrary, I have consistently gotten up when I think a lot of other people would have given up. Indeed, I really enjoyed hearing Joe Biden speak of his father’s favorite philosophy that when you fall, you get up. That belief really resonates with me. It just took a long time for me to recognize those strengths in myself. I also think that I was so busy fighting battles, I sometimes forgot what I was fighting for. But thankfully that’s all starting to change. I can't even recall what Mrs. Seymour looked like. And that’s change I can believe in.