When I stopped being a kid
Kind of a rite of passage (123/365)
(I’ve been thinking about writing this post since last week, but I evaded it because writing about coming-of-age seemed complicated. Today, I decided to go for it. Here I go.)
There’s a guy at Harvard who developed a theory twenty years ago on how adults make meaning of their experiences, and explained that everyone—of course—could be categorized into different stages according to their mental development.
These are the most relevant ones, according to Dr. Robert Kegan:
Socialized Mind (around 58% of the population): Their sense of self is shaped by external expectations—what others think of you, social norms, authority figures, and they struggle to take a critical stance toward those external expectations.
Self-Authoring Mind (around 35% of the population): They develop their own internal value system and identity, critique societal expectations, and choose their own path.
Self-Transforming Mind (1% of the population): They recognize the limitations of their own systems and are open to other perspectives. They see identity and belief systems as fluid, and have the capacity to hold multiple, often conflicting, perspectives.
I can clearly identify when I started to move from The Socialized Mind to the Self-Authoring Mind, and who pushed me in that direction.
It was during high school, and three names come to mind: Yanill Brancaccio, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar.
First, a bit of backstory.
Religion in our house was not that important during my infancy. That changed when my siblings and I were moved to school run by Opus Dei, a very strict Catholic institution. I was expected to start third grade in my new school.
Since then, our life as a family and my life as a student changed. We were now part of a community that expected you to be, think, and read somehow.
When I began reading fiction on my own—around junior high—I was already told what I could read and what I couldn’t.
During high school, that expectation was intensified: There were forbidden books and suggested books.
Then, we started the IB (International Baccalaurate Program) which included Theory of Knowledge, a class about how we know what we claim to know.
When we got our syllabus for the first year, we quickly looked at the professors names. We recognized most of them, from older cohorts—the Math guy, the Spanish Literature professor, the legendary History teacher.
There was one name we hadn’t heard before: Yanill Brancaccio, our Theory of Knowledge professor.
Yanill was from Mexico City, had studied Philosophy, and had a really cool rebel vibe. It was, know that I think about it, our John Keating, a man who challenged us for the first time.
To be honest, he still was part of the system, kind of. He studied at the Universidad Panamericana, a private college ran by Opus Dei in Mexico City.
To me though, he sure was different enough.
During one of our first classes, we were asked to read a short text by the Argentinean Julio Cortázar titled Instructions on How to Climb a Ladder. Here’s the text’s first half:
No one will have failed to observe that frequently the floor bends in such a way that one part rises at a right angle to the plane formed by the floor and then the following section arranges itself parallel to the flatness, so as to provide a step to a new perpendicular, a process which is repeated in a spiral or in a broken line to highly variable elevations.
Ducking down and placing the left hand on one of the vertical parts and the right hand upon the corresponding horizontal, one is in momentary possession of a step or stair.
Each one of these steps, formed as we have seen by two elements, is situated somewhat higher and further than the one prior, a principle which gives the idea of a staircase, while whatever other combination, producing perhaps more beautiful or picturesque shapes, would be incapable of translating one from the ground floor to the first floor.
Everyone was stunned:
WTF is this.
We—I?—eventually thought that it was funny.
Then, we got into larger texts from him, each one weirder than the last.
One day, he introduced Borges to us.
Jorge Luis Borges, also an Argentinean writer, is a very sui generis guy. He wrote mostly short stories, as well as essays, and some poetry.
He is a surreal writer obsessed with the concept of infinite and with labyrinths. He explored how memory, dreams, and time affect personal identity, sometimes suggesting that the self is an illusion.
My all-time favorite Borges book is a collection of small stories titled Aleph. There, he writes one—El Aleph—about how he personally discovered a tiny sphere that shows everything at once: every person, every place, every moment—simultaneously and without distortion in the basement of a friend in Buenos Aires.
Three others stuck with me, from this and other books:
The Immortal: A Roman soldier sets out to find the legendary City of the Immortals. He eventually discovers it. Over time, the main character realizes that immortality is a curse, not a blessing. Without death, life becomes meaningless, actions lose urgency, and identity begins to dissolve.
The Library of Babel: Borges imagines a universe that is a library—an infinite, hexagonal maze of books, most of which are gibberish, but some of which contain truth. Or lies. Or one letter. Or your life story.
In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Borges discovers a secret society that invents an imaginary world—Tlön—with its own languages, logic, and philosophy. Over time, fragments of Tlön begin appearing in reality, suggesting that fiction can overtake and reshape the real world.
Whatever, the point is that these readings, and the discussions that emerged were extraordinarily refreshing to me.
It was the first time I read outsider texts, essays, books and stories written by people who were very different from me.
Indirectly, they helped me challenge the environment I was in, a series of social norms based on Catholicism that seemed to shape everything.
I didn’t do anything rebellious after that class, true, but those ideas stuck with me, and eventually helped me break out of some/most of those social norms that governed me many years later, when I needed it the most.
Thanks for reading!
#day123