Congratulations. By picking up this piece of prose you’ve started your journey to becoming me, Robert Shoykhet. Before you embark on such a journey, it may be a good idea for me to explain exactly what being Robert Shoykhet entails. If you are a human being who can appreciate hard work, isn’t too fond of being the center of attention, is good at math and science, and loves sports, then I’m afraid to say that this is the wrong journey for you. Perhaps you’d be better off trying to be Jerry Jock or Mandy Math. But if you’re the kind of person who loves a little attention, is almost offensively outgoing, isn’t that fantastic at math, and likes to believe they’re unique but is realistic enough to know they’re not, then I congratulate you once more, because you’ve stumbled upon the right journey for you.

You begin by being born not in the United States, but in Odessa, Ukraine, which, for those of you who don’t know, is part of the former Soviet Union. The first language you learn to speak is Russian. At the age of three and a half, your family decides it would be a fun idea to move out of the Soviet Union, which has just collapsed, and to the wonderful mysterious land to the west, the United States of America.

After a brief, one night stay in a New York City airport, you, your parents, and your grandparents relocate to Dewitt, New York, and more specifically to the residence of your aunt and uncle, on Cayton Drive, which is currently still located where it was located then, across the street from Le Moyne College. Your first memory about seeing your aunt and uncle and being in this new country for the first time is the scrambled eggs that your aunt had made you as soon as you arrived. You recall that the only thing you thought was that they tasted no different than the scrambled eggs you ate in Ukraine, and for that reason you had some amount of difficulty wrapping your three-and-a-half year-old mind around why exactly this move was such a big deal.

You spend a few years in that apartment complex on Cayton Drive, where you have some experiences and learn some things that will surely benefit you in your future. For example, you learn to speak and read English. That’s a pretty big accomplishment for you. You go to preschool for approximately one semester, but then are pulled out by your parents because you constantly complain about how much you dislike it. At a later age, you will learn that complaining constantly does in fact not always work.

At the older, but still young age of five, your family moves to Fayetteville for a multitude of reasons, the main two being the fact that they bought a house, and the fact that they heard that the school system in Fayetteville-Manlius was much better than the one in Jamesville-Dewitt. At a later age, you’ll come to realize that that isn’t necessarily as true as your parents thought it was.

This is the part of the story where you might expect to hear that at this point in the journey, you realize how much you hate Fayetteville, how much you hate the situation you’re living in, and how much you generally hate life. If that is the part of the story you were looking for, feel free to skip ahead to the middle of the second page of this lovely little journey of ours, because at the moment, I’m afraid to tell you that you in fact love Fayetteville. You love the feeling of being surrounded by trees, you love the big backyard you’ve got, you love your new house, and you love Mott Road Elementary School. You love everything about your situation right now. As a child under the age of ten, you’re more than thrilled at the idea of sharing a room with your closest family member, your grandmother. Once you grow older of course, you realize that that idea is not as appealing as it once was.

You slide through Elementary School with what can be described as a minimum of hassle. Sure, there’s the odd parent-teacher conference that makes your heart sink here and there, the occasional friend drama involving one of your friends supposedly “stealing” another friend’s copy of Pokémon Silver for the Gameboy Color, but these are all just fond, fuzzy memories now.

The first two years of Middle School for you are relatively uneventful. You have a terrible fifth grade year. You suffer from the worst grades you’ve ever gotten, and the adaption to a new school feels a lot harder than it used to. Just a week after school starts, something happens in the world that changes you as a person a great deal: September 11th. On 9/11, the image of the world that you’ve had in your head since before you can remember is ripped into shreds, shot by a firing squad, thrown into a herd of stampeding buffalo, injected with a poison, buried in a very expensive graveyard, only to become the neighborhood dog’s favorite urination spot. The world you once thought was friendly, fair, just, and over all a happy-go-lucky place turns out not to be so nice after all. This makes you rethink not only your own view on the country in which you live in, but also on society in general, and you go through a period of thought that is most likely far too analytical for a fifth grader to go through. You question how good your country’s leadership could be if they’ve managed to upset others in the world so badly. You begin to feel bad about yourself for thinking such things when everyone around you is becoming not less, but more patriotic. As time goes on, more people around you begin to agree, and you feel better about your political views.

Sixth grade is another year of change for you. Your grandparents, with whom you’ve lived for your entire life, move out. To be fair, they don’t move all that far, only to Dewitt. But to you, they’ve just moved to Timbuktu. You feel as though you’ll never see them again, you feel as though you’ve just lost the people who raised you, and you suffer what can only be described as your first emotional breakdown. You cry for a somewhat longer-than-usual amount of time, and you become what some may call a hermit. And although this period of grieving in your life only lasts for about three days, it still helps to shape the person you become at the grand conclusion of this fantastic journey.

In seventh and eighth grade you really come into yourself, as the expression goes. You become more involved in your group of friends, and for the first time you have what are called “close friends”. Instead of just people you hang out with or trade Pokémon cards with, you now have people who you can share your thoughts and feelings with, and discuss more serious subjects with. For the first time you can trust someone other than yourself. You’ve always trusted your parents, but it’s always been too awkward to actually talk to them about things that matter. And talking to yourself gets boring, and makes you begin to question your own sanity, which is most likely not a healthy thing to be doing at the tender age of thirteen.

Also in these two years, you discover music. Originally, it’s because your friends got you into a little band from California by the name of Green Day. But soon you quickly branched out into U2, The White Stripes, and classic rock like David Bowie, Queen, The Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. Now you suffer from a condition that has not yet been discovered, but can be simply described as a physical addiction to music, to the point where if you don’t hear music for more than an hour you actually contract headaches. Luckily, a simple cure is just to hum a song, which is useful when you go to a school that has a strict no music policy.

This rule is something that catches you a bit off-guard when you get into high school.  You don’t understand why you can’t listen to your iPod when you have a free period, it just doesn’t make sense. Banning music to you sounds just as crazy as banning smiling or banning happiness in general. You whine, you complain, you have long discussions with the people in power at your school and get absolutely nothing accomplished, except the realization that no one, not even the administration, knows exactly why the rule actually exists.

Of course, if this was the only thing that bothered you about high school, you wouldn’t be a very good teenager at all, would you? Of course not! Which is why this is the moment where we throw in some more problems into your life. Freshman year is the worst year of school you’ve had yet. Socially and academically, it’s just a disaster. You hate your classes, you hate yourself, and even your friends have now changed from generally nice and drama-free people to dramatic, scheming, backstabbing Neanderthals. You sink into a depression that lasts until sophomore year, where everything seems to magically become… perfect.

Sophomore year is your best year, possibly the best year of your life so far. You succeed in your classes, you gain a lot of new friends, including some who are actually considered “popular”, and you meet the love of your life: theatre. Okay, that might be a tad overdramatic, but come on! It’s theatre! You grow to love acting, being on stage, getting attention, and watching people do the same. You become a core member of the FM Improv club, and decide that that’s your favorite form of theatre. Sophomore year has so many great things about it that nothing can possibly get in the way.

Then, like a sudden crash of thunder, like a sudden shattering of a window, like a sudden tornado demolishing your house while you’re out partying, a black shadow is cast upon your happiness. This black shadow’s name: Junior year. I lied when I said that freshman year was the worst year for you. Academically at least, junior year is the pits for you. Your grades drop lower than you thought was even possible. It seems like they have to invent new letters of the alphabet to signify on your tests how low your grades are. Okay, I’ll be honest, that’s probably another over dramatization. But that’s how it felt.

Socially, junior year is actually your best year. You have more friends than ever before, and for the first time you actually feel like you not only fit in, but also like people actually respect you and look up to you, which is actually a very delightful feeling to someone who loves attention as much as you do. You also are talked into doing the fall play for the first time this year, and you audition with a monologue you don’t feel that great about, but you still get a very fun role. You have a blast doing it, and come out of it with a lot of great memories. You leave junior year feeling very good about yourself, despite the poor academics. Over all, you view it as a social success, and most of your fondest memories come from this year.

Now you enter your final year of high school. Congratulations, your journey has finally come to its conclusion! You’ve mastered the art of being Robert Shoykhet, and can now go on to becoming people who are more interesting and who have lived more compelling lives, like Ernest Hemingway or John Lennon. Of course, they’re dead, so you might be better off just sticking to your first choice.