Thick flakes of snow trickled from the sky, fluttering past my face, rounding the edges of the gray forest. With each breath the cold air burned my nose, mingling with the smell of the hazelnut coffee clutched between my gloved hands. The cool, metal railing of the tree stand confined me to the yard-long bench perched twenty feet from the ground. Glancing sideways, I saw my father, the same coffee clutched between his hands, his grey eyes scanning the forest for movement, ice freezing in his beard.
My heart swelled. I loved hunting with my father. Waking up early, sitting in the cold, enjoying the silent camaraderie and companionship, laughing and whispering to pass the time. But the love was bittersweet, because for every laugh and cup of coffee my father and I shared, there were other, far different moments we shared.
I thought of my father’s anger, the moments he yelled at my siblings and I, telling us we brushed our teeth wrong, or that we closed doors incorrectly. I thought of the times I had to re-mow the lawn because he said the lines were not perfectly straight. I thought of all the afternoons I spent hiding in my room with my little brother, trying to stop him from crying, of all the times I did homework by flashlight because he could not sleep with any lights on in the house. I thought of how emotionally drained I felt after I helped put Ben to bed every night.
As I shivered in the cold, my mind wandered to a night I spent talking with my sister. I had been berated earlier that day for chewing too loudly, another one of his endless critiques. Perched cross-legged on her bed, she looked me in the eye. “Jordan,” she said, “Dad’s narcissistic. He thinks of himself as the center of the universe. He wants ultimate control and praise, but you can’t blame him for everything. Yes, he has his faults, but we all do, don’t we? Jordan you have to separate the things he says that hold no weight and the things he says that have value. He may not say them in the right way, but if you continue hating him, eventually you may end up like him.”
After thinking about what she said, I realized what made those cold mornings with my father so important. All the walking and coffee breaks were not about the elusive deer or the bitter brew; they were about separating my father’s love and good intentions from his anger and control; they were about understanding how his constant unemployment, unflagging narcissism and bouts with alcohol did not excuse his actions, but contextualized them. Instead of his narcissism, I saw the intelligent, driven man whose dreams and ideas never reached fruition; I saw the depressed man who took the stress of the world on his shoulders, but refused to share it. As I listened to him, I began to see more and more of how he thought, and I began to understand him.
In the same way I’ve worked to look beyond my father's exterior, I want to pursue a deeper understanding of the world around me. I want to explore the unique intricacies of the ‘social contract’, diving deeper into the interlocking set of social pressures that drive human relationships. I want to examine neural maps, the molecules and that make them up, and how their interactions cause feelings of pain or ecstasy. I want to examine software beyond its code, and research the way electrons flow through microprocessors so that I can devise better, faster and more efficient ways to compute data. Through my father, I’ve learned that the world around me is a multilayered organism, and I want to take the time to look past its surface and understand its underlying complexities.