Emotions? What emotions?

For as long as I can remember, I knew I was adopted. It was never kept a secret from me at any point, which I feel was best thing for my parents to do. Naturally, there has always been a part of me that yearns to know my biological parents. I never thought I actually would…
My story is interesting, yet, unclear. At the time of my adoption, my adoptive father was only given a vague description of my background, and that’s all I know to this day. According to the story, my birth father is an American man living in Texas somewhere, and my birth mother is an Indian woman (from India) who was deported shortly after my birth. Funny thing is, I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and adopted in New Jersey. For whatever reason, only the name of my birth mother, Troupe George is listed on my original birth certificate. Because of this, I had always thought that it would be more likely to find her, if any of my birth parents.
My adoptive father has always been very supportive of my desire to find my birth parents. I could never even imagine what I would do if I did happen to meet them. I really never wanted to have any sort of ongoing relationship with them, because that would just be weird. I feel that what I want most out of this endeavor is to see my face in theirs. It would be so satisfying for me to see the very two faces that created mine. I could finally pinpoint the cause of my stubby fingers. I would actually have the opportunity to hear the real story.
Basically, I went all of my life thinking that the only way this would really happen is if they come to me, or I went on the Montel show, and had him do the work for me. Both of those scenarios, I realized were, most likely, not ever going to happen. So, around the time of May of last year, I took the first steps.
I did some research and was able get in touch with a woman named Debra, at the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS), here in Trenton. This is the headquarters of the adoption agency that handled my adoption. Debra provided me with all the information I needed to begin this process. The first step was to get my name on the national adoption registry, which is list of birth parents looking for their children and vice-versa. As soon as both parties are on the list, DYFS can then contact each party and provide them with the information of the other.
Prior to being added to the adoption registry, the only information Debra was authorized to give me was that my birth mother had been on the registry since 1990. This was absolutely shocking to me, so I quickly completed the application and got myself on that registry. About a month went by and I received an e-mail from Debra containing the address of my birth mother in Rajkot, India.
While Debra was very excited for me to contact my mother, I suddenly became unsure of the situation. Sure, I had waited twenty-one years for this information, but I was afraid to pursue it on my own. Debra offered to attempt to contact her for me, and without any hesitation, I consented. She went ahead and sent a letter to India with my current contact information. Months went by with no response or any indication of receipt. Eventually I put it to the back of my mind while I began to prepare for the fall semester.
It was about the last day in August when I woke up to find several missed calls from an especially strange phone number. Oddly, the phone calls occurred in the early hours of the morning, between 1:30 am to 4:30 am. Surprisingly, they left a voicemail.
I never thought, in my wildest dreams that I would ever be so frightened as a result of listening to a voicemail. “Hello, this is Ms. George calling from India… please call at…” For the first time in my life, I was legitimately scared. This event certainly stopped me in my tracks and filled me with more emotion than I had ever felt before.
I’m not a very emotional person, and when I am, I just suppress it, or, if anything, I’ll use anger to express emotion. But, this time, it was a different kind of emotion. For some reason, this time, I couldn’t suppress it, nor could I get angry about it. Instead, I was filled with an unexplainable fear. I’m never afraid of anything, which causes an abundant amount of problems in my life, yet, this event was so powerful it scared me.
For a few days, I walked around in a daze of uncertainty. It was so simple for my family and friends to tell me to just call her back. Maybe I was just not as ready as I thought I was for this awkward situation. Mostly, I think the problem is that I never imagined meeting her on the phone. I always thought that I would just meet them in person, or even exchange letters and pictures through the mail which would then lead to the phone call. I still have not called her back.
This event in my life has showed me that, sometimes, what you think will make you happy, might just take you by surprise and scare the hell out of you. This was something that I felt I was emotionally ready for all my life, since, in my opinion, I lack an average amount of emotion. This led me to believe that when the time came, it would be easy for me to deal with. I was surely proved wrong when I was overwhelmed with an array of emotions that I had never felt before, most of which I was unprepared to handle.
So, I never actually met my birth parents, yet, but I am now closer than I ever had been before. The ball is in my court, and its time for me to make the next move. I have finally come to terms with the situation, as well as my emotions and decided that, instead of calling her back, I’m going to write her a letter.

Success of Pie...Chart

The Success of Pie

The first thing that came to my mind when I thought of success was how I couldn’t help but to think of pie; the countless ingredients, the savory, wedge-shaped slices, the overwhelming sense of accomplishment that accompanies personal completion of the pie…

Perhaps, I was just hungry at the time, or, maybe not. Who really knows? The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t tell the two apart. After several hours of contemplation I was finally able to establish a meaningful link between success and pie. Then it clicked. From that point on, I knew that I would never look at pie the same again. I know that there is a great deal that must be accomplished before I can deem myself, or anyone, a true success. True success, to me, is the unique combination of all one would consider while discussing this topic: money, happiness, career choice, family and friends.

I have developed a personal success strategy, or, hypothetically, a recipe for “success pie.” Separately, success and pie, is, well, just, success and pie, but together they can be used to formulate a strategy for success. Creating my own Success pie, as I consider it, requires that I accomplish a number of specific goals, before I can think of myself as a total success. I believe that, within one’s lifetime, it’s possible to obtain several different types of success, such as financial success or career success. I think of these individual successes as entirely independent slices of the ‘success pie,’ which, eventually, if all goes well, will become a whole pie. This is when I will have achieved, what I consider, total success.

Of course, money is one of the more dense slices of my success-filled pie. I don’t think that excessive wealth is necessary to consider myself a financial success; however, it is important for me to be financially comfortable. If I were able to retire completely debt-free, after having put my children through college, with at least thirty years of spending cash, I would consider myself a financial success. For the record, though, I never said I would be opposed to being a millionaire, so long as it would not interfere with my personal endeavor of completing the pie to total success.

To some, career choice seems to be the determining factor when considering success. I can even admit that, at one time or another, I have considered an individual may be a successful person, based solely on his profession. For example, for one to assume that a Wall Street stockbroker is ‘successful’ because, after all, he is a Wall Street stockbroker (that spiffy suit sure is a nice touch, too!). Regardless of the fact, to me, career success is still only one piece of the pie, the success pie, that is. Career success is currently number one in terms of importance in my recipe for success pie. While, it is very important to me that I choose a career that pays well and is challenging, yet stable and secure, it is substantially more important to me that I am genuinely happy doing what I am doing. Ideally, in my terms, I will feel that I have reached career success when I can truthfully say that I look forward to going to and coming home from work everyday.

Family and friends, I’ve concluded, are definitely a vital piece of my success pie, which we’ll call, for lack of a better combination term, social success. I just may even go as far as to say that social success could, perhaps, be thought of as the ‘crust,’ or foundation of my success pie, because of its substantiality. One problem exists, however: ‘success crust’ is not an ingredient in my recipe for success pie, so we’ll stick to imagining the social success slice as another crucial piece of the success pie. I would like to argue that one cannot truly be happy without some network of family and friends, whether large or small. In this context ‘family’ may include any member of one’s family from a grandfather to a sibling or even one’s own spouse or child.

In my case, before I can officially toss the social success slice into the old pie pan, I will need to pay my dues to nature and procreate, in order to fulfill my natural responsibility as a living being. As a man, I believe that the ability to win the love of a woman and, subsequently, produce offspring are essential to fulfilling your natural responsibilities and, ultimately, success as a man. I mean, how could one actually consider ‘successful’ without having fulfilled the responsibilities that was intended by nature? I, for one, am impatiently looking forward to the day when I am complete as a man, and can begin to mold my own creation and contribution to society. I will then have achieved what I have been calling, social success. At this point, total success, as I define it, will be merely an arms reach away.

The final slice needed to complete my hypothetical ‘success pie’ will take no more effort on my part than the steps I had already completed. If my hypothesis regarding total success is theoretically accurate, I will, at that point, have fulfilled the requirements of happiness success, the final slice of the success pie.

To make a long story short, far after the fact, my standards and expectations of a successful person are unusually, and perhaps even, unnecessarily high. I doubt that I will never be able to lower my standards of success for others as it may, consequently, result in the lowering of my own personal standards of success. While I have explained that it’s possible to achieve different types of success- financial, career, social, happiness- I, personally, will consider an individual a total success only if they have achieved success in the aforementioned areas. Paul Mourry, a specialized robotics engineer and long-time family friend was the first man that I had known to have achieved this level of total success as I have defined it.

Mr. Mourry was able to retire at age 46 with all three of his kids still in college while he was able to take a vacation every week. The man never ceased to amaze me, and, as a result, set the standard for my vision of a successful individual. During a very recent conversation with Mr. Mourry, I could not help but to ask him for some advice on beginning a path to success. Mr. Mourry stressed, in his words, “The key to success is strategy.” He explained that he developed his success strategy while attending his final year of college, “I just needed to have a plan… everybody needs to have a plan. I called mine my ‘stepstool to success,’” He explained. Within just a few hours of talking to Mr. Mourry I had developed my own strategy to success. That is how the success pie came about.

Whether minor or not, one must be at least be aware of the intangible costs that can be expected. Developing and deploying a strategy for success will undoubtedly cost the average individual a great deal of time, effort, motivation and, in many cases, disappointment. However, these costs may seem rather insignificant once compared to some of the potential rewards associated with success. One of the best examples of such a priceless reward, such as the acquisition of happiness, can be, for some, the sole reason they had begun their journey to success in the first place.

There are many people who tend to argue in favor of contagious success, that is, success that can be passed on from person to person as if it was some sort of new strain of influenza. Under my personal criteria for success this could not be possible. However, it may be possible that it’s simply the actual desire to be successful that is actually contagious. Regardless, what I consider to be a successful individual is primarily the result of a well formulated and effectively implemented success strategy. For some people this can take many years to develop and perfect, so I feel that it is highly unlikely that true success can just be ‘passed on’ like some sort of ringworm outbreak.

Back to the pie. At first, I found it very difficult to find a meaningful relationship between success and pie, however, once one finally came to me, they wouldn’t stop coming. Pie just seemed to act as the perfect structure from which to build any type of effective strategy. Never underestimate the power of pie.