Getting Away
A reflection by Gabriel Del Valle
3/28/20235 min read
A major turning point for me in rethinking my life, my skills, and abilities - both as a person and a professional - was when I got away from my childhood environment for the first significant time of my life. That point happened to be going to university, but it could be anything from a summer camp trip (if people still do those), it could be visiting family in a different part of the country, or anything where you have time to breath new and fresh air, so to speak.
In my new university environment, I was exposed to people with different ways of thinking and, maybe most importantly, people my age who didn’t have challenges like I had growing up. I went to public university in the middle of Pennsylvania that was majority white – this alone was a significant switch up from my majority-minority life in North Philadelphia. Most of the people I knew growing up were from the same general socio-economic situation living in generally the same environment with similar… issues, let’s call it. Issues like having to deal with drug addicts, or seeing and hearing shootings, or dealing with gangs in the neighborhood. The shift from Philly to the rural town of Indiana, Pennsylvania was worth its weight in gold. I started to talk and exchange with people from various economic situations, family situations, or even some people who had never seen colored people, which is probably a topic for a separate reflection.
What this change of scenery allowed was for me to compare notes with a large cut of people from all over the spectrum in a way that wasn’t previously possible. What I found, which may be obvious to many but not necessarily to me at the time, was that everyone had challenges. The kinds of challenges were different than the ones I grew up with, and, therefore, some of the lessons people learned were different, but what I really found was that the life I lived had actually prepared me quite well for life in general when comparing to my peers. As it turns out, living and growing up in a less-than-perfect situation gave me tools and practice to handle situations that some of my peers couldn't handle when mom, dad, brother, or sister weren’t around to help pick up pieces. For a fairly large number of my peers, university was the first time they were fully responsible for themselves, their decisions, and consequences of those decisions.
It’s no fault of anyone to experience real adversity or struggle alone at age 18, and it’s not wrong to get one’s first sting of reality at university – some say it’s the point – but for me it was interesting to have first-hand and prior knowledge that life doesn’t always necessarily care about you or pick the most convenient times to throw challenges your way. It was eye opening to experience other people experiencing that reality for the first time. It was interesting to be able to realize that I was ahead of the curve, in some specific ways, when it came to dealing with stressful or generally difficult situations or people. What was even more interesting is that when talking to people and learning about their background, I found common ground with other folks like me who didn’t come from amazing neighborhoods, or didn’t come from money, or didn’t come from highly educated families. We would talk about how life at this university simply wasn’t as hard as life “back home” (whether home was Philly, Pittsburgh, Chicago, or Shanghai) and we naturally found our ways through situations with grace where others might stumble.
However, the opposite was also true. I found out [quickly] that it can be difficult as a first-generation student with no familial or peer mentors with university experience to guide you through what to expect as a minority living and going to school 5+ hours away from all you know. I found out that adjusting to a new environment was extremely difficult when everything you’ve grown accustomed to from an environmental perspective is gone, and how that adjustment costs your mental resources, which takes away from what you should be focusing on. I was never an amazing student in high school who got straight As but I was a decent student who worked [reasonably] hard and regularly got As with Bs. My first semester at university I had a C average that promptly lit a fire under my ass. There’s great value in being humbled, too. And this change in environment definitely highlighted deficiencies in my life.
I say that to say this: as with nearly all things, there are two sides to any coin. If I hadn’t gotten out of my neighborhood at that early age, I wouldn’t have been able to realize what I was made of. I wouldn’t have recognized or appreciated the skills and abilities I had because they would have always been put towards surviving and not thriving. Also, I wouldn’t have realized that I had gaps in my life that stemmed from lack of experience. Sometimes – maybe often times – you must leave the familiar to realize that your way of living isn’t the only way, that your mindset in one place can't be the mindset in another with different people. You also learn that in a different context or environment you can grow more than you thought possible and shine brighter than expected. The truth is that there are places or situations that can be recipes for disaster if you stay there for too long EVEN if those places shaped you into someone who’s smart, strong, capable, and willing to achieve greatness. Another way to look at is with the adage of “too much of anything is a bad thing” (usually) – too much negativity, too much stress, too much of the same, too much of whatever “it” is can suck the life out of you over time. In such cases, something as simple as creating space from it to recover and realize there’s a better way could be just what the doctor ordered.
An analogy I think of is in related to fighting. When you train in Muay Thai (a form of kickboxing), for example, you have to condition your legs, particularly your shins, to withstand pain that comes from kicking or blocking. One way to do this conditioning is by kicking the bottom of a heavy bag (typically used for boxing) where all the sand collects over time, which results in it being the hardest part of the bag. That hardness is, technically, causing destruction and stress to your leg by creating microfractures in the shin bone. But these microfractures – when given time to heal and recover – are what cause the leg to get better conditioned to handle more training, more punishment, more work. In the same way, challenges early in life can condition you for a life full of obstacle and less-than-ideal circumstances. At some point, though, you need to be removed or remove yourself from that environment to see that you have valuable life skills; skills that can be useful in other contexts whether it’s interpersonal or professional. However, if you’re always in that same place then you only learn about the pain of microfractures. You never see the benefit of that training, and eventually you just break down and can’t handle it anymore.
By the way, this initial conditioning of yourself because of where you come from is no-one’s doing. Just as I didn’t choose to be born in Philly, you didn’t choose to be born where you were, nor did others choose where they were born. That’s all chance, luck of the draw. So don’t judge yourself, and don’t judge others too harshly either. There are so many great ways to leverage where you come from for your success. What I’m encouraging here is to think and see that we all have opportunities to learn from our environment regardless of it being great or not-so-great. We can all be a little bit better if we take an open and positive approach to learning about ourselves. And we can do that by taking a chance at putting ourselves in a different circumstance that might help reveal who we really are to actively condition ourselves for a bigger and better life, even if it may be uncomfortable at first or humble us to our knees.