I started trying to find myself at a very early age.  I remember, at the age of six, standing in the middle of my father’s three part fitting mirror, centre panel with two folding panels on either side.  I saw myself reflected and wondered whether there was really another side to the glass where this reflected me lived.  When I started to fold out the two sides, the me’s multiplied.  I pressed myself tightly into the middle and pulled the two folding panels closed behind me.  I turned my head from side to side and in either direction I could see me’s going on forever.  Who were all those figures who looked like me?  Which then raised the other question:  Who was I?
 

I first came to perceive that “real me” not as a solid thing but as a plastic entity defined by how others saw me.  Of course the most important of these others were, from the start, my father, my mother and my brother.
 

My father played a relatively passive role in raising his two sons.  When I was very young, he was just that tall person, I saw occasionally and who could make me laugh by bouncing a ball on his head or helped my mother swing me when we went for walks in the park on Sundays. 
 

When I became more conscious of him around four or five he seemed very distant and self-absored and did not interact that much with the children.  Mostly, he was busy working in his tailor shop downstairs.  My mother took care of all our basic needs.  In addition, my father was a bit of an intellectual often seeming more concerned with ideas and books than with people, although he took an active part in making us clothing. 
 

At other times, he would seem to become enraged at the smallest frustration and he would bite his knuckle, sometimes drawing blood.  My brother told me my father would beat him with a strap when he was younger.  I don’t recall him doing the same with me.
 

My father in some ways doted on me.   He loved my success in school and was constantly praising me.  He got my mother to take part in doing a ritual, “What will you be when you grow up?” routine at a very early age.  When I was eight, my grade three teacher informed my parents that I was “university material” and that shaped our ritual from then on. 
 

“What will you be – a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer?  Maybe a druggist?”
 

I experienced this as pressure and resented it.  My brother, who did not do as well at school and was a bit of a roughneck also resented it but for different reasons.
 

And although my mother at first took part in this game, she too became tired of it and started to feel that my father was playing favourites.  Her attitude toward me also changed and she started to treat me more critically.   She praised my brother because he could manage repairs to mechanical things, he could use a hammer, wrench and screwdriver with finesse.
 

Now when we talked together as a family, I was told I was my father’s son and that I looked like him.  My brother was informed that he was my mother’s son and that he looked like her.   It felt like we were being divided up like the spoils of war and each of us was assigned a side in some kind of struggle for power.
 

I felt that my mother was casting me out of paradise and out of the place that her cute little son held in her heart.  I was too large to be little and cute and whenever she became angry with my father, she seemed to look at me and see his qualities.  So she became less patient and tolerant of me. 
 

The arguments in our household now started to rage constantly.   If we were painting a room together, my mother would dismiss my father’s ideas, berate his taste, his lack of interest in doing the work.  If I tried to do anything, I would invariably be holding the brush wrong, or not be tall enough to stand on the ladder or spill some paint “because you are a clumsy oaf”.   Usually, my brother and mother ended up doing all the work.  My father when he was there, often would have walked out in a huff and I was consigned to sitting and watching or to “go into another room and get out of the way.”

Because both my mother and father seemed, each for their own reason to move away from me emotionally, I ended up trying to imitate my brother more than anyone else.

My brother was my hero and much to his chagrin, I tried to follow him everywhere. Furthermore, he was the one who defined me. He gave me the name “Norm” that everyone in our school knew me by.  Although he was four years older, he ended up only two years ahead of me in school after I skipped a grade and everyone knew me as his younger brother.
 

At about this time my father had a nervous breakdown, because of the increasing stress of our lack of money and because he was inwardly blaming himself for not being able to rescue his family, not being able to convince anyone to run away with him to the Soviet Union, where he managed to survive.
 

He stopped talking.  He stopped eating.  He stopped sleeping.  His behaviour made my mother frantic. The dark circles around his eyes expanded as he lost weight.  His look became vacant.   If he was uncommunicative before, now he became almost autistic. My mother would plead and beg and yell that he had to try.  “You can’t give up.  You must try.”
 

When he started to simply go out and walk the streets all night, my mother could stand it no longer and called the doctor, who immediately diagnosed him as being depressed.  At times he seemed catatonic.  The doctor had him treated at the Psychiatric hospital where he underwent electro-shock treatments.
 

This had a calming effect on him but for a long time, he seemed quite strange to me, trying to hug and kiss me out of the blue, asking if I loved him and then saying before I had a chance to answer, that he was no good and a bad father or a bad husband or that he had mistreated my brother.
 

I had no idea how to address him and, being HIS son, the one who was like him and looked like him and who was his favourite, I acquired a little bit of his lack of self-worth.  In the internal battle in our family, I was on the losing side.
 

This was at the time of my brother’s bar mitzvah and, if anything, he became even closer to my mother.  My father had never been particularly easy to talk to until then.   After this, for a very long time, it was impossible.
 

For my part, I felt somehow I had to stick with my father.  That was my assigned part.  I found it harder and harder to talk to my mother who I felt did not react to me with understanding.  I later learned my brother had exactly the opposite experience and discovered he could talk to his mother about anything, even sex.  I am still envious that he ended up with the practical parent and I with the injured and wounded philosopher.
 

When I looked into the fitting mirror at this age, I strained to see the last face in the receding series of reflections, but there always seemed to be another just around the corner out of range.  Who was it there at the end?  My father? My brother?  Who was the real me getting further away, the harder I tried to see him?
 

For a number of years after that, I felt completely abandoned.  I had no inner anchor, although, once in a while, I would manage a more open conversation with my brother who would throw me a lifeline.
 

During this time, I was not sure my life was real or meaningful.  I felt increasingly adrift and dislocated but some things turned out to be positive.  I ended up going to a different high school from my brother and my classmates and teachers no longer defined me in terms of a comparison with him.  This was both frightening and liberating.  I reclaimed my own name.   By the time I graduated from high school, even my brother started to call me by my name.
 

Traveling on a bus to New York City at the end of my High School, I leaned back in my seat and as if in a dream, felt my face muscles relaxing into my father’s face.  I knew that if someone saw me at that instant they would think I was him.  Slowly the muscles shifted and my face was transformed into that of my brother.   But it did not stay there.  It shifted again and left me with my own visage.  On a bus motoring into the future.  Myself. 

I had found the person that I was.  All I had to do now, and it took another three decades, was to learn how to accept him and be comfortable inside that face.