I’ve mentioned it once or twice here, but I spent a single year in the same school as Zuckerberg. He went on to a fancy private school thanks to the tutors his dad paid for, and i went on to a special ed program. Zuck was one of a number of bullies whose frequent harassment that led to that; I doubt that i was the only classmate he was harassing, but as with all of my bullies, his name left a mark on me.
I was a visibly queer AMAB person who still hadn’t learned to mask as neurotypical; the European Jewish heritage i shared with Zuckerberg manifested in me in a more obvious nose, stereotypically Ashkenazic eyes and lips, and apparently most offensive to him and those around him, i had dark black hair in unmanageable curls that i kept .longer than a “boy” was expected to.
But it took me a long time to understand other factors. I had lucked into my family being able to afford, for a big chunk of my life, living within a pricey school district with an excellent (and undeserved) reputation. This started with a two-earner household, and over time turned into my dad struggling to keep us at the very edges of that school district and affording food, clothes, and the like. My clothing was unfashionable and cheap, and ill-fitting because of how i hated my body. The best i could aim for was a once or twice yearly visit to a barbershop. On a few occasions, we couldn’t afford to live in the area for a month or two, and my dad actually wound up cheating the system by driving me in to wait at a school bus stop by the previous apartment. I was prone to picking up elements of my immigrant father’s accent, and our lifestyle didn’t allow dad to socialize with other adults in the area.
I was a disabled, queer, ‘ethnic’ kid, but I was also poor, and that combined together in a way that made me an easy target for Zuckerberg and kids like him, a number of them the sort of Jews who prioritized assimilation into goyish culture as a tactic to raise their station.
I remember that you could even tell the difference in our station by the malls we frequented in the area. Zuck was the type who would have gone to The Westchester at its peak, if he was bothering with something like that; the brightly-lit mall with all the trendy stores. I was usually at the Galleria, which kids in my school district at the time remembered as “the one where someone got shot”.
I look at Zuckerberg’s appearance here, and i can see the same differences from back then. His shirt is plain, but fit well, perhaps professionally tailored in spite of its simplicity. The same goes for his jeans, wrinkled in a fashionably disheveled way without being visibly worn. His shoes don’t have any of the scuffs, tears, or stains that mine wound up with. They’re a name brand, albeit a simple and sober one. His hair is cut precisely, kept closely trim albeit in a way that, at least to my eyes, does not flatter him. Elements of his ancestry are kept to his surname, while I met him under an audibly foreign deadname and a surname with an accent nobody could get right.
Zuckerberg puts on now, as he did then, the pretense of simplicity and austerity. Colors and patterns are an affectation of his lessers; if i was to try and imitate this style within my budget, i’d wind up with something that fit wrong in most places. He has people keeping his physique fashionable, he has a schedule and budget that allows him to exercise and eat in ways that maintain that.
I look at him and i see the money he had then, the money he has now, the moneyed people supporting and encouraging him. I see the pretense of being a Normal American Guy that he was able to effortlessly adopt because, in spite of anything else about him, he could afford it. I see the resources he has acquired by stepping on other people, by cheating and lying, by starting off rich.
I look at him and i remember the words he said to me, about my appearance and what I wore.
I will not let him erase what he is.
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
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