Confessions of a Model U.N. kid

First, welcome new readers and subscribers! If you haven’t yet seen my Tuesday essay on Ezra Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and swallowing frogs, you can read it here. You can also watch the podcast episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

For those of you who are new to the newsletter, the Tuesday posts are usually the longer essays that deal with current events and history. In an attempt to remember there’s a bigger world than just this current fraught moment in which we’re trapped, Friday posts usually have links to the podcast and then a shorter piece with a focus on literature, music, growing up in West Virginia, or my work in the Arctic (the book I’m currently working on is a polar one).

Next week, I’ll celebrate Degenerate Art’s first birthday with a state of the union address reflected through what I’ve been writing about since October 2024. But today, I want to return to a phrase I wrote a little about on Tuesday, one that ties in to something from my own life. I talked about “bright-kid syndrome,” which can involve feeling like you need to outperform everyone, solve the biggest questions of the moment, and get acknowledgment for it.

I was serious about suggesting that bright-kid syndrome can be a liability. But I didn’t mean it as an insult, because I have deep sympathy for those afflicted. Growing up in an unstable household with violence and not enough money, being that kind of kid was pretty much all I had going for me as a child, year after year. It got me attention, and it gave me a sense of self-worth. In the long term, that’s not healthy or sufficient. But in the short run, it helped me survive.

In our West Virginia high school, the gifted program counselor brought kids each February to NAIMUN, Georgetown’s model U.N. in Washington, D.C. I loved going and attended twice. Each time I went, there was a big snowstorm. As I wandered the streets of an actual city and ate well (we didn’t always have enough food at home), I imagined a whole new life for myself.

In theory, the whole point was that I was supposed to represent a country. Our delegation got Bulgaria one year, and Ghana the second time. Unlike a lot of people there, I wasn’t a debate kid. I didn’t know anything about parliamentary procedure. I was lost.

Each time, I had done some research on my country in advance. But thrown in among the other high school delegates at a conference run by Georgetown students, I had no idea what I was doing. I never made a speech in committee, I never passed a resolution. I recall sitting and drafting them. Did I do anything with those drafts, or did they accumulate in some potential achievement in my mind for the imaginary country I was representing?

Despite all this, running around the hotel, meeting with people, it felt like I was doing something. And seeing Georgetown University students running the conference made an impression—it made the university real to me.

The setting had little in common with my world back home. A dealer had hooked my best friend from my preteen years into trading sex for pills, leaving her with a dependence on him she couldn’t shake. I’d steered clear of the grimmest parts of life in my hometown, but as a poor kid steeped in violence, I knew I had to leave if I were going to find any kind of life. And bright-kid syndrome was what gave me a boost in the short run, college being my most likely route of escape.

I wanted to be a writer, but it was hard to imagine the details of any future. There was no one who would pay for school. But if I thought too hard about any of that, I would never get out at all. So I simply proceeded as if money wouldn’t be an issue. I would, I decided, go to Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

By the time I got accepted, I’d won enough scholarships and financial aid to pay for my first year. To say I deliberately ignored that fact that no real plan existed for how to cover the following ones would be giving me too much credit. I was incapable of thinking that far ahead. I was going to go to Georgetown and study diplomacy, live somewhere far from my hometown, and save the world. I would fit being a writer in there somewhere, too. And if that was naive or improbable, staying alive seemed no more unlikely, making any future a fantasy one.

Georgetown was heaven for Model U.N. kids. There were thousands of us. My first two years there, I helped with staffing the same conference I’d attended in high school. But as I fell further and further behind on being able to pay my tuition, I had to get a second, off-campus job.

I’ve written before about going to work in a record store in DC in 1988. That second job transformed my life. Unlike the public misrepresentations of the city as ultraviolent today, back then, the District really was consumed by crime. Homelessness, crack, and government neglect ravaged so many lives, resulting in tremendous violence against the most vulnerable residents.

Each of the international issues I was studying in my classes—democracy, elections, negotiation, legitimacy of institutions, state violence, crime syndicates, propaganda, destabilization, human rights—was suddenly facing me in new, much more mundane ways. In a small retail store, do you let the guy who has nowhere to sleep or even to shelter for a while from the cold hang out for hours? What if he’s trailing feces around on the floor while he walks? How do you get him help, and what if that help is worse than what you could do for him yourself? Now multiply that guy by a hundred, then more.

How do you deal with the group of professional thieves who work in groups of three or four to strip the merchandise at the front of the shop? How do you handle the preteen repeat shoplifter who’s a minority and might get mistreated by the cops if you call them? How was it possible to be living in a city with a majority population composed of Black Americans who had no member of Congress or Senator to represent them on Capitol Hill? All the issues I’d been studying abstractly became a concrete part of my life.

By the time I dragged myself through four years of classes, owing so much money to the university that I wouldn’t get my actual diploma for another five years, I’d failed the illusory promise of bright-kid syndrome and washed out as a model U.N. kid. Without a degree, I had the knowledge and the training but couldn’t enter the diplomatic corps, the Peace Corps, or even find much in the way of a better-paying job. I stayed on at the record store.

I’m not ridiculing my classmates, my education at Georgetown, or my professors—many of whom went to great lengths to encourage me in my writing and thinking, and who helped me get my first publication as a poet. Their time and energy were tremendous gifts to me. And the university itself had its strengths and its blindnesses, but I learned to think there.

Many of the fellow Model U.N. kids from my years on campus went on to be everything from representatives in Congress, ambassadors, a Solicitor General of the United States, a chief of staff to the President, and even the current spokesman for the Secretary General of the United Nations itself. Some of them have been or are brilliant and talented in their work, serving humanity beautifully. Others were or are mercenaries (some of them equally brilliant, others merely vicious) and have deeply harmed the country or the world.

But for me, my delusions of saving others in places I knew nothing about had to take a back seat to getting myself together. I had to figure out who I was and how to move through the world, to find a way not just to not die but also to build a life.

That necessity meant no longer trying to get ahead by appearing to be the smartest person in the room or single-handedly solving the hardest problem. Instead, I had to begin to understand who I was in the middle of a wild, beautiful city that had its own issues, a city that could help me and which I in turn could help, a city in which I’d found a home.

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