When I was at American University Washington College of Law, the dean at the time was a man named Claudio Grossman. He was from Chile and seemed to carry that fact around like a passport that needed stamping at every conversation. His favorite word was paradigm. He used it constantly—so much, in fact, that I often wondered if he truly understood what it meant. It was like a magician pulling the same rabbit out of the same hat over and over again, insisting it was a new trick each time. In lectures, meetings, hallway conversations—“paradigm” this, “paradigm” that. Eventually, the word lost all meaning. It became noise. A kind of academic Muzak that played in the background while students like me tried to focus on surviving law school.
But lately, and especially in reflecting on Full Circle, I’ve come to understand that paradigm was always the right word—just misused, misapplied, and, in Grossman’s case, misplaced.
You see, my life has been defined by resisting paradigms. Not society’s, but my parents’. Their paradigm of what a child should be. What I should have been. And more importantly, what I should have done for them.
I wasn’t the son they ordered from a catalog. I didn’t go to Harvard. I didn’t write perfect essays in high school, or chase after the Ivy League dream they wore like a badge. I didn’t win the medals they could hang in their mental trophy case and polish at dinner parties. I didn’t become their reflection.
Instead, I built something from the ground up. My practice. My integrity. My independence. No silver spoon, no handouts, no shortcuts—just sweat, stubbornness, and survival. I took the long way, because that’s the only road I had. And in doing that, I broke their paradigm. Or maybe I just refused to live inside it.
My parents were broken people. Narcissistic to the core. Everything I achieved had to be theirs. Everything I failed at was entirely mine. Their love—if you can call it that—was transactional, conditional, and forever out of reach. I spent years in that loop, trying to decode their expectations, trying to earn their approval by shaping myself into someone else’s ideal. But the more I tried, the further I drifted from who I actually was. Until one day, I stopped trying. I let go of the idea that I had to fit their image. That I had to play a role in their performance.
That was the beginning of the real paradigm shift. Not in a lecture hall. Not from a dean’s monologue. But in the quiet, painful realization that I could not—and would not—spend my life being a character in someone else’s script.
The funny thing is, Claudio Grossman probably thought he was introducing us to a revolutionary concept when he said paradigm. But for me, the revolution was personal. It was walking away from a broken inheritance. It was building a life that didn’t need their approval. It was writing Full Circle—not just as a memoir, but as a declaration.
I was not their paradigm. I never will be. And that’s the point.
