Gabriel Ortega ’24
Comfort in Discomfort
Up until the age of fourteen, I had never found a fictional character that I could truly relate to. Spiderman is a possible exception, but I couldn’t realistically see myself swinging from web to web saving my hometown. On June 24, 2015 that all changed.
It was a warm Saturday evening. My father, brother, and I sat in front of the TV in our shoebox apartment in Queens and watched the darkest episode of television my thirteen-year-old eyes had been exposed to yet. It was the pilot episode for Sam Esmail’s Mr. Robot. The episode introduces the protagonist, Elliot Alderson, a socially anxious, morphine addicted, computer hacker in Chinatown. My thirteen-year-old-eyes did not see that and immediately think, “That’s me!,” because in many ways he was not. Yet, an unknown part of me wanted to hold on for the ride. My subconscious detected a part of Elliot that was eventually going to become more evident within me. That piece in Elliot is what ended up helping me define the way I see the world and find comfort in myself.
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Sometimes it’s hard to believe that life changing events happen by coincidence. Sometimes it feels like there is a puppet master pulling all the strings and I’m just watching a scripted story unfold. The moment that I gave up on the idea coincidence is when I started to see the overlap between Elliot’s life and mine.
The same year that Mr. Robot aired its first season also happened to be my freshman year of high school. Transitioning to high school was no ordinary tale. Prior to attending Grace Church School, I went to a public middle school ten blocks from my apartment in Queens. The school was a massive brick box planted just off the main road, and caged over 3,500 students. Cops welcomed us through the metal entrance doors every morning. The halls were too skinny for the thousands of mindless bodies that trudged through the halls. All the students were from foreign backgrounds that blended to create a pool of diverse cultures. However, our identities were reduced to numbers that would soon be lost in the sea of many.
Luckily, the good fortune of a private education came my way during these years. Now those musty, overcrowded halls were a thing of the past. I sat in classrooms with just ten kids where my voice was heard and my opinion mattered. A curriculum of critical thinking took over my previous experience of industrial factory-style learning. The only catch was that I was one of the few minorities to be enrolled in that school. My tongue felt different. Everyone else spoke with a “formality” that only money can teach. Mine felt like it was from those dirty public institutions, the ones that “plagued” the city and scared away the private school parents. I sat in classrooms with kids who lived on the Upper East Side, whose parents were successful lawyers, artists, and practitioners. I would look at all the preppy kids around me and not have the furthest understanding of what their lives must be like.
Feeling distant from everyone around me made it difficult to feel part of the community. Oftentimes, I would be the silent observer studying the difference between uptown and downtown kids. I would try to put myself in their shoes—a pair of shoes free of financial worries. I would try to understand why the “preppiest” of kids would have the worst outfits and how those kids could leave their MacBook’s and wallets lying around in the hallway unattended.
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Elliot Alderson studied people in a similar fashion. He felt different from everyone else, broken and unable to connect with anyone emotionally. In the world of Mr. Robot, Elliot is a socially anxious computer hacker. He learns about people by hacking their online profiles and social media pages. Ironically, no matter who he hacked, he still felt disconnected from the people around him, unable to understand the lives he was bought into. He despised the version of reality that people perceived because he believed he saw the hidden truth about our capitalistic driven world; their world is all artificial, social media driven, and fueled by money and materialistic pleasures. I think that was the one thing that set me apart from a lot of the kids at my high school. Their lifestyles fell under the same umbrella of artificiality that I could not adapt to. My lack of understanding of the culture that was so prevalent at my school developed an anxiety in me that would crush the little confidence I had built for myself.
Social anxiety is an inescapable void. It looms and plagues the mind, it’s a hammer constantly pounding, forcing a re-evaluation of one’s micro-thoughts and actions. With each re-evaluation, the anxiety filtered out every glimpse of positivity I had for myself. One could say that this made me feel even more disconnected from all my private school classmates.
But from all the discomfort that came with comparing myself to the higher-class folk, I found comfort that someone else understood. Elliot’s world existed in the same neighborhood as my high school. Elliot ‘s mental health is one of his main struggles, and often gets in the way of him accomplishing his goals and ambitions. Throughout the series, Elliot has one goal; take down the world’s largest corrupt conglomerate, E-Corp, which is a subtle commentary on the power of Apple and Amazon. Even though Elliot seems to have planned everything thoroughly and is more than capable of succeeding, his mental health is what tends to get in the way. With drug addiction constantly pounding the front door, and the weight of depression and anxiety crushing his aspirations, Elliot constantly finds himself in the same void I was in.
Sam Esmail, the creator of the show, painted a beautiful picture of the constant push-pull nature of social anxiety. An opening monologue at the beginning of season one episode five begins:
I feel the sensation. Fight or flight. It’s constant. I should just pick one. I, Elliot Alderson, am flight. I am fear. I am anxiety, terror, panic/Who would have thought? If I could go back and undo this… You can’t. You promised me. I’m gonna get you out of this, okay? Time’s up.
Even though much of what Esmail has to say through Elliot is on-the-nose commentary about modern society, Eliot also accurately portrays what it’s like to deal with social anxieties. Knowing that there is someone out there willing to open that conversation and bring exposure to such a taboo topic makes dealing with those anxieties more comforting, and more possible.
One connects to art by empathizing with its message. Once I saw myself in Elliot’s shoes, it was bizarre to walk the same streets that he did in the show. This was when I started to notice some puppetry at work. For lunch after school, I would be eating at the same restaurants, drinking from the same cafes and going to the same parks that were significant to Elliot. I did so out of sheer coincidence because it was only after going to these places that I realized they were also the settings for Mr. Robot. For example, I would go to the Think Coffee on 4th Ave and 12th in Manhattan, which was used in the first episode of Mr. Robot as Ron’s Coffee Shop. I always walked by a small chicken spot on Broadway right by the Flatiron Building which was converted into The Red Wheelbarrow BBQ spot for season three. One of my closest friends, Graham, ended up moving to Chinatown, just a five-minute walk from where Elliot’s apartment is in real life. Now, if you were to ask me personally, I wouldn’t be one to say, “There’s no such thing as coincidences.” However, Mr. Robot has perhaps led me to believe otherwise. From the moment I watched that first grim episode, it seemed to take over my life. Elliot’s life and mine blend a little too well. Although I’ve never hacked anyone, gone to jail, or tried to take down a global conglomerate, Elliot’s world started becoming my own on both practical and emotional levels.
My attachment to Elliot became surreal, and I’ve never been able to relate to a character more. Mr. Robot was there for every year of my high school experience and concluded after its fourth season, just as I entered college. It was part of my life at the perfect time, and saw me off when I ventured out into the world on my own. No matter where I go, I’m sure Elliot will follow, just as he has in the past.