About Me
“The reality is that the only way change comes is when you lead by example.”
— Anne Wojcicki
In addition to beginning my MFA within the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg within Naropa University, I am also teaching high school English composition classes to teenagers trying to graduate or get their GEDs.
One of our assignments is a five paragraph “About Me” essay, so I wanted to give my students a thorough example of my own.
“About Me” Example Essay
by Adam W. Fitzgerald
What are the characteristics that define a person? According to the quintessential American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, “action is character,” which means we are what we do, not what we say — trust what people do, not what they say. For my own life, I have tried to focus on education, written languages, and the arts, all while treating others with kindness and respect, as I wish to be treated; the Golden Rule as some call it. At the same time, my life is painted with stories from the fringe, characters of counterculture, perilous and treasure-less adventures, and growing dissent for the crumbling systems enabling injustice worldwide. My name is Adam Wesley Fitzgerald Smith: I am a teacher, a writer, a musician, a DJ, a record label and artist collective leader, an underground event organizer, a rebel, a martial artist, a moment in time.
How did I get to be 33? They say the Romans killed Jesus Christ at 33, but most of my heroes like Kurt Cobain died at 27, or younger, like Tupac “2pac” Shakur killed at 25, or Ian Curtis, the singer and poet behind the influential post-punk band Joy Division, dead at 23. We’re supposed to live longer nowadays, until 80 or 100 years old, but as social security runs out, homelessness and debt rise, climate change worsens, major cities reveal toxic poisons within water supplies, and international conflicts and corporate exploitation escalate to the point no one can afford food, rent, or gas … younger generations are asking more questions. What kind of world are we living in, what kind of future are we heading into, and how do we want to participate one way or the other? These are vital questions, which I started to ask myself at a young age, maybe because my grandfather Jim Fitzgerald wrote for the Detroit Free Press and publicly battled plagues of modern society like the KKK and crooked politicians.
The more I learned as I aged, the more I read, the more I realized how unhappy and unsafe most people in this world are: we are manipulated, miseducated, misinformed, divided, and conquered. My hope is that I can use my life to fight worldwide injustice through the informed empathy education, music, writing, companionship, community, and the arts can offer — I want to empower individuals. Education is empowering, as the age old saying goes, “knowledge is power” and learning is a gift; if we are to stand strong on our own against the tyrannical forces that wish for us all to only be worker bees in an inhumane system, we must arm ourselves with intellect and awareness. I grew up near Flint, Michigan, the first major city to have a lead-poisoned water supply crisis, which is on-going, and about to erupt in almost every major city worldwide, as reflected in recent research, documentaries, and Atlanta, Georgia. Growing up in Michigan, I experienced yin and yang directly: the beauty of the forests, lakes, and dunes juxtaposed with the modern horrors of urban decay in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and Saginaw — echoes of the historical failures of Michigan’s automotive legacy and American society.
By the time I was in college, I was studying education, communications, and the fine arts: I ended up graduating with a dual English degree, a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from both the College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences within Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. During this same time throughout my early twenties, I also toured the country in a van with my indie band, The Kodaks, which included high highs and low lows, playing to hundreds of people and sleeping on floors, always traveling. For the rest of my twenties I taught on 8 Mile, worked as a journalist, and led many more musical projects, then I got married and moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in the United Kingdom, where I studied at Cambridge University through a British Study Centre to attain my “CELTA certificate” — which means I am certified to teach English as a Second Language (ESL) to anyone of any age, anywhere in the world. After a few years living in the UK my grandmother passed away, so I moved back to Michigan and lived in Traverse City during the worldwide pandemic, teaching ESL online and in-person until mid 2021 when I moved to Colorado and worked for the company Gaia. After two years running the English publishing department for an international corporate conglomerate with nearly a million monthly subscribers, I moved back to Michigan to take care of my mother as she passed from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) and at the same time I also separated and divorced from my now ex-wife, my partner of over ten years.
My father is about turn 70, but my mother did not make it to 68, so their “Golden Years” never existed — they lost their entire life savings in the 2008 financial collapse, then my mom passed before my dad could retire, so they get no retirement, no Golden Years, no traveling like my grandparents got to before they passed away. Where is the freedom in that? No one has any idea how long each of us have on this planet, so it is crucial to live your life with meaning while you can: help others, help yourself, think about what you want in life, do what you want in life, travel, explore, experiment, have the courage to fail and start all over again. I’m hoping I will keep going to Los Angeles, California to record more music as Quells since my band Shady Groves is on hiatus, I hope to keep helping artists through Underflow Records, I hope to publish my books to help educate and empower the masses to fight for their rights, I hope my partner Cindy and I will eventually move back to Europe so we can be closer to her family in Germany, hopefully we will end up somewhere beautiful like Dublin, Ireland or anywhere along the coast of the Mediterranean Ocean. Learn from mistakes, history, and pain to find your own happiness; helping others is an empowering way to find your own path forward, do your best to stay patient, kind, respectful, present, and grateful — life moves fast, make sure you have the wheel.
— A. W. Fitzgerald
“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
