Some of my most profound memories of childhood, when not consumed by eating and large extended family reunions, was being forced to sit at a desk and fill out pages of script and arithmetic exercises. Much of this autoethnography is centered on the discipline and “home-schooling” that consumed the weekends, summers, and other free time of many other Russian-Americans of my generation. This is not because I have nothing else to say but because it was such a critical component in my childhood and one of the greatest effects on my becoming the person I am today. Education was always a key component within Russian culture. In the Soviet Union if one was uneducated or began falling behind in any professional pursuit, it was a death sentence. As a result, the Russians of the 20th century were raised in a brutal eat-or-be-eaten environment where the strong survive and claw ahead of those who were too slow or too weak-willed to keep up (there is a slight irony here because from what I have seen, many Russians are procrastinators by heart). Parents raised in this environment understand not only the necessity of a good education but also the difficulty their children may encounter when faced with the necessity to sit and study for hours at a time. Therefore, they push and pull their children from a young age attempting to schedule and structure their lives in an attempt to guide them to a place where the mistakes and fears of the parent would not be made and encountered. However, as any therapist or physicist may explain, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The iron fist in which our parents attempted to shelter us in eventually broke down. For many of us, much like a bird that is kicked out of a nest, we began to fall. Having reached a level of maturity where our schedules, organization, and balance of work-to-play were left to our control, many of us newly liberated did not know how to successfully manage such greater responsibilities. Only after a period of anxiety and terror were we able to begin climbing out of the holes we had dug and, with the newly gained knowledge of freedom and demise, were able to continue on the upward path towards our aspired goals and desires.