Who is Sebastian Brévart? A European by birth, I was born in 1980 in Germany to a mother from England and a father from Morocco. Shortly after we emigrated to the states and moved to West Philadelphia. My father got a job at University of Pennsylvania that paid him $18,000 a year, and my mother worked two days a week as an editor for Penn’s alumni magazine. My father had a barbaric upbringing, and was raised by parents that believed fear, intimidation, and physical discipline were the best methods of educating children, whether justified or not. These values made their way down to my and my younger brother's upbringing as well, resulting in childhoods spent living in a state of perpetual siege. Despite this, the silver lining was that it helped both of us recognize the fundamental flaws in his parenting style, and eventually break the cycle with our own families and partners. We watched our father lose everything when his marriage fell apart as a result of his actions, and it was these events that transpired during our formative years that revealed a clear path to avoid. When I was 9, we left Philadelphia for the suburbs after a shooting occurred at the end of our block, and my parents finally had enough. Moving didn’t solve the financial problems, because we were still essentially the poorest family in the area, but it did provide opportunity. On my first snow day off from school, I was given $5 for shoveling the driveway. Afterwards, instead of enjoying the day with friends, I went out and found work, shoveling neighbor's driveways and sidewalks, returning a little after dark with just under $200. My father was in disbelief, told my mother he thought this was far too much for a kid my age to have earned, and promptly confiscated it. My mother later went through the neighborhood and verified that I had in fact earned it, and I was then allowed to keep it. The caveat to this was that it was stored in a small red box, secured in my father's
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