Hi! I'm a new Misha fan. I scrolled down your page a bit but wasn't able to find the answer I'm looking for -- did Misha have a rough past? I read somewhere he did, and I'd really like to know what he has been through? Mental illness? Poverty? Etc. Thanks! :3
Well, Misha’s parents split up when he was very young, and he and his brother lived with his mother growing up, visiting his dad on weekends. His mother is a bit of an eccentric character, and she was occasionally homeless and often without money:Â
I have an amazing mother, but when I was growing up she didn’t always have a tremendous amount of material resources at her disposal. We were on welfare and very poor for some time and we were homeless for a while. When I was eleven, we were taken in by [friends who let us live on their] farm for several months. They were unbelievably generous with us. They gave us essentially room and board for months because they knew we didn’t have a place to go, and they enabled us to feel like we weren’t a burden there, by allowing me to work on the farm and to earn my keep. Of course at eleven, I was completely useless and probably more in the way than anything […]  a woman that gave my mother $100 when I was six so that she could buy me and my brother Christmas presents that year. I didn’t even know who she was, it was just this really generous act that made a huge difference in these small children’s lives and to my mother as well.
This is his description of living in a camp site:
We, when I was a kid, we lived in a campsite out in the woods for a few months. It was very nice. We had our little kitchen set up, which was just a fire pit, and a big bowl, like a little washbasin, that we would put ice in. That was our refrigerator. Then the ice would melt and everything would just float in warm water. And that was our refrigerator. Not very sanitary. Lots of mold. We also had a bathroom, which was a tree that had fallen over like this, so it went over like four feet, and then you could walk up the remaining bit of the trunk and do your business off the end of it.
This is his description of working on a farm:Â
When I was 11, I worked on what’s called a “Polish butterfly.” And it’s a tractor that looks like a biplane because it has these long wings that are right above the ground, and there’s another wing above that, and you lie on a lower wing and you pick cucumbers as it very slowly drives down the row. So you’re lying on your stomach picking cucumbers. That job really sucked. Super shitty job. They make it sound fun, like “Polish butterfly!” And you think, Oh, that’s going to be great! It’s not great, so don’t fall for it if anyone offers you a job on a Polish butterfly.
Misha wound up spending at least one night in jail with his mother and brother as well, and their house burned down when he was in high school.Â
In addition to his family’s struggles with poverty, Misha had trouble fitting in with his peers in school. He was bullied for the way he dressed and for being overweight when he was 13. He summed up his reputation this way: “I was very cool. The other kids at school didn’t know that. They thought I was a really weird little geek that they didn’t want to talk to.”Â
However, Misha did have a lot of advantages. He attended two rather prestigious schools, the Center School and Mount Herman High, the latter where he met his future wife at age 15. With encouragement from her and a few teachers who believed in him, he managed to gain admittance to University of Chicago, which isn’t an easy school to get into. So he had some things that he had to struggle with, but other things worked in his favor.
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