Story of my life part 2 - The dark years 12-20

To see how we got to this point, please read part 1: https://steemit.com/lifestory/@brandonh/story-of-my-life-part-2-the-dark-years-12-20

   So I'm going to say that my life in the 90s, going from a pretty innocent kid and transitioning to a teenager to an adult were met with a ton ups and downs.  But this was really not unique to me, as I think this time in everyone's life is met with things that shapes your worldview and perspective on life.  

1992-1996

A ton of stuff happened to me this year.  But 2 very big things happened:
  
1. I got into comic book

2. I left my home town of Kansas City

To me the whole idea of me getting into comic books is so important and so essential, that it cannot be overlooked.  I think if I had never got into comic books I would have never possibly become the person I am today.  Comics books legitimately help me understand my purpose in life, my direction going forward, and it increased my creative outlet.

But leaving Kansas City had a lot of growing pains.  My mother basically tried for years to get a transfer from her department at the airline she worked at.   After we had left my father, he didn't take it well, and he couldn't deal with the fact that she had moved on.    And Kansas City was infested with drugs and gangs in the early 90s.  Black people were still pretty much forced to live in certain parts of the city, and the economy of the city had become pretty bad.  The city wasn't growing in any meaningful way.

My uncle who had been in prison through most of the 80s was released around 1988.   He came to Kansas City, but found it was a horrible place to stay, and there wasn't many options for a black man.   He knew he had to make a move, so he headed for Atlanta later that year, got a job at McDonalds, and soon became a manager.  Me and my mother would visit him a few times in Atlanta, and my mother fell in love with the city.   From 1990 to 1992 she would try hard to get a transfer to Atlanta, which was a growing and bustling airport.  She eventually was able achieve this in 1992, and was able to transfer.

My mother actually move to Atlanta like 6 months before I did.  She stayed with my great grandmother for a few months until she can save enough money to get her own place.   We ended up staying in Stone Mountain in Dekalb County, which had one of the most affluent black populations at the time.

Atlanta was considered the black mecca back then.  It still is somewhat considered that, but back in the 90s it was a sanctuary form black people.   Cities in the West, Midwest, and Northeast were doubling down on the war on drugs, and basically using dirty tricks to red line black people into certain neighborhoods.  All the while sucking all of the economic grown that was possible by not giving black people loans to start businesses in their own neighborhoods, and essentially over policing these areas.  We can always debate why this was the case, but unless you really lived in these cities and in these neighborhoods at that time, it's hard to really grasp how much the cards were stacked.  Atlanta was the exit.  It was a true shinning example of capitalism and the free market.  Black people could move to any neighborhood they wanted.  They could apply for top jobs, and really set their own path.   So hard working black people from all over the country packed their bags and headed to the chocolate city.

On November 3rd 1992, my mother came to Kansas City, we loaded a Uhaul with my dog Trixie (who I guess I haven't really talked about), and we headed for the south, which was a 15 hour drive .  But of course Atlanta would be easy.

One of the main issues with Atlanta was this.  I was in a middle class neighborhood at a middle class school. But I came from a household that was barely middle class at all.  And I came from a city where the general rule of thumb was "If you're black, you're poor".   This was an entirely different reality.  I was going to school with children who were the sons and daughters of doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other solid middle class professions.   And the name of the game was being materialistic and keeping up with the Jone's.  This was the very definition of children who were the offsprings of new money, and America's consumerist paradise.   

My mother was old school.  She didn't believe in debt, and she lived within her means.  So this meant no name brand clothes, and getting the odd video game cartridge was good enough.  But the pure pressure was insane.  Plus I had been reading comic books.  And I had no friends when I was in school.    This started to shape my speech pattern.  I started using words I would read in comic books and in articles in regular speech.  But this was a sharp contrast to kids who thought being dumb was cool, plus it was in the south, with the southern accent being pervasive.

As a result I was quickly dismissed as a nerd.   And at my school we have suburban kids trying their best to emulate gangsters that they saw on TV.   My middle school soon became dominated with kids who would call themselves Crips and FOLKs ( a Chicago gang for those who don't know).   Their goal was to resist the idea of being black and being middle class, and to emulate street gangs as much as possible.  The results were to harass anyone who appeared to be a real nerd.  And I was often a target of harassment.

Now keep in mind, physically I've never been a pushover.  I've just been reluctant to fight, almost always.  Today I stand 6'4, and well over 300 lbs.   And I was a taller and more huskier than average build even at that time.  At 13 years old I was at least 6'0 at that point.  But of course, I wore thick glasses (because that is all we could afford), non namebrand clothes, and spoke proper using words that the other students didn't.  So for the average "want to look tough" guy who was shorter than me, I was a good bonus.  He can show a girl that he's willing to attack a 6'0 guy, making himself not look like a bully, and he could basically attack a person who isn't like to attack back.

This characterized basically my entire middle school and high school experience.   Comics were escapism for me.  And eventually writing became escapism as well.  I always wanted to create my own comic book characters with their own stories in their own universe.   So I started drawing, and I even got into drawing portraits of female faces who "didn't actually exist".  Why?  Because there was something about me creating my own world, that I could control.  That is why I was drawn to comic books and science fiction.  I could create my own world.

Throughout middle and high school my grades were horrible.  And I mean pathetically bad.  I was mostly a straight D and F student most of the time.   But this didn't mean I didn't retain the knowledge.  I actually discovered that I loved to learn.  But I hated doing all the rituals surrounding school work.  I pretty much never or rarely did homework at all.  Feeling it took valuable time from me reading comic books, or writing my own stories.  

I would say around 12 I started to take a lot of interest in the opposite sex.  However I was probably severely shy.  Because in Atlanta I found myself in unfamiliar scenarios far more often, it forced me to almost always second guess myself.   So freezing up was way too common.  And this was a bad habit to have when you need to attract females of the opposite sex.    As a matter of fact, my lack of success with the opposite sex really frustrated me to the point where I if someone embarassed me in front of a female, I internalized it and it angered me.

If 12-14 years old was the point in my life where I was the most creative.  Then 15-20 defines the time in my life where I had the most rage.  Rage defined everything I did.   But it stemmed from the fact that I did not have control over my life.  I didn't have control over my mother struggling to make end's meet, I didn't have control of the clothes I wore, over how my school taught me.  Basically over nothing in my life.  But that would changed.

1996-2001: Fighting for control

I think the reason why young boys are always so violent is because the very nature of our manhood tells us how we need to be in control of every situation.  And I really do think boys feel the need to control things around 15 years old.  This is why young boys join gangs around this age.   They feel that they're in control of themselves.  And the best way to show control is rule by fear.  I would attempt to instill fear in others.

When I was 15 around 1995, I brought steak knife to school.   I wanted people to think I was crazy.  I wanted people to fear me in the hallways when I walked through school.  But honestly what I really wanted was a gun.  I don't think I really ever to kill anyone.  I just wanted to make people fear me so they could respect me.  But since I was broke, a knife was the next best thing.  But this wouldn't really work.   The steak knife was discovered, I was arrested at school, and expelled on the spot.

This lead me to go to an alternative school.  It was a small school littered with kids who had been expelled for various reasons.  But one thing that was interesting, a lot of these kids had real problems.  And the environment felt more "adult" than high school did.  We didn't have a school bus, so we had to take public transportation to the campus.  The school also let out much earlier.   Some of the kids already had children, and oddly enough one girl was legit "married" to a guy.  Even some of the kids there were altogether not living with their parents, and some were living on their own.  It was my first consistent exposure to the adult world.  And frankly, I liked it.

That summer I went to go stay in Kansas City.  Typically I stayed in Kansas City all summer.   This time at 15 yeas old, my father saw how big I had become.  I was almost as tall as him, and I was strong.  My father was in one of his many "clean" periods where he wasn't doing any drugs (he would relapse many times over the years).  So he decided I was old enough to work with him.  His brother, my uncle owned a roofing business, and they agreed to have me as a hand on many of his roofing assignments that summer.

Not only that I always was my father's "assistant" in between jobs.   I would become his "go for" boy.   He was an electrician and I would be his assistant.    My father was a terrible person to work for.  Often talking really horribly to me while asking me to do some of the most back breaking menial labor.  Did I mention working for him only paid $20 a week?  He loved the setup because he could underpay me, and he could pocket most of the money he made on his jobs.  And he didn't have to hire an adult hand who he may have had to pay more money to.

This saved my life.  My father was a horrible father, and easily the worst boss I ever had.  But because my "adult" life started on such a bad note, I am often most resilient when it comes to things that upset other people.   There would never be another job that would be so back breaking, and there would never be a boss who talked to me as bad as my father.  It also built up my mental toughness.   I saved up a lot of money that summer between working for my father as his assistant, and working for my uncle as a hand.  And I was able to buy the great name brand clothes so I could now be in the "in crowd" when I would return to normal high school.

So with brand new clothes, and a new attitude.  I entered normal high school in 1996.   Due to me being away for so long due to the expulsion, a lot of people flat out didn't remember me.   I had less and less of a clue how high school worked.  And not only that people still made fun of me even with my name brand clothes.

I decided to get my first part time job at 16.  I would work at a grocery store as a bag boy.  This was also a pretty important time, because honestly, I killed it at that job.   The minute I got into a situation where I could make my own money, I loved it.  I no longer needed to ask my mother for anything.  I also worked all the overtime I could.  and my managers loved me.  And I would always come in and work to cover people's shifts.  I was a hustler, and I saved money.  It was a match made in heaven really.  But in terms of school, things were getting worse...

School continued to suck and suck.    To a point where the idea of a high school classroom containing me was a joke.  I was really looking past high school, and moving myself to the next level.   I was suspended from high school again, and would never return again.  I remember I would just leave high school for the entire day, and go back home.  Or go to the arcade.  But I was barely even in school.  Almost to the point where I got suspended for not showing up.

During this suspension my mother played with the idea of just flat out removing me from the school system.  She knew I wasn't really learning well, and how much I was really hating high school.   Plus I seemed to enjoy working my job.  And I definitely agreed with the decision to take me out of the high school.  I would withdraw, and be put into adult education at the local community college, and eventually receive my GED in a month.

While my time at the grocery store seemed like a long time, it was only 6 months.   I was still pretty angry at the time, and I had no outlet for my growing depression.   They also put my on the register, and an irate customer lead me to go to the bathroom and cut myself.  Cutting myself would be the way I would deal with internal pain.  And would become a problem for me for several years.

But there was a silver lining.  I got my GED.  And while getting my GED I got a public library card for the first time.   I wanted to learn my father's field of electronics.  And I picked up a book called "Calculus for Electronics" which I read and studied everyday.  Keep in mind I was barely past Algebra 2 in high school, but despite this gap, I was still able to teach myself calculus.   And I soon realized that I could possibly teach myself anything.  And that I didn't need high school anymore, and it was always within me to learn.

So in October 1996 I registered and entered college.  A local community college but college nonetheless.  I entered college 1 month after I turned 17, meaning I entered college about 1 year before any of my classmates in highschool would.  

My mother's own story is very important here.  Because I think there would be a convergence of her story and my story once I entered college.  My mother soon lost her job when she came to Atlanta.  The airport she worked at competed with Delta Airlines, and wanted to expand their footprint in the Atlanta area.  But this wouldn't work.  They heavily scaled back their presence in the Atlanta airport, losing many gates and many routes.   My mother was asked to come back to Missouri if she wanted to continue her employement.  But she had felt at this point she had moved on past the state, and wanted to stay in Georgia.

She would go through a very stressful layoff.  Living in a good neighborhood but not having a job was too much.  Stuff started getting cut off.  That meant the phone and even the gas.  We had to take cold showers or warm up water to take a bath.  We were basically poor with barely anything to eat.  And my mother didn't qualify for assistance, because she had been working a decent job.  These were dark times and would last for quite awhile.

My mother worked with her former company for 18 years.  Her entire adult life.   She went to that company in 1976 and was laid off in 1994.   The economy and the market had changed in a very significant way.  And these new things called computers were needed to do most jobs.  My mother eventually went to the Atlanta Urban League, and had to modernize her skillset to learn computers.

She also found a new job at a finance firm as an Executive Assistant for the Senior VP.  But the job was stressful leaving her with Bells Palsy temporarily.   She would get laid off again, and work for a law firm, where she would stay for years.  She also picked up a lot of computer and financial skills leading her to want to start a business around this time.

Now this is significant, because to this point I wanted to become an electrical engineer.  My father was an electrician., and it only made sense that I would become an electrical engineer.  But my mother made a suggestion.  She had learned about computers, and thought I should consider specializing in computers in some way.   I had also read about the process of creating video games.  And how you needed to learn computer programming to do so. I had read this from Ed Boon who did an interview with Gamepro, which was a magezine I had read.  And I always wanted to become a writer of stories in some way, and creating video games would have been a good medium for this.  So when I entered college I entered my major as Computer Programming.  Feeling that my dream was in hand, and that I would eventually become the great creator I always wanted to be.

But I'll conclude things here.  I'm still at around 17 years old.  The next 3 years would become probably the toughest 3 years in my entire life.  I'm a success today, but there were so twist and turns on the road to success.  I hope to be able to share that.

Anyway if you liked this, let me know.  Definitely don't be shy telling me where I can improve.  Constructive criticism is always welcomed.