Struggles

Growing up I was surrounded by people who were bad influences on me and who were the kind of people who took the easy way out. Growing up I was surrounded by gangs, drugs, violence, but I never got into those kind of things due to my parents and how they told me the real side of life. My dad told me his story of how he grew up as a kid who didn’t know how to speak English, and became someone who was fluent and to me was the smartest man alive. He told me that life is not easy for our people and that we need to bust our asses to get by in this world. My mom gave up and dropped out of high school. She grew up as someone surrounded by gangs, drugs, and violence, but the way she handle it was that so different from my dad. She gave up and regretted it years later. She told herself that she would have no future, no dreams, and not even kids to call her own. She told me that if I give up then what's the point of having dreams. My parents told me if I want to give up then they’ll let my or if I want to I could finish high school and be the first one in my mom’s family to graduate from high school. That would mean that I could be a role model for my little cousins, my little sister, and my little brother. I made the decision to go to high school and finish with a diploma. I started in K&E and busted my ass to get into mainstream classes. I worked to the point where I was actually sleep deprived from studying but when I finally got into grade twelve I was so happy I even remember picking up my mom and running around with her. I went into grad twelve with four classes and I’m writing this on my last day of class because Mrs. Gardner got mad at me and forced me to! So please, what ever you do don’t sleep in her class.

-Keenan Black Plume