I was eighteen the last time I made a choice without knowing it was a choice.
That’s the part nobody tells you when you’re standing where a lot of the young guys I talk to now are standing. It rarely looks like a decision. It looks like a Tuesday. It looks like who you’re riding with, who you’re trying to impress, what you think you have to prove and who you think is watching. By the time it’s obvious it was a fork in the road, you’re already past it.
I’ve had over a decade in here to think about that Tuesday. Not in a way that helps me get it back — it doesn’t work like that — but in a way that’s made me pay closer attention to the ones still coming up behind me. That’s most of what I do now: write to young men who remind me of who I was, and try to say the thing I wish somebody had said to me plainly, before it mattered.
Here’s the plain version.
You are not stuck yet. Whatever’s already happened, whoever you’ve already disappointed, however far off track it feels — you are reading this, which means you’re still the one holding the pen. I’m not going to pretend I know your specific situation, your house, your block, your people. I don’t. But I know the shape of the moment, because I stood in it. And I know that the version of you that gets to decide differently exists whether or not anyone around you is telling you that.
The second thing is harder to hear: you don’t have to do this by yourself, and honestly, you can’t. I didn’t have a Communities In Schools coordinator checking on me. I didn’t have a Big Brother. I didn’t know a JCPC existed, let alone that it might have put someone in my corner before things went the direction they went. Those aren’t abstract programs to me — they’re the specific kind of person I needed and didn’t have. If one of them is available to you now, that’s not a small thing. Take it.
I write this from inside a place I’m not eager to describe to you, because I don’t want it to sound like a scare tactic — you’ve probably heard enough of those, and in my experience they don’t work on anybody who’s already made up their mind not to be scared. What I want you to hear instead is simpler: there is a version of your story where this page, this moment, is the furthest thing gets. Not because you’re special or lucky, but because somebody — a coordinator, a mentor, a family member, a stranger running a program in your county — got to you before the Tuesday that doesn’t feel like a decision.
Let them.
— Brandon