i come from nothing immigrant refugee the foreigners the lesser me a soviet i m all of it the government i grew up in couldn t get the best of me we left before the fall of it it s called communism by the way so i appreciate this parliament and by the day we made it to america my parents marriage was hanging on by a thread from past hurts and infidelities in the 6 months it took to cross the globe their marriage was dead my dad went out the picture i got to see my mom struggle on welfare and coming out of abusive relationship after abusive relationship see she was a hopeless romantic and couldn t stand to be alone plus a full gamut of other emotional damage done to her so she did her best and sacrificed to raise me right and figured it out got a job left her relationship and became an even bigger superhero in my sight see in my life i didn t have a ton of advantages english was not my first language skipped a few meals but never famished we were in poverty but without anguish and to be honest i didn t even know we were broke so we finally moved closer to the burbs and some rich kids cracked jokes cuz i was raised mainly around black folk so i never knew that my speech sounded ghetto huh needless to say i didn t fit in didn t know how to read in freshmen year i finally begin pops wasn t in the picture so i had to pretend like i knew how to be a man and the work ethic i have came from sports but my mom forced me to get a job at 15 as a last resort so i have to report every penny to her and save for my own car cuz that s just something she just couldn t afford a c student i m not stupid but i just wasn t motivated to do it went to college cause that s what you do with grants and fee were main truancy they didn t take attendance but i remained that class clown smart aleck nuisance i say all that to say my life wasn t perfect but the struggle was worth it i had to work my tail off in and outside of any class room i was never that type of person but i learned that i could never afford to stop learning i could never afford to stop working i ve made every dumb decision there is to make racked up all kinds of debt and i wish would ve knew then i know now but i don t have any regret under the southern california sun pretty close to paradise my new life after life has finally just begun