What a Ride

Life is fucking bizarre. When I was a kid, I was never very ambitious. I was reasonably intelligent but never academic and I squandered the good education that I managed to secure, mainly because I hated the school and virtually everyone who went there. Posh kids don’t make you feel at home when you’re poor. Plus, I literally had teachers who would pull me up in front of the class and tell me I would never amount to anything, which is pretty messed up looking back now. I left school at 17 to get a job but at no point was I ever particularly career driven, so I bounced from company to company and probably racked up 20 different job entries on my CV over a fairly short space of time. While all this was going on my mental health began to deteriorate and I discovered drugs, which as some of you know didn’t end well. I was rarely happy, not in the truest sense and rarely beyond the chemically instigated temporary happiness that Class A’s offer.

It’s now coming up to four years since the time I tried to kill myself after hitting rock bottom in London, but fast forward to today and I actually have an idea of what I want to do with my life. Not only that but I’m already doing it and I’m doing it well. What started out as a hobby, has now given me the opportunity to meet and speak with some of my all-time heroes and some of those heroes are now my friends. I’m sitting here writing a commissioned piece for one of my favourite artists in the world for fucks sake. It also gives me a sense of satisfaction that when I do eventually die, I will have actually left a mark on this world; my words will live on and they will have contributed to a cultural movement that has given me so much over the years I spent struggling. I’m sitting here trying to write this without getting emotional, but I think if anything is worthy of an outburst it’s this shit right here. Pride, self-belief, ambition — all alien concepts to me for so long, but now I feel like I have actually made it to a place where I can be proud, I can believe that what I’m doing is good for me and I can continue to work towards achieving the things that I want. Life will always be hard, that just comes with the territory, but it’s how we deal with it when it is, that matters the most.