I guess I’m feeling good right now, a little something for the hood right now…”
I turned 31 today. 31 years in outer space is nothing short of a miracle and today I’m overwhelmed with feelings of gratefulness. The ghetto programming I have to overcome is strong man. Sometimes I can’t accept why I’ve been so lucky to be privileged. I work hard so it’s not that I don’t deserve or think down on myself but I just feel like I still have people behind. As long as the ‘hood’ exist I’ll always have that feeling though and I’m understand that it’s my calling to help eliminate that place.
Give a damn how you feel, we just tryin’ a keep it real.”
Keeping it 100 is my absolute obsession right now. I just watched a documentary on Netflix about Marina Abramović called The Artist is Present. In it she spoke about her come up as an artist and how she never once compromised. People didn’t understand her, critics asked her if her performance art could even be classified as art and she was so broke that she lived in a van. It’s at that breaking point that most people get a job or seek forms of comfort but she held on to later find acclaim, fame, respect, stability and fortune on her own terms. She kept it 100 through thick and thin.
I guess I’m feeling good right now, a little something for the hood right now…”
I love that and it’s reigniting my inner Howard Roark. People are going to disappointed when you do your own thing, they’ll dislike you, you’ll let them down but at the end of the day you’ll find power in staying true to yourself. The price of compromise is much more than any of us truly comprehend…
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture,” – Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.