A lot of people don’t even realize the challenges and obstacles you face when you grow up in the “hood”, “projects”, “ghetto”, whatever you want to call it. The point i’m trying to make here is many of these young men and women are very misunderstood.

So many people look down on young men and women from the projects, but the funny thing is that most of the people that look down on these individuals couldn’t walk two feet in these people’s shoes. Me, as being a young man who grew up in the projects for most of his life have seen first hand the problems you face growing up in this kind of environment. How I always describe growing up in this kind of environment is, everything is backwards. Doing the right thing seems wrong and doing the wrong thing seems right. Kind weird huh? Most kids growing up in environments like this eight times out of ten are growing up with out a father figure, and more often than not there mother is either a drug addict, or works two to three jobs at a time. So we as growing young men and women look for someone to fill that void in our life, so we often get caught up in the wrong crowd because you don’t want to be viewed as a kid who doesn’t fit in, so you find yourself doing things that normally you would never even think about doing. After a while you become used to seeing all these traumatic things that you go numb to just about everything and everyone around you, and because of the pain you carry with you everywhere you go you look for something to cope, that being your new friends or marijuana, or all the other crazy drugs you can access so easily growing up in a place like this.

Of course you need to make money, everyone in the world needs money, but when you’re starving, and living with terrible conditions at home, That hunger for money becomes almost irresistible. You find yourself selling drugs, stealing, robbing, just because, hey everyone else is doing it why can’t I? Not realizing this is not normal behavior, because all your friends and in some cases your family does the same thing. Not because you need to, or necessarily even want to, it’s all you know, because growing up that’s all you see around you so naturally you are going to follow suit. Only because of the fear of not fitting in eats at you, because every kid wants to be cool and in the circle so to speak.

As I said earlier, kids that grow up in an environment like this are so misunderstood. People always talk down about people that grow up in places like this, when more than half of the people that speak on this topic really have no clue what a kid growing up in the projects go’s through on the daily basis. Until people are able to understand where people come from than there will be so many people that grow up misunderstood.