Transformative Moments in my Life
Please tell me what you think about my essay on 3 moments that changed my life.
How I Became Who I Am
Throughout my life there is one thing that I have learned to be consistently true in many ways but also because I have witnessed it firsthand in my own personal experience, that your environment will influence who you become, or as C.J. Heck said “We are all products of our environment; every person we meet, every new experience or adventure, every book we read, touches and changes us, making us the unique being we are”. I once heard about research that was done that showed that the number one reason people give for their reason why they believe what they believe, is personal experience. I have written a lot about beliefs in the past and plan to write about them a lot more but usually this is argumentative, fact-and-evidence based writing, which I think is very important, but to paint a picture for people who wonder about what led me to these ideas, or what environment gave birth to this perspective I have, I think sharing a short reflection of three very transformative events in my life will be helpful.
Coming of Age
When I got to high school I quickly got trapped in a cycle of punishment from my parents. My parents were very strict and when I was a teenager their favorite form of punishment was “grounding me”. If I got an F in any class on my report card, I was grounded until the next quarterly report card. Being grounded meant no hanging out with friends, no playing video games or watching TV, and no using the Internet or anything that could be enjoyable, also, it meant I was to do chores inside or outside the house until I made dinner for the rest of the family, then washed the dishes after, then had to go to bed. Because I wasn't allowed to have any social life outside of school, I began skipping my classes every day and would smoke weed with my friends. When they found out I was skipping school and smoking weed, I became grounded indefinitely. This continued until my junior year when my mother and stepfather then decided that because I just skipped school every day I should just stay home and work, and so they withdrew me from school and told me after the fact. Long story short, they started locking me in my room at night so I wouldn't sneak out, and then when I kept doing it, they told me I could join Job Corps or leave the house. I was still only 16 and I had been researching emancipation for minors because that is all I wanted, to leave and make my own way. I didn't know that legally (in North Carolina law, where I grew up) as soon as I turned 16, I could have left at any time. I went and stayed with my father in New York for a few weeks but then became homeless in Rochester, NY a few weeks before I turned 17. What followed was a year of traveling around the country, homeless, hitchhiking and hopping on freight trains (the train cars that carry supplies not people) and learning a lot from so many different kinds of people in different parts of the country. I already wanted to be a hippie, so I decided I wanted to go to California.
California was like going to a completely different country for me, which is how I would often describe it to people back home on the east coast. I was exposed to and embraced by the hippie subculture on the west coast, and all the psychedelic drugs and idealist beliefs that came with it. My mother used to tell me when I was younger, before I became the “problem child,” that I could do anything I set my mind to, and these hippies explained to me the same thing, but they had a captivating word for it, “manifestation”. After doing a bunch of mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelic drugs and feeling like I had come to supreme awareness of life itself, I felt that I had the power to make my reality anything I wanted it to be, I only had to remain pure of heart and to know in my heart that it was true. This reality I wanted, I had to believe with all my heart that it was already there and feel the feeling of gratitude to the universe for it, that is how it would “manifest”. For the first time while writing this, I see now how similar that conviction of belief was in this, and when I was in church growing up, and I had to believe and be “100 percent sure” that Jesus had saved me, or I wasn't saved. I believed with all my heart that I would be a famous musician, in a nice hotel room in San Francisco with all my family there. I would take care of them with my new wealth from being a famous musician. I knew in my heart that this was a pure wish, I had let go of any resentment to anyone in my family but I knew that money had caused a lot of our problems, I felt like I could go to scapegoat to the provider for the whole family, and everyone would be happy and love each other again. When it didn't happen, I kept telling myself that I just have to keep believing, but also that there must be some kind of ritual or prayer that I must perform to finalize it.
This eventually led me to going to a closed gas station and knocking over their cigarette garbage bin with the cops showing up soon after.
“My brother’s gonna pick me up, I have a hotel room in San Francisco,” I told them when they asked who I was (which was not the case, no matter how much I believed).
I had lost my phone and because I thought I had traveled in time forward a few weeks (too much to explain here), I told them I was 18 when I was still 17, but also started talking about time travel and aliens.
“Here’s your time-traveler suit,” one of the cops said to me when we got to the jail and I was put in a cell, handing me a green velcroed piece of heavy cloth to wear. Part of me got excited with anticipation, was this it? I put it on and closed my eyes and waited, hoping when I opened them again, the power of my conviction would cause me to be in the hotel room with my family. When I opened them however, I was still there, in the jail cell in this green piece of fabric that didn’t cover my whole body. Eventually I gave them my step-grandparents' number, and that was when they found out I was actually 17. They came to the door of my cell yelling why didn't I tell them I was 17, and I was confused. Apparently in California, if you are under 18 you cannot go to adult jail, which was interesting to me because I had already been to adult jail a few months ago in Atlanta (twice) for possession of marijuana. This made me feel more like California was like a different country, back in the southeast you go to adult jail from 16 and up, and how the juvenile center was. They had classes, even recess, nice motivational speakers and all the staff were really nice. I am not the best judge of the place though because I wasn't there long, after a few days the juvenile center bought me a Greyhound bus ticket back home. I told them I just wanted to go back to my family, and my mother said I could come back home, I felt like it would be a relief to be off the streets and around familiar people again.
When I got home my mother was nice the first night, but after that she told me how disgusting my dreads were and started criticizing everything about me, every day it felt like. I still hadn't given up on manifestation, I told myself that there must be more trials to go through, because it sure felt like my mother was putting me through some. It was easy for me to stay calm and not get angry or yell at people when I was in California, I thought I had gotten through all the negativity and lower-self parts of me, and when I got home I was able to stay calm for a while, but eventually I snapped. It was another day, and it was just me and my mother at the house,
"Look at you," she said, shaking her head at me sitting in the living room minding my own business. "Those disgusting dreads, they smell like shit. Don’t you know how stupid you look?"
I tried to stay calm, like I had in California. "Mom, why are you—”
"Why am I what? Being honest with you? You don't have a job, you don't do anything, you’re lazy and entitled!"
"I’m doing what’s best for our family, I—"
"Our family?" Her voice cracked. "What do you mean? You’re just a lazy piece of—"
"Stop!" I exploded, getting up from the couch. "You don’t know what you’re talking about! I came back here for you! How dare you treat me like this!”
She stepped back, tears starting, this was the first time I had yelled at her since I got back, before this I would just take it.
"Get out. Get out of my house," was her response. It was then that I had become homeless again, at 18, in my own hometown.
For a few months I wandered around my small town (pop. around 30,000) wondered what had happened. I came up with all these explanations in my head, telling myself long, captivating stories, about how I was actually a werewolf and my mom was from a clan of vampires, and that's why she can't love me for who I am. Or that I was on a special mission from aliens to bring the east and west coast together for peace, and that maybe my mom was just another dimensional version of herself and that is why.
I realized in hindsight, maybe a year later, that I was in a “perma-trip,” I remember feeling the effects of the LSD strongly still, for months after, and this also influenced my thinking. I was stuck in a drug-induced long-term effect of my sensory perception being distorted (which to me felt like I was feeling “energy,” of myself, the universe, and other people), and having this as a constant affirmation (I feel so good about it, it must be true, “it resonates”) of my idealist ideological notions of manifestation that had been so socially accepted as fact in some circles in California, made my delusions seem more real than reality. This from a material perspective, was me walking around my town begging in parking lots of stores for money, and sleeping outside, while also sometimes singing loudly walking down the street or going into stores and proclaiming things that I thought thereby, would affect the energy and manifest something good. One time I walked into a bookstore and loudly proclaimed, “to everyone here, I am now converting to the religion of Islam,” and then just walked out with no explanation. I meant it with 100% conviction at the time, but I never actually attempted to become Muslim, which I feel a little guilty about. Another time, I went to the public library in town and was trying to check out a book, but I had no ID. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as I stepped up to the counter, the smell of old furniture hanging in the air. When the librarian told me flatly,
“You need an ID to check out a book,” as she said the words I felt that this was unfair, and it was my job to correct it. My voice rose, not to a shout, but sharp enough to slice through the silence of the library. Heads lifted from books and computer screens as I declared,
“Knowledge should belong to everyone, not everyone can afford an ID, you should change the policy for those less fortunate” My words echoed across the room, heavy, defiant, and indignant.
A year or two later I remember going back to the library, without my dreads and seeing a sign that said that if you don't have an ID you can still get a temporary library card and use the computer, I felt a little guilty and silly for making it into a scene, but I always think back and remember how nice it was of them to actually take what I said into consideration and change the policy.
Some say I was lucky, because a few months later when my father offered to let me try to live with him again in Long Island NY (where I was born), things changed. I specifically remember, when I got there, it all went away. All the delusions, the extra-sensory feeling (which I believe now, to be the after-effects of the LSD), and all the doubt and worry. Life became simple, my father had a very materialistic view of the world, to him everything is about money and time, how much time it takes you to make money. I have heard stories of other people who had taken too much LSD and never came out of the “perma-trip,” and I do accept the label of being lucky, and I am glad I was lucky enough to have a healthy mind again. I also learned a few things though, among many other things I learned that every goal needs action, without purposeful and relevant action towards a goal, nothing will “manifest”, also I learned how powerful an environment can be. I watched myself go from borderline emo kid who wanted to be a hippie, to someone who embraced fully that hippie identity and all that came with it, to someone who rejected those things for a more materialist worldview that felt like it could produce actual results, and all these perspectives came about from my social environment and my response to it.
Unfortunately, that isn't the end of the story, although I did get a healthy mind back upon seeing my father again, our relationship did not improve much from last time. This led me to quit my job at McDonald's in New York after two months of being there and buy a ticket back to North Carolina to move back with my mom again (can you believe it?). With a new perspective on life and my mom believing in me once again after seeing me get a job, I headed back to North Carolina to finally be the good son and brother I knew I was.
Fitting In
When I came back to North Carolina I had already decided that I had to “conform to society” so that I could get money and achieve something with my life, and because I also, I did want to be, and feel “normal”. The town in North Carolina I grew up in is a lot more diverse than most places I have been to on the west coast, but ironically there is more intolerance of diversity there. My hometown has echoes of segregation in the school system and in housing. There are two famous neighborhoods, or “projects,” Trent Court and Craven Terrace. There are sometimes one or two apartments in these government-funded housing complexes that white people live in, but you don't see any white people there usually. The school system is a little more diverse because of zoning that was made to make them more inclusive, but I went to many different schools in the county growing up because we moved a lot and you could definitely see the same echoes, some schools had a more percentage of black people, and were less funded, simple as that. Most people I grew up around were descendants of slave owners or descendants of slaves; my family came from New York when I was young and we came to America from Italy only about 100 years ago, so the generational racism, superstitions and prejudice that a lot of white people around there grow up around, was only present in my stepfathers family (who was from there), and I never felt like we were the same. I wanted to get away from it all, I wanted to just embrace peace and love, and be a hippie, but after seeing where that got me, I decided to embrace my original environment, feeling that this was the “right” thing to do.
In my town in North Carolina, and in much of the southeast United States, there are two main distinct subcultures, the white redneck culture, and black culture. People who have studied culture have pointed out that the culture of oppressed peoples, marginalized people, minorities, this culture has consistently been what is new and exciting in the overall society that they exist in. To put it simply, black culture has had the biggest impact on American culture, and shaped it the most, because the culture of resistance, of overcoming adversity, is the most inspiring kind of culture. Think about it, we all watch movies or TV shows of people who are oppressed and face sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds, and those are the pieces of entertainment that inspire us most. American society has historically on one hand systemically suppressed the opportunities for black people, and on the other placed famous black people on a platform to admire and celebrate for overcoming it, for becoming successful in spite of it, while still refusing to acknowledge and correct the effects of historical systemic racism and the generational disparities it creates. In my town, you can see this concept displayed very well. Most white people in my hometown (specifically the older people, but many young people who follow their lead as well) will talk about black people behind closed doors as if they are another species. Many proudly have flags in their homes somewhere, some of them are not American flags but Confederate, but the American one is more common, and they talk about Christian values. When they talk about black people, many white people in New Bern, NC correlate being black with “not representing Christian values”. I will give one small example although I could write pages of them; when I was a teenager a white girl who I was hanging out with said its good I'm white because her mother doesn't like black people and when she saw her hanging out with a black person, her mother told her that she “saw a bad spirit on him” (more likely she just saw the color of his skin, and used her Christian spirituality as a justification for imposing racist values on her daughter). They will do all this, but even the most racist white teenagers at my high school would bump the latest Lil Wayne or Wiz Khalifa album in their car, sag their pants or wear clothing that was not from traditional white culture but from black culture, the same stuff black celebrities wore and did, they did. Many white teenagers start selling weed or harder drugs, to be cool. Their parents have money and have bought them a car (which they use to sell their drugs) and whatever they need, they even can get any job in town or at their parents work, but because tales of black people selling drugs to survive became popularized and glamorized with rap music, being a drug dealer is seen as having a high status in our social groups. It goes even further, to where white people use the term “n***a” as an endearing term to their close friends, just like they see black people do, and this is where the line crosses and something people from outside this environment are shocked by. On one hand, using the word as a white person is crazy because it is trying to re-appropriate the slur that was given to them by white people, “because it's cool to them we can use it to be cool too” is the mindset, but on the other hand, sometimes, when you are have a really good Black friend, they will call you my “n***a” as a term of endearment, and don't mind if you call them it back. However one might feel about the morality of this arrangement, the fact is that usually the white person thinks it is now okay to use that word freely, and to other black people. When another black person hears a white person using this term in public, not to someone who calls them it privately and allows them to say it back, it can, rightfully cause the black person to be triggered. Now when a white person is well meaning, and genuinely did not understand the complexity of this word and it's use, and apologizes, things can usually be resolved. The problem is that many white people, especially ones raised to be prejudice against black people, will then un-rightfully, feel indignant. I personally committed to not using this word, even towards a black friend who thinks it is okay, after this period in my life was over, but during the time I tried to conform to my surroundings, I did use this word often, as a term of endearment to my friends but also almost as an adjective to describe people who I didn't like as well, whether they were black or not, and this is where another problem lies, and why I think I stopped using it.
When you start to put the word “n***a” in your vocabulary as a white person, you start to use it in the way that black people do, because they are the people you hear using it the most. Black people may use the term as an adjective for negative and positive purposes, and while one black person calling another the term with negative connotations may be hurtful, it's not based on centuries of oppression and doesn't have the same weight as when a white person uses the term that way. So, the point is, invariably, white people who accept the term as part of their vocabulary will use it with negative connotations as well as positive, because the term becomes like the word “dude”. If dude is your go to word to speak about other men, you will say “what's up dude” to your friends and “this dude is crazy” to someone you don't like, and this is where the line between adjective and noun gets blurry, and so I think if you are a morally good white person, you should not use the term after understanding all this.
When I first got home from New York, I thought I should be good and get a job, and I worked at Burger King and then Chipotle, but after being fired from both and my mom kicking me out of the house again, I decided I would be a thug, a gangster, a drug dealer. I listened to music about selling drugs to take care of your family and saw this as my way to become wealthy and be happy with my family again, or at least start my own family I could be happy with.
I won't go into too much detail, but I'll give one quick story to help you get a picture of my life at the time. I was doing and selling heroin and weed at the time and this one guy in the neighborhood would always come to me and my homies apartment and ask for $5 of weed, which to some egotistical drug dealers (which I wanted to emulate) would take as disrespect, especially since sometimes he would come with $4 or change. I had, like most people who had similar ambitions as me do, spent a lot of time coming up with random things to say that sounded gangster, and for a while I was saying this one I came up with that a lot of my homies told me they liked, “I only kill, steal, and keep it real”. So the $5 guy comes to the door of the apartment and me and my homies are all on dope and we had been through something else that day where we were facing threats from other people, and so I tell the $5 guy
“Get the fuck out of here.”
“C’mon, look out for me man,” he says, I replied,
“If you don’t get the fuck out of here Imma come out there and beat yo ass.”
“C’mon out here and do it then,” my heart skipped a beat but I didn’t let it show, as he continued, “C’mon Austin, I’m calling your bluff, be a man and come out and fight me.”
“Fight you? Ha! If I come out there, Imma slice, dice and end yo life,” I said as I pulled out my Italian designed switchblade, “Imma slash, gash, and put a hole in yo ass” (I was Italian so I wanted to be like a mafia guy, and these lines were from the parody movie, Scary Movie, I thought they sounded cool though). Me and my friends exchanged a few more words with him and then I said “listen there's only 3 things I do motherfucker, steal, kill, and keep it real, now I done kept it real with you this whole conversation, and I already been out stealing all night, so there's only one thing left to do n***a!” I didn't mean it, I didn't want to kill anybody, but the drugs were pumping through me and every time I said something I felt more powerful. The guy started trying to mess with the door and then I tried to keep it shut because I was honestly scared if he did get in, then I would have to follow through with my threats, and I really didn't want to.
“You ain’t gonna do shit,” he said to me then “You too Mike, you scared?” to my friend who was there. Mike stood up and puffed his chest out, and his eyes got wide,
“Oh you don’t want Big Mike to open this door,” Mike said in a booming voice, “You’re not gonna like it if Big Mike opens the door."
“Yeah man, you’re not gonna like it if BIg Mike opens the door, you know Big Mike don’t play!” I chimed in.
“No he don’t, Big Mike don’t play,” Mike continued, with a sinister tone entering his voice. "
“Yeah so you might want to get outta here if you know what’s good for you” I said.
“Man whatever, you guys are trippin’ man,” the $5 guy said, and then luckily he left. After that I tried to be careful with threats I didn't want to back up. Stuff like this continued until my best friend since elementary school, who I saw as a brother, betrayed me. After that I laid low by myself and just continued selling weed to a few customers, and I started hanging out with a girl I had a short romance with in high school. She wouldn't be my girlfriend when we were in school because her parents were strict and I was a “bad kid” so I thought maybe now we could be together. I felt really good. I had hung out with her a few times and we did LSD together and I had already been off the dope for a few months, so I was more nice and humble. One night, after we had hung out the day before, she asked if I was coming over tonight, and I told her no because I wanted her to miss me, and I thought I could make more sales if I was in town. I was hanging out at IHOP where a friend of mine worked and would give me whatever food I wanted there for some weed. I would get a loaded omelet with strawberry and blueberry pancakes on the side, and it was the best thing ever to me. My friend let me hangout in their car while they worked and I was watching a documentary on my phone when some guy I knew hits up my phone and wanted 12 grams for 100, I told him to meet me at IHOP, but when he left, I looked closer at the $100 Bill and saw it was fake. I called the guy and said I need that back or we got problems and he said I could come get it, so I did. I didn't have a car but my friend let me use theirs, they told me to stay off Simmons st because of the cops, but I didn't, and a cop pulled me over because I didn't know you had to manually turn the lights on at night, so I was driving at night with no lights. I had no license, and I was smoking in the car, so it wasn't long before the cop found the couple of ounces of weed and the half ounce of mushrooms I had in the car and took me to jail.
My mom kept telling me she was raising for money for a lawyer and for my bond, so I shouldn’t take any deals or go to court to plead guilty, so I stayed in there for 5 months when I would've been out in 1 or 2. After 5 months I decided I just want to get out, I wasn't going to listen to my mom anymore and I would just plead guilty (because when you plead guilty it speeds up the court process and you get out faster if you are getting probation instead of prison time). When I got out, my sister told me that she asked my mom if she really had been putting money away for it and she said no, but this story is about what happened in jail.
There was a bully on the block who only took advantage of, and messed with people who were weaker than him (like me and my friends younger brother), and he was a trustee (an inmate who gets to stay out of the cell all day unlike everyone else because they help clean and hand out meals) on the block so he had power, but he didn't have real power, he had tentative power, it was based solely on his position. After a while one of the most high-ranking gang members in our county was moved to our block of the jail. The first night he was there, someone had put a hit on the trustee, for a beating. I was in the cell with and next to the people who took the hit, and as soon as I heard the two older people with us talk about it, I said I was down, before the two other people were firm in their resolve to commit to it themselves. I knew I had to seem ready and willing so I wouldn't be seen as weak. The next day when we were let out of our cells for our hour, we all rushed him in his room. I felt lucky because the other guys in charge told me my job was to take all his stuff, all the clothes, food/snacks, and extra bedding that he had accumulated over many months and bring it back to our cell. I wasn't part of the violence, but I was inches away from it, rummaging through his drawers, putting his stuff in a bed sheet as he cried. I remember him saying “why are you guys doing this to me” and “alright, that's enough” among other things, and only to be ignored as he kept being hit with fists, elbows, and then feet. When I had left and gone back to the room to hide our loot, I came back out and saw him lying on the floor outside his cell, face down with blood coming from his head. I did see him a day or so later, with his head wrapped up and he seemed cognizant. I tried to turn off my empathy. He had humiliated me before too, he shouldn't have taken advantage of his power, these are things I told myself, but I did feel bad. Not guilty, but bad. Something inside my chest didn't feel good when I heard the words of his pleas echoing in my mind later. I saw it as something I had to do, and a lesson. I felt like I had to be part of it, I was weak and if I didn't conform I would be a target, but I also knew that if I had never gone to jail in the first place then I would've never had to make that decision. So, I vowed when I got out to not sell drugs or do anything that could land me back in jail, that was just jail, not even prison. It made me think a lot deeper about the effects of simple choices, how bad choices can bring you to a situation that you can’t get out of, that can change who you are. I never wanted to have to go through that again, so I resolved it in myself that I would still be rich and able to provide for the ones I love, but I will do it legally, because I am not willing to risk what going to jail again would entail.
Finding Something to Stand For
For my sentencing I was given two and a half years of supervised probation, which meant a lot of rules that if I didn't follow, I would have to go to prison for a year or two. One thing jail famously does, is give your brain time to recover from weed or any other addictions and so many people like me, come out sober with ambitions to keep that sobriety and “go legit,” or follow the law. This was my experience, and it was really helpful for me. My little sister got me a job at the fast-food place she worked at, and I met a girl there who I started dating, and I was happy. I stayed with my mother and stepfather again until me and my little sister got our own place together, and after a while I quit fast food to do construction work. My girlfriend had decided she wanted to go into the military, and the way she was talking to me, it sounded like she was trying to hint that if I got her pregnant that she wouldn't have to go. She would cry to me saying she is scared to go but she had a lot of pressure from her family, and she was also scared I would leave her when she went to boot camp. Regardless, I kept using protection because I knew I was not ready to have a kid, and for a few years after I regretted it, because soon after she went to boot camp she broke up with me and I was very sad thinking about the life we could have had. I think that was better for her also though, if I didn't have more time to grow up before having a kid I don't know if I would've ever got more mature and realistic ambitions for my life. Around that time, I was renting a trailer with my sister and my stepfather's brother's ex-wife. I started smoking again, I even started selling again, and eventually my little sister moved out because I was demanding her friends who were over all the time pay rent and help with the dishes, and then I told my ex-aunt to leave after she trashed the house when I was gone for two weeks and came back (I did give her 60 days, though I know this was harsh). The house became a party traphouse and I even did LSD a few times there, but I also was not going to work much and not making much in profit selling, so I got evicted after a few months.
I lived with two of my friends at their parents' house for a little while, but their parents kicked me out when we all were smoking weed at their house, because in NC it is illegal and some people see it like any other drug, and so I became homeless again. I was living outside and begging for money to survive, and I started hanging out with a friend of an old friend sometimes. I felt like a social outcast, and I appreciated him keeping me company sometimes. I was living outside but some nights I would stay in this gym I had membership to overnight and read, I didn't sleep there because I didn't want to get kicked out. I remember I was also following a lot of different political pages and groups on Facebook from different ideologies. I was really interested in understanding power because I was powerless. Eventually this led me to decide to read the Communist Manifesto. I had heard about it, but was told all my life growing up by my stepfathers family, other people in my community, and in online documentaries that basically socialism was people wanting to take what other people had and that Communism was akin to Naziism, so I had previously stayed away from it. I always knew I would never associate with anything hateful or violent, I wanted peace and to help make the world a better place. At this point in my life I had already tried believing whole-heartedly in idealist beliefs of manifestation and then tried to embrace the individualistic ‘grind till you make it’ mindset, and I had come right back to the same circumstance, homeless and struggling to survive, because of this I was more open to reading it and learning about it. I felt powerless and from what I had learned Communism had made some people powerful, and I thought maybe I could at least learn something from it. Maybe even if I didn't agree with all of the perspective, I could still learn something applicable to my life. At this point, being 23 and searching since I was a kid for the answers to life, or at least the world, I had read and listened to many philosophical and political opinions and immersed myself in learning psychology and history, but this was one territory that I had never dared step into, until now.
The book began with the famous line “A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism”. The boldness of the statement, coming from someone who is advocating for Communism, instantly caught my attention, and then the authors go on to explain that much of the media (even in his day) run by the people in power, has basically demonized it and come up with all these things that they say Communists want, and so they are explaining in this pamphlet (the Communist Manifesto) what their true aims are and where their ideological position comes from. The authors then give a material analysis of how class society was arranged in feudal Europe, how different professions had guilds where they all coordinated with each other, but when factories came along and the new economic system of capitalism along with them, all these professions are taken away and there becomes only two classes, capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and workers (the proletariat). The communists argue for a system in which the workers of all these factories are all co-owners of their workplace, to take away the position of “owner”. (Think about it, there are managers upper and lower, and lower level workers who all make factories and other workplaces run, and they don't need the one who owns the business to run it, they could all hold meetings and democratically decide how they run the business together.) By doing this, taking away the ability for one person to own a business (and thereby have complete dictatorship over all workplace decisions) that many people operate in , democracy will be between people who work voting for each other, not rich people who “represent” us. Basically, just like the founding principle of America “no taxation without representation,” but applied to class, we should not be “represented” by people whose lives (because of their class position) have nothing in common with us or our daily struggles as working-class people.
I could go on explaining the theory of Marxism, but this writing is more about reflection. When I read this for the first time, I was amazed how it explained how the world is, not blaming our problems on some spiritual force or on people's own individual ineptitude, but giving real material, historical explanations why our society is structured the way it is today. I was hooked.
I ended up listening to an audiobook of what is called Karl Marx’s Magnum opus, Capital, while I was staying in a tent at night in a small, wooded patch of unused land in the middle of town.
My tent was wedged between a cluster of pine trees that dropped needles like rain every time the wind picked up. The narrator's robot voice filled the tent with the buzzy sound of the cheap speaker my phone had as I lay on a sleeping bag that reeked of mildew, explaining surplus value while mosquitoes whined around my head. My phone screen was the only light, casting blue shadows on the nylon walls as Marx's words about worker exploitation played over the distant hum of late-night traffic on MLK Boulevard, the main street in town that was nearby. Every few minutes, I'd pause to scratch new bug bites or adjust my position on the tree roots digging into my back.
One early morning while listening to it, I heard a voice of a man say from maybe 20-50 feet away,
“oh you're still here, you can't be here on private property” and then followed by something like “you better not be here tomorrow”, I stayed still and listened, trying to hear if footsteps were coming my way, but I didn't hear any, so after a moment I opened my tent and looked around and he was gone.
The next day I left for the day and when I came back to the patch of woods, my tent was gone, and only a small part of it left behind, in a way that felt like they wanted me to see that they took my tent. I called my friend who I had been hanging out with sometimes and told him what happened, and he was nice enough to say I could stay on his couch if I can help with rent. I was exhausted because I didn't get much sleep the night before and so when I got to his place I passed out, and when I woke up in the morning, I told myself I was a Communist now. I then spent the next month or two fervently reading from the most famous Marxists throughout history, especially those who had led successful revolutions, and hardly did anything else besides that and debating and discussing with other people online. Since then, I have always identified as a Marxist and a communist. I have studied a lot about previous Marxist movements and read the theories, and results of their actions, from many revolutionaries, and I have only continued to become more inspired and resolute in my conviction.
Final Thoughts
Looking back now, I see how each environment shaped me like water shapes stone; slowly, inevitably, leaving permanent marks. The strict Christian-nationalist household that drove me to rebellion, the California hippie community that fed my idealism, the North Carolina streets that taught me survival, the jail cell that forced me to confront violence, and finally the gym and that patch of woods where Marx's words found me at my most desperate moment. Each place demanded a different version of myself, and I became what I needed to become to survive.
Marxism explained to me scientifically and concretely, among many other things, something very profound, something that I had already learned through my own experiences: our beliefs don't form in a vacuum. They're forged in the processing of lived experience, in the collision between what we're told the world should be and what we discover it actually is. My mother once told me I could do anything I set my mind to and while that was motivational, what she couldn’t prepare me for was how the world would try to stop me, and how that resistance would ultimately lead me to understand not just my own struggle, but the struggles of everyone trapped in systems bigger than themselves.
I often wonder if I was from a wealthy family would I ever feel the need to read Marx or if I would just accept what I was told about it, if someone who never went hungry would ever question why some people have too much while others have nothing. Maybe my path was inevitable—maybe every homeless night, every jail cell, every moment of powerlessness was leading me toward that tent in the woods where I finally found words for what I had always felt but could never articulate. Or maybe that's just how we make sense of chaos afterward, by finding patterns in the pain. Either way, I know this: I am who I am not despite my circumstances, but because of them. If my story can help even just one person recognize the forces shaping their own life and help them process it better, then maybe all of it, even the worst parts, were for something after all.