Jesus, reading that made me reflect on my own life, my own loss, and the demons I've battled;some I'm still battling this day. Thinking about my favorite uncle getting locked up when I was kid for possessing and distributing drugs, and not understanding why he was taken; Seeing him released years later, only to see him defeated by the seemingly impossible task of finding a job as a convicted felon with a GED, falling to the allures of easy money, just to get locked up again for possession. All the while simultaneously destroying the mystique that I had built up of him, leaving me to cope with the depression and the wave of cynicism that overcame me afterwards. And my mother who I lost a few years ago, who lost her battles with here own vices years ago, vices she turned to because she was unable to deal with the mental ramifications of being abused and tossed from foster home to foster home (your lines about mental illness in the black community hit me HARD, and was such an astute observation about how it's treated, especially the bit about the the lack of empathy that coincides with it) because she lost her parents-my grandparents- in a car accident that my mother bore witness too in the backseat of the car; and seeing how it all haunted her and made her turn to alcohol. And having one of my best friends, one of the wittiest,most naturally intelligent, underachieving ass nikkas I've ever met, get killed because of some street shyt, at an age before any of us had a chance to find out who we really were, and how that shyt still doesn't seem fair. I feel like I can relate to your story a bit, hence why I'm opening up more than I ever thought I would on a message board, and I know how these pains literally fester inside of you, never to go away, popping up whenever you're vulnerable or just at random sometimes. They only fukking thing you can do is cope and learn to live with the pain, because it never goes away no matter how much you try to trick yourself into believing it doesn't hurt.
I didn't mean to carry on, I don't want to make anything about this thread about me, and I can't tell it like you tell it, but fam, when I started relating to your story I got touched b, I had to get some of this shyt out. when you first started this thread, I didn't expect at any point I would come out of this thread feeling like this...
