Reuben

When I was twelve years old, I made one of the biggest mistakes in my life and it was joining a gang. I became loyal to a gang that didn’t care about me and put me in situations that led me to state prison. The second biggest mistake I made was pushing my family away; I had to deal with this prison life and didn’t want to stress my family out with the things I was going through in life, like stressing out and figuring out how this life was going to be. I didn’t want them to deal with any of this, so I pushed them away so far that even now that I’m in contact with them, I don’t feel close to them. It’s as if they weren’t my family. The third mistake I’ve made was allowing my anger to get the best of me. Having a messed-up anger problem made me make a lot of messed-up mistakes towards other humans. Now, before I allow myself to get mad about what someone says, I think about it a couple times in my mind and think about the consequences I’ll have. I do that now because I don’t want my anger to take control over me and because I don’t want to be a messed up person. I want to be seen as a happy go lucky nigga that people see and can say “that man is always smiling and happy.”