Be a Survivor...be a winner.

Hey guys,
I looked back and since I never do 'rules' very well...(probably why the army and I never really saw eye to eye) I skipped around in the month from a year ago and found this post from my something special for jack sh*t series...you would have had to be around back then to know what that was about...but I wrote a bit more about my epic childhood and the lessons I learned from it...and one of the lessons I learned was that I had been born in the wrong place. That for some reason, unbeknownst to me, and probably because I had something to learn...I was born in a place where I did not fit in at all.
This is one of my best posts because it described the lynch pin for every other discovery I have made about myself since....
Lake station, Michigan.
Here is an excerpt from 8-16-09:
"All that summer I felt restless. It is a very small town, a village really. There aren't alot of young people. Its mostly a retirement area. There aren't many jobs, my mom didn't have a lot of money and I worked a lot of odd jobs to buy school clothes and go to the occasional Friday night movie.
Here is the point of this post. I never fit there. From the time I was small, I never liked car harts, I never wanted to camp, get drunk or go muddin' . There isn't anything wrong with any of those things, but they just weren't me. I didn't even fit in with my own family. I thought for a while that I must have been adopted. I loved to read books. I would find books about different places and read about them. I wanted to travel and see the world. I dreamed about the Eiffel tower from the time I was ten years old. I used to hold the antennae on our old t.v. (It was the only way you could get the channels in....to actually hold the antennae up with your hand...) and watch Dallas (or the Grammys, and infamously in our family-once I watched Gone with the Wind...talk about TV elbow). When I was twelve, I talked my mom into letting me watch Out of Africa, when I was sixteen...I sat, practically alone, in the local movie theater and watched Havana with Robert Redford. (The only other person in that theater was my art teacher Mrs. Thurston, whom I had great respect for) I would sit by the highway and watch cars go by and wonder where they were going. I never felt right there. Then one day, I was walking down the hallway and I heard the song Colorado Rocky mountain High. I had never heard that song before, or even of John Denver. It was the line " I was born in the summer of my 27th year, coming home to a place I'd never been before'. It hit me like a hammer...standing in the hallway of my mom's trailer, it all suddenly made sense. Why I didn't fit there. I wasn't home. This wasn't the place I chose, this had been the result of someone Else's choice. Of course I didn't feel right here, this wasn't my home...I just had to find my home. The rest of that summer, while working in that stupid caboose, I sat on those steps and could almost feel my life coming for me. I was so ready. It took me two more years for things to happen. So here is what I know. Sometimes, through no fault of your own...you are not where you are supposed to be and you are not WHO you are supposed to be. If you have this persistent feeling that you just don't fit, or your life doesn't fit you...it may be because it doesn't. There is nothing wrong with you, you are just in the wrong place."


You know, after I left home I found my place. I did travel...saw the eiffel tower. I did what I set out to do.
By doing.
My one shot was the army.
Since that summer, there has been one musician I understood in the same way I understood John Denver.
I was riding in my car a few years back and listening to the radio...up till that point I listened mostly to country and pop.
Then this rap song came on and it hit me the same way the other song hit me...right in the gut..the way the best songs do...It was lose yourself by eminem.
I understood this person.
He could have been singing my song.
And if he would have known me, he would have understood me too.

I was willing to face anything to leave where I grew up because there was nothing for me there.
So was he.
Mr. mathers is my dopple ganger...so when robin got on her eminem kick, I was tickled.
I admire people who have had to actually overcome some sh*t in their lives.
They often have rough edges and aren't always socially acceptable..because their lives made it impossible to play nice.
It's easy to be genteel when you have people in front of you paving the road and behind you cleaning up your mess.
When you have to crawl up out of the hole someone else dug to get to even ground, you are already a fighter.
When you have people all around you settling, telling you to settle...telling you to be a secretary not an artist....
And his most recent song with b.o.b where he says
'allright lets pretend Marshall Mathers never picked up a pen
lets pretend things would have been no different
pretend he procrastinated had no motivation
pretend he just made excuses that were so paper thin they could blow away with the wind
marshall you’re never gonna make it makes no sense to play the game there ain’t no way that you’ll win
pretend he just stayed outside all day and played with his friends
pretend he even had a friend to say was his friend
and it wasn’t time to move and schools were changing again
he wasn’t socially awkward and just strange as a kid
he had a father and his mother wasn’t crazy as sh-t
and he never dreamed he could rip stadiums and just lazy as sh-t
f-ck a talent show in a gymnasium bitch you won’t amount to sh-t quit daydreaming kid
you need to get your cranium checked you thinking like an alien it just ain’t realistic
now pretend they ain’t just make him angry with this sh-t and there was no one he could even aim when he’s pissed it
and his alarm went off to wake him off but he didn’t make it to the rap Olympics slept through his plane and he missed it
he’s gon’ have a hard time explaining to Hailey and Laney these food stamps and this WIC sh-t
cuz he never risked shit he hopes and he wished it but it didn’t fall in his lap so he ain’t even here
he pretends that…"

If I would have settled, I would probably be married to some dude who works at a minimum wage job, who drinks his nights away and watched my children live the kind of low expectation life I led.
I wouldn't have seen Europe and traveled, I would never know what I had in me.
I didn't accept it.
I listened to that inner voice.
The one that said "This isn't who you are, and this isn't where you belong."

That he got to where he is can only be attributable to the size of the fight in his soul.
When you come up that way, you can't play nice, So you play hard.
It makes you tougher.
It makes you a survivor.
I thank God for every obstacle I have had to crawl over.
It made me so I don't crack easy...
It made me a survivor.
cherish your tough times...they make you.
if.you.let.them.
Have a great night guys.
Hugs
chris