Yesterday I wrote about the great extent in which hip-hop and its culture influenced me when I was a lot younger, even if not always positively. That influence has been with me up to this point, but just recently it’s starting to really feel like my mind and personality have changed enough that I can finally reflect, with a clear mind, on that influence and where it took me. Don’t get me wrong, I still respect hip-hop and I’m a rapper myself, but there’s only certain elements I respect about it, which are the ones that drew me to it in the first place. There are also a lot of aspects of hip-hop culture, including the music, which I don’t agree with at all, and I’m glad to see that some of those are starting to change. I am in no way trying to blame hip-hop or its culture for anything that happened in my own life, just like I don’t blame drugs for the bad decisions people make while on them, or surrounding them. We are all responsible for ourselves, but just because we are responsible for not getting caught up in traps, doesn’t mean there are no traps out there. In fact, there are a lot of traps we can fall into in this life. As I mentioned yesterday, one of the things that I feel hip-hop influenced me in was my openness and willingness to associate with drugs, including using them and selling them. When I was in high school, I almost ended up getting expelled because I got caught selling weed. It was a great thing that I had discovered, and I felt like the laws surrounding it just weren’t fair, so I wasn’t going to respect them. If I could make some money and give people this medicine, then why not? The funny thing is that I wasn’t even conscious of why I was doing what I was doing, but looking back on it, years later, it’s clear to me that I decided to start doing that only because I had heard it so many times in the songs I listened to. Sure, we were new here, my family had just emigrated from Honduras, and things weren’t great for my dad when it came to jobs and that, but I can’t say that my brothers and I ever needed anything. I realize now that, I had created an image in my head of what it meant to be cool, and since I was going to be a rapper as well, I had to be the same. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, coming from a conservative Christian household in a third-world country, I had been pretty sheltered up until that point, but now that I was getting into high school in a completely different country, with new friends and new influences, mainly in the form of music, I felt like I wanted to experience everything, especially everything rappers talked about in their songs. Money, cars, girls, the whole thing. Why the hell not, right? The problem is that, as I adopted this type of persona, without even realizing I was doing so, I ended up getting into all sorts of problems. Fights, police problems, school problems, family problems. My teenage years were nothing but a hazy mess of never-ending stress that I’m glad to say are over, even though I managed to have a lot of fun in between all of that as well. Actually, the fun and the problems were probably linked, now that I think about it. Anyway, the aggressive, materialistic me who just wanted to be cool and get money and girls got into all sorts of shit, but as I grew up, the more I started reflecting, the more I realized that this wasn’t really me at all. I had buried the real me, for some strange reason which I’m not exactly sure of, but which I might dive deeper into at a later date. Now, there’s a reason why I say I don’t regret everything I went through, other than all the fun I had. The fact is that, in life there’s a principle of polarity. Even when things go wrong, there’s usually a lesson to be learned, and that lesson can serve as inspiration to avoid many more things going wrong in the future. So, isn’t that a blessing in disguise, in a way? There were some tools which helped me reflect and change, and ironically, one of those was psychedelics. Weed has always been very introspective for me as well, but the early experiences I had with psychedelics really showed me things that truly shook me. It was as if I was able to see clearly so many things that I had somehow blinded myself from. Now, as I mentioned, I grew up in a very religious home, and although the thought of organized religion doesn’t appeal much to me, I can’t say I haven’t learned any good from my parents. Although they’re not perfect, they’ve both been great examples to me in certain ways, even in terms of spirituality. That is to say, I already had a concept of spirituality before getting into weed and psychedelics, and in a way, that was why I was so eager to experiment with these substances. However, as I mentioned, my psychedelic trips shook me to my core, and in a good way, because it showed me all the good in life, and in myself, and I realized that it was time to change, and to change for the better.
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