It was early 2008 I was 23 years old at the time and the night was unforgiving in its blistering cold.  I was hungry with a few bucks to my name and I wanted to go to the store to get some snacks as a late-night comfort food to ease my mind of the pressure that I was under.  But I knew that was not a good idea because I had to stretch my dollars out and needed to make sure that I had bus fare to get to some open interviews in the upcoming week.  Like many in America, I was eagerly awaiting a modest tax return and just thinking of a deposit of a few hundred dollars into my bank account in the coming weeks was enough to hold me over mentally so I laid down in my bed put the comforter over my head and tried to capture the vision of getting back on my feet.  But I was restless.  Something in my spirit just did not sit right with me.  I went to my living room and sat on my worn-out sofa and peeled back the curtain and looked out into the empty street.  My eyes started to follow the snow flurries falling from the sky.  As I sat their daydreaming at a block of abandoned houses and I couldn’t help but wonder how many people were feeling just like me on this night.  Like a complete loser with no purpose.

I thought back to my classmates, particularly the ones who kept good grades and I concluded they likely had gone to college, found a great career and were probably married with children by now. At the very least, I was sure that they had a car.

Have you ever got the feeling you get when you look at everything and everyone around you, and then, look deeply into your own eyes in the mirror? And you know that you should be doing so much better than you are? I mean really much better?  This is a crossroads that many young Black men find themselves at by the their mid-20’s.  You start feeling like your behind somehow in life. 

Enjoy Your Youth

Your youth is a blessing.  Youth is but a few short chapters of your life, just a fraction of the entire composition of your life’s book.  As young Black boys growing up, many of us are faced with the realities of the seriousness of life at a very early age.  We often envision ourselves as needing to assume the roles of adults even before puberty.  We have an awareness of our treatments in society as less than second class citizens just from the color of our skin, irrespective of the social class that you may have grown up in.  Many times we didn’t grow up with a cushion of being able to try our hand at something and if that doesn’t work than to try something else until we find a lane that suits us.  We didn’t have the financial baking from our parents to be able to make mistakes with our ideas and we knew that byt the time we turned 18 it was time to have it together enough so that we don’t have to rely on our parents for a thing.  So we often develop a callous about many areas of life before we even have a chance to discover life.  We knew that we had to get it right the first time or possibly never have an opportunity for a long time if ever at all.

Your youth is a time of self-discovery which will precede your later years of self-reflection, correcting course and becoming actualized into a well-rounded man.  Enjoy your youth and realize that manhood has stages of development.  Just like in sports where you’re a pro football player as a rookie on the practice squad, but there’s a big difference in being on the team and being a starting veteran that can be counted on during clutch moments.  Be grateful that you made the team and go to practice.  Be ok with learning as you go and take note of seeing yourself grow.  If there’s one thing that I would have done differently as a younger man it would have been to not have taken everything about life so seriously so early on and not to put so much pressure on myself to think that life is about either have it all together or being a failing. 

This doesn’t mean that youth is a time of being irresponsible or haphazard with how you live, or treat or how you conduct yourself but rather that you should give yourself the emotional freedom to come into your own and understand that you’re in a stage of  manhood and that you shouldn’t beat yourself up too much about what you don’t know, about what you don’t have or about what you haven’t done as you go along in your journey. 

You should enjoy your life socially.  Youth presents you with a great opportunity to establish relationships that can be with you throughout life.  It also presents you to have more of a balanced view of the opposite sex by participating in co-ed group settings where the focus isn’t sex or relationships.  Don’t harden yourself too early about female nature or their social conditioning.  Have an awareness, and keep your dignity and self-respect front and center at all times, but you also have an opportunity to enjoy the beauty of a woman’s early adulthood if you deal with women in the right settings, such as women who share a similar value system as you, perhaps women who are in your college or who participate in similar social and civic circles as you.  This is a beautiful time to create memories with the ladies that do not always have to be sexual or romantic.  The charming monuments where you remember having that warm conversation with her at lunch and how pretty her lipstick was and nice her hair looked and how friendly she was.  These are the moments that you can capture and reflect back on as you get older, you can make your own good ole’ days with the appropriate attitude and outlook on where you are in life.    

Youth is a time where it’s a good idea to take a trip out of town with the fellas, where maybe 4 of you have to go in on a hotel suite to afford the trip, but you can put your money together to go out, sightsee, meet other young ladies and have share in creating a bond of brotherhood where even more memories are added.  You want to make as many moments as you can that put a smile on your face, where you are being safe responsible and not impeding up another person’s quality of life. 

So, I encourage you to give yourself a little breathing room.  Be joyful that you are now a man but still a young man and that stage has a specialness to it that you’ll never get back and that you should embrace for the time that you’re blessed with it. 

Don’t Let Older Men Look Down Upon You Because of Your Youth

To me, one of the best things for a young man is to have a mentor, a counselor a guide, a trusted male source that can help you along the way who is not related to you.  Even though you may have a great relationship with your father or like many brothers, you may not have one at all, having a man who’s 10 or 20 years ahead of you in age and who truly wants to see you succeed is a gift that may end up being more valuable than a treasure chest of gold. 

What often happens though is that you will encounter older men who want to stick it to you for being younger than them to try to prove to you how much you don’t know and why you should listen to them due to your inexperience in a field.  These men are not the ones who have your best interest at heart.  These men are the ones who likely have problems within themselves and cannot handle seeing a young man coming into his own at a speed and in a manner that surpasses their progress at your age.  These men are in competition with you, because they often envy your social skills with women, your talents and your motivation to make something of yourself, so often times they will try to put you in your place by limiting your self-image.  This is just like the female who doesn’t want you to think highly of yourself because she knows that with the raising of your values and standards the more she may need to step her game up just to qualify to participate with you in life, so instead of making the change, she’d rather keep your ego under her thumb. 

Now with that said, if you are a respectful young man with a good head on your shoulders, well-intended older gentlemen will go out of their way to help you to see you win.  Older men who can’t stand to know that you’re on your way will try to throw subdue your self-esteem.  When I was about 23 I had a conversation with a man who was about 46 who saw me grow up and though he had been drinking, the alcohol serving as his truth serum showed me how despite seeing me several times a week for years at a time in the community and observing my progress growing up he was jealous because he saw that he didn’t have the gumption to take certain risks, roles and responsibilities that I had taken back then without the community growing up because he was scared to fail.  So the first time that we had a conversation at length, it was him letting the demon out that he must have had stored up for some period of time by trying to minimize the significance of my knowledge and accomplishments.  Older men who detest seeing you on a path to success will try to make it appear as though you have to have it all together and if you don’t than you should listen to their words and follow suit.  But these are the same guys who don’t even have it all together themselves and simply have the craftiness to mask over their weaknesses. Don’t fall for it.  If older men are trying to keep your self-image at their rule, check them at the door. 

Start off with respect but don’t continue to show respect for people who don’t respect you.  Have the open-mindedness and humbleness to gather other men’s wisdom and experiences and reference it as a guide for your decision making.    

Don’t Be Afraid to Take Chances

When I was a kid I would often times in the Summer race other kids on my street.  On your mark get set go.  I would start off strong and swift, being a bit taller than most of the other kids and being skinny with long legs but the second that I would see the back of another kids head I would literally stop in my tracks and give up on the race. 

My mother who always wanted me to embrace my strengths would shaker her head sometimes as she would tell me in so many words that giving up in these races just because I was losing was setting a tone for how I would conduct myself in other areas of life and she was right.  In 8^th grade I was selected as a semi-finalist for what was known as the Richmond Speaking Contest, it was a public speaking competition for young people.  I had already had years of experience in public speaking as my mother has got me involved in the skill at around the age of 7 so by 13, I had a leg up on my competition.  However moments before my time to go on stage I told one of my teacher’s that I was dropping out of the contest.  He thought that I was joking and I assured him that I wasn’t.  My mother came out to see my in her pretty dress so eager to see her son compete in the contest as I had a poem that I was h]going to recite from an anonymous writer.  But I looked my mother in the eye and told her that I wasn’t going to do it.  No amount of convincing by her was going to steer me otherwise even including her tears that broke my heart as she nearly begged me to do the poem.  “You made you mom cry!” one kid barked out at me as the announcement over the loud speaker came that I would not be reciting my poem.  Though I don’t often reflect on that day anymore, in talking about this right now, 20 some  odd years later, it disturbs me.  There it was my opportunity to make a name for myself early on in public speaking.  I was confident that I was the best from my school to represent them in the finals where school from our district would eventually compete at our popular music hall here in Buffalo, but for some reason I just dropped the ball and didn’t compete.  I quit before I had a chance to even get an outcome.  That type of giving up before the good part was the start of a trail of events that would influence my conduct thorough life where I would throw in the towel if I thought there was a chance that I wasn’t going to make the sort of progress that I wanted and it wouldn’t be well into my mid to later 20’s where I would eventually shake off that bad habit. 

Your youth is your time to take chances and to allow yourself to see how far you can go in playing to your strengths.  There are so many resources and people around to help you if you would simply allow yourself to step into your greatness.  Don’t be afraid to fall and don’t be afraid to fail.  Don’t worry about the embarrassment.  Focus on the outcome, the result of you putting your best foot forward and taking action.  That’s where the magic happens.  Each time you make a plan and make a move towards that plan, you start a chain of events that lead you to your throne.  The place where you finally start to put all the pieces to the puzzle together to make yourself into a success.  Success may not always happen in the way that you envisioned it originally, but it can be a surprise destination awaiting you when you take action and commit to always being willing to keep trying until you make something happen.  If you have this same bad habit that I cultivated in my youth of stopping while your ahead in a journey of being awarded with life’s offerings, I beg of you to please not do that to yourself.  Please don’t be like me in that area.  Look at my failures a lesson and don’t miss your moments.  Whatever you are thinking of doing in this short span of life, go ahead and do it.  Look into it, pursue it.  Just by changing the language of recovering from a loss to learning from an outcome and making a corrections to succeed changes your entire internal narrative. 

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Written By: Waymon Brown. Creator of theesquireproject.com. Email info@theesquireproject.com