Wrong reasons, right outcomes

The things we carry forward from the people we left behind

Admittedly, up until three weeks ago I’d never listened to good kid, m.A.A.d city from start to finish. Of course, I had my favorites from the project: Backseat Freestyle, Money Trees, m.A.A.d city, but 14 years ago I wasn’t really listening… I just wanted to dance.

It wasn’t until I pulled up to a listening session hosted by Cue the Record that I finally got to absorb, not just hear, the story Kendrick was spitting. In a room full of people bopping their heads and rapping along, with my eyes closed and my back pressed against the wall, I immediately understood why each track resonated so deeply with anyone blessed enough to experience the project.

Although I’d heard tracks like The Art of Peer Pressure and Sing About Me in isolation hundreds of times, it was something about this time that I couldn’t help but catch myself slipping back more than a decade to those teenage summer nights. The ones where I would ride in the passenger seat of my then-boyfriend’s silver Toyota Corolla, staring out the window as he rapped over lyrics about a life he’d never lived, and I imagined a future that I hadn’t yet figured out how to make real.

Coming of age in Silver Spring, Maryland wasn’t comparable to Compton by a long shot. Still, it wasn’t hard to relate to Kendrick’s adolescent struggle. I knew what it felt like to straddle the fence of who I was and what I had the potential to be. I’d played the game of tug of war between what my dreams were conspiring on my behalf and what the signs around me suggested would be my actual fate. I didn’t understand it then, but I now see how one small action could change everything.

If you’d asked 18-year-old me what I wanted from my future, I probably couldn’t have told you anything beyond what the next few days or weeks would have held. I didn’t necessarily love my life, but I also didn’t hate it enough to do anything drastic to change it.

There were no dream houses or cities that I fantasized about. I loved the idea of love, but there were no girlhood daydreams about my ideal florals or fairytale wedding dresses. I didn’t obsess over the idea of “making it out” or building a “better” life. Not because I didn’t think any of those things were possibilities for me, but because I didn’t think about the future in that way.

That is, until the moments when I would sit in his passenger seat.

When we first met, he instantly became one of the most interesting people I knew. He didn’t smoke weed or have an aspiring rap career that he’d skip school to pursue. He was a college kid who played sports, owned textbooks, and attended fraternity interest meetings. Instead of filling me in on need-to-know neighborhood beef, he told me stories about dorm parties, football tailgates, and the madness that ensued during late-night food runs or student center spades tournaments.

The way he spoke about life after high school was underscored by so much freedom that it could make birds jealous. He often described time passing as a variation of choices that you got to make. You never had to be anywhere important before 10 AM if you didn’t want to. You only studied things in service of a subject matter that you cared about. You hung out with friends when you wanted to because they lived next door, not separated by traffic and train delays.

In the abstract, he was different than any guy I’d ever attracted. I wanted to do anything to impress him. Even adopt a future I had zero intentions of pursuing before that summer.

When August arrived, so did the evaluation of how successful this relationship would be with 6 hours between us. One particular drop-off, as we sat in the parking lot of the train station with a thick silence holding us hostage, I decided to clear the air with the only words I could manage to release from inside of me: “So what happens after this?”

With zero hesitation, almost as if the answer was sitting right there in the car with us, he broke his gaze to face me and declared, “You could just come here next fall,” as if it had long been decided.

I sat up a little as I started painting the picture of what that life could look like. Even though my academic track record said otherwise, I was flipping through every conceivable future to find the one where that idea was a reality. It was the first time I’d seriously entertained a life where things didn’t just happen to me but where I got to build them.

There was a future here.

I did everything to bring that reality to life. I attended college fairs and onsite admission events. I practiced an in-depth “if you accept me” speech that seemed to charm admissions counselors into looking past my 1.9 GPA. I kept a record of all 13 of the schools that said yes on my bedroom wall. I enrolled in Virginia State University for the fall.

What started as me taking note of how to turn a summer romance into forever became the architecting of a blueprint for a life I hadn’t really imagined but discovered could easily be mine. So even as the relationship crashed and burned, the new vision for my life remained clear as day.

I no longer wanted him as much as I wanted this.

Somehow, deep inside, that used to bother me. That being young and boy crazy created the conditions that became the foundation of my life today. It bothered me that at some point in this narrative, I only saw him, not an accomplished future. Instead, I crafted talking points that glossed over that fact. Ones that overstated the intentionality of my choices. That, when greeted with one of life’s major milestones, I made a decision on behalf of my future self and didn’t treat it like a throwaway plot-filler episode of a teenage rom-com.

Retrospectively, I just wanted my origin story to sound profound when it was played back. I wanted to say, “I always saw this for me. That’s why I did it.” But that wasn’t the truth.

Sometimes the truth behind the greatest moments of our lives, our most impactful decisions, our most memorable experiences weren’t a byproduct of the best intentions.

Sometimes the kids were born because you were lonely. Sometimes you moved across the country to escape, not expand. Sometimes you orchestrated your future around the idea that you liked a boy as much as he liked you.

As the album closed out with a prayer of redemption, with Kendrick choosing a different way, I rested in the reassurance that the catalyst for our journey doesn’t have to be noble for the outcome to be meaningful. Who we become isn’t contingent on where we were when we started or why we started in the first place. What matters is where we decided to take it once we realized that there was an opportunity for more.

Now, looking back at the notes I took from the session, I no longer see a few scattered thoughts. I see timestamps that reflect the people I knew, places I’d been, and things I’d done. I stare at them and no longer wish they were footnotes that would go unnoticed. Instead, I’m grateful for each and every one of those people, places, and things. Not because they were my best decisions, but because sometimes the greatest gift someone can give you is evidence that another life is possible.