Aron's Journey, by Aron Walls

Is what you consider normal actually normal? I lived where people stayed up all night blasting rap music and police never came; where in the morning I would find bullet remains on my grass. Well, this is my city: Detroit. My name is Aron and all I want to know is why did my life have to turn out like that? The thing is, my life was anything but normal. Growing up I was never really a good kid in school.

In school I would always get into an altercation that would end with me on a trip home with a short-term suspension in my hand. My mother would always beat me with a belt for getting into trouble, and I would promise never to get into trouble again, knowing I was lying. The thing about me was I always wanted to be the cool kid, or the tough guy. I had no friends and no one showed even the slightest sign that they wanted to be my friend. So I decided to be the tough guy. I then thrived to become the guy everyone feared.

 I turned so corrupt that the same day my mom would put me back in school after a suspension, I would be walking home with another suspension within a matter of hours. As I walked home, all I thought about was how powerful I felt fighting and nothing else. When this kept happening, my mother had gotten tired of me and gave up on me being anything in life. I just never cared about her feelings; all I just wanted was to be remembered for the good I did or the bad. Even when she gave up on me, she still punished me, for my mistakes, and when she got tired of punishing me, she started calling my uncle. My Uncle Nig was stronger than her. My uncle, who worked all day lifting steel, would not only punish me by chasing me around his house, swinging a belt at me and not caring where it hit, but he also cut off my braids.

He and my mother kept giving me bad haircuts just to punish me. I would be so embarrassed that I did not want to go to school, walk out of the house, or even look at my family members. I hated my uncle for a long time, and felt as if he took away my manhood and my pride.

What they never realized in my family was that I was bullied. I hated how I had to defend my pride at school, just to come home and have it taken away. Because of that pride I tried so hard to defend, I failed a grade. Yet every day, I still acted tough, as if nothing was wrong.

Every day I went to school, and I had no friends and very few acquaintances. The few people who talked to me would only talk about video games for a short period of time. People who wanted to prove they were better than me would taunt me. They threw bars of wet soap from the restroom at my face, pushed me in the hallways, call me names, and even spit on me. All I did was give people what I felt they had coming. I believed I was the punishment they deserved and  received. I was getting hit at school, just to come home and get hit again. I hated my mother and my uncle for a long time. All I thought about day in and day out was killing them for not understanding.

As time went by, my hatred grew. Day in and day out for years, all I saw was my uncle beating me for getting into trouble. After a while, I grew to despise him. His very existence enraged me. Every time I looked at my uncle, I was enraged and felt as if I was going to die if I did not take him down. All I could smell was my blood when he was around, but I also felt as if as if I was worthless. I felt like I was nothing compared to him, and I knew that it was the truth. I say this because I knew I could not win and I knew that physically I was weaker than him, and because of this I hated myself even more than I hated him.

When I entered high school, things went even further downhill from there. During the first week of school I already had people who hated my guts, but I never really cared.  Within the first couple of weeks I had gained some acquaintances from all different grade levels. By the time the third month of school came, I was hustling snacks with them, charging everyone outside of my group double what I had paid. One day a guy named Ice stole some of the snacks and ran while I was talking to a teacher. What he did not realize was that I was angered easily. My acquaintances and I found him in a bathroom stall and beat him until we saw blood.

During my 9th grade year, all I did was fight and skip school. Almost every day I was supposed to be at school I was ether at the mall, downtown, or at my friend’s house playing video games. My grades were so low, my cumulative GPA for 9th grade was around a 1.0 on a 4 point grading scale. When I did get suspended for fighting I had to stay home, take a thrashing from my mother or uncle, and clean anything that was dirty in the house.

During my 9th grade year, my family had a get-together for Thanksgiving. I sat in the room next to the adults, just listening to everyone talk. I failed to understand how I had become the topic of the conversation, but my mother was telling everyone about the latest Aron screw-ups in school. My grandfather, who never has much to say, spoke. He was telling everyone, “That boy is never going to learn. He is just stupid.”

When I heard him say that, I jumped up and walked into the room so he would know that I heard him, but he didn’t care. All he did was walk up to me, look me in the eye, and say, “You will never graduate high school; you will never be anything. You will die in the street like a dog.” All I did was grimace him and then I walked away. As I walked away, I heard him tell my mother, “That boy is too far gone. It’s over for him.” I had never even realized how far I had been falling, and even if I knew, I would not have cared.

 It wasn’t until 10th grade that I made a change. I was sitting at one of my acquaintances’ house, doing nothing. I don’t know why I was thinking about him, but all I could think about was my granddad. All I could think about was him making fun of me, laughing at me, taunting me.

I imagined him standing over my grave, laughing, saying I was nothing, saying I was never anything, and it enraged me. The thing different about this situation was that I wanted to prove him wrong. I wanted to graduate from high school and laugh in his face, as I thought he would do in mine. At this time, I had already moved, and no one from the hood knew where I lived, so I just made the change. I changed my number and begged my mom to enroll me in The Academy of Public Leadership At Cody. This school was small and everyone knew everyone. The environment was friendly and I actually felt as if I belonged there.

The problem that I faced now was the classes I had failed. I had failed nearly half of all the classes I had taken up until that point, and just thinking about them made me want to quit. But I did not. I stayed after school every day of my 11th grade year until 8:00 p.m. just to make up some of my classes. In 12th grade I had to stay after school every day until 6:00 p.m. just to make up my work.

My original plan was only to graduate from high school, but after people saw me trying so hard, it was different. My principal, Mr. Mathews, my math teacher, Ms. Raye, and my counselor, Ms. Meyers saw something in me that most people never saw a glimpse of. They saw my potential and helped me get into college.

My life has been far from what people consider normal, yet I am proud of my mistakes and everything else. I am now a Madonna University freshman. I also graduated from high school with my last two report cards being a 3.8 on a 4 point scale. I would never have made it to where I am if it was not for all of my bad experiences. Even though I have changed my life around, I am still defined by that one moment when my granddad said, “That boy is too far gone.”