The Boom in Bloom

When it comes to mentors, I would say that three in my life stick out to me, and they might not even know that they are mentors to me. A mentor can be a lot of different things, but to me, it is someone who motivates you to be a better version of yourself, helps lead you down the right path, and holds you accountable. One mentor that I have in my life is my friend, Matt. I have been friends with his younger brother, Mike, my entire life as we grew up together. I was always friendly with Matt, but we were never close until a couple of years ago. We got close when I was going through a little bit of a rough patch and he started sending me different workout programs to try out and encouraged me to get out of my funk. Whenever I wanted to complain, he’d shut me down and tell me to focus on what really mattered and to keep pushing, and it worked. Fast forward and we still hold each other accountable, we worked two jobs together, and we both pushed each other to be better every day. To me, t

  In the other Wes Moore’s life, hip-hop played a special role. The other Wes Moore had a dream of becoming a rapper because he felt like music gave him a sense of purpose and direction. He did not want to be like his brother and become a drug dealer. His brother Tony was a drug dealer, and he always encouraged the other Wes Moore to go down a different path, but he based a lot of what he did off of his brother because he saw him succeeding. While hip-hop played a crucial role in the other Wes’s life, it also resonated with the author Wes. Hip-hop sort of served as a bridge between the two with how they resonated with the emotions of the music even though they took very different paths.  Music historically has had a way of bringing people together. Look at the present day, there are music festivals all over the world like Rolling Loud, Boiler Room, Coachella, etc. Everyone from all over the world comes to gather at these events and all bond over the same thing. Like Wes Moore and the o

  When it comes to making decisions that I believe could have altered my life path, there have been numerous decisions where I felt as if I made a certain choice that could have led me down a different path. Everyone who is alive probably feels this way, we wish we could go back and make a different decision, make a certain sacrifice, and say the right thing this time, but we can’t. A lot of people, including myself at times struggle with this kind of living in the past sometimes and we are unable to let go of past decisions we might have made dwelling on if things would be any different now if we did things any differently. While they do not have to be as drastic as the Other Wes Moore making a decision that would lead him to be in prison for the rest of his life, certain decisions can haunt us if we are unable to let go.   I’ll talk about one of my decisions that haunts me to this day. My freshman year in 2020 I was at Montclair State University. I was majoring in sports and digital

Our environment is what surrounds us externally, while our expectations are what we expect of ourselves internally. Many people believe that we are a product of our environment, but does that have to be the case? If LeBron James was a product of his environment growing up, he would not have grown up to be the greatest basketball player to ever live. Instead, he overcame his environment and lived up to the expectations he and everyone else had for him. Environments are a driving force in our lives, good or bad and they can shape us as individuals. Cultural influences, social structures, economic factors, educational institutions, etc, are all things that shape the people we become, but do they necessarily mean we become everything that we are around and what everyone else tells us? I believe that is probably one of the hardest questions to answer because only we can decide what and who we want to become.  In my personal experience, I have grown up in a pretty supportive environment with