In 2002, a year after i graduated high school...i started to feel everything that came along with not being around those friendly faces everyday. I was from and was in at the time, what people would consider...tha hood. This wasn't nothing new to me but what was new was not having that outlet (school) anymore. I had gotten 52 letters in high school, 4 of which were full rides and i bypassed it all. My mother and i used to open them all up and read what colleges had what and what they could offer me academically. What people didn't know, even though, i hustled, barely went to school....i still maintained a 3.2 on a 4.0 scale. I didn't take the college route because i felt my mother needed me, but now that i look back at it...i should have went to college right out of high school. I was far from a dummy. Sometimes i thought i think too much because it was always something in my head. I used to get mad when i asked a person "what u thinkin bout" and they would reply, "nothing". I found it impossible to be alive and not have a constant thought. But the same thing i admired about myself, soon became the same thing that was about to be my demise.
One day i woke up with this huge cloud of grief, it wasn't nothing unusual. When you grew up in places i grew up, that feeling was normal and if you didn't have it, something that day was about to get really bad. My mother is an evangelist and we would have church on Sunday in our living room. People would come over and it felt like a church. But for some reason i would always have this unexplainable feeling right after it every Sunday. I remember this one Sunday after church, i was sitting in my room on my bed and just started crying. My big bro Tank (name he is hugely known by) walked in, put his hand on my shoulder and asked "whats wrong B". I looked up at him and said, "I don't know". I was crying and couldn't explain the reasoning why i was even crying. Not only was it confusing to me but i can only imagine how confusing it was to my brother who was trying to help me through it. We just sat there for a while and i the feeling left after about 30 minutes. I was trying to channel that exact emotion because i had always been able to get passed a feeling, i guess i was special lol.
Later that week, that feeling came back. As i was in the front of the apartment playing music, i just started to feel worthless. I felt like what ever was in my life was there because of me. The lack of money, happiness, comfort...everything. I grabbed my mothers keys and hopped in her van. I told myself that i was just going to go ridin. I lived in humble at the time and there is a part of 59 freeway that connects to 45 freeway and its a long drop from the freeway to the street. As i was driving down 59 getting closer to 45, i didn't feel like i had complete control of what i was doing. It seemed like i was just in the drivers seat but something or someone was driver the vehicle. At that point, thoughts of suicide started to entertain my mind. Something was telling me to drive off the freeway and end it all. There was no reason i was that far down 59 just "ridin" anyway. I had music playing and as these thoughts started to become more and more, i turned the music up. It seemed though, the more i turned the music up, the louder the thoughts became. I started to swerve on the street to regain some kind of control and then it happened....EVERYTHING WENT BLACK. My body was relaxed, my mind was calm, i felt like a human being again.
I used to always pray to God and ask him, "why me God, why i gotta live this life..why other people don't have to live this". But God chase whom he loves. I guess i never wanted to accept who or what i meant to him. When a woman creates a child, its hard for her to just let it go or not worry about it...its a part of her. I am a part of God and didn't think he loved me as much but he never let me die.
The next morning was Sunday, we had church at another location. As i sat in that seat, clueless of how i even gotten back home or how i even was still alive...i was just froze. As they welcomed all the new faces to the service, there is normally a scripture reading of the persons choice to open the service. For the first time in my life, they asked me to read a scripture. They didn't know what happened to me the night before, they didn't understand the things that was going through my head. I grabbed the bible that my mother was handing me to pick a scripture to read out of. I stood up and just opened the bible. I told myself where ever it lands, that's what I'm going to read. I remember reading a scripture that said, "i gave you ears, i gave you eyes, im God". That isn't what it said word for word but what i got from it as soon as i read it was, God was telling me "i gave you those eyes from all this stuff you see, i gave you ears from all this stuff you hear...i see what you going through and i hear your prayers, I'M GOD". I started crying in church. I was never an emotional person, actually people would consider me more "emotionless" appose to anything else. I shared the story of how i was about to take my life and my sister looked at me and said, "I felt you were about to do something like that but we Vinson's, God made us special". Then my mother hugged me and said, "The devil wanted you out the way because he know you gonna be a problem, you aint goin nowhere, we need you down here".
This is the family that i have. We lived in the ghetto, hood...are hood, whatever you want to call us, but we are strong.
Someone may read this and may be going through the same thoughts i did, just know that you are valuable to life even when life seemed to have given you up. Without trial, there is no story...be thankful for the problems.
I'm glad to say that i was reading the bible tonight and ran across that scripture that i had been looking for, for 8 years.
Proverbs 20:12 "Ears that hear, eyes that see, the Lord has made them both."
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