Not Every Friendship Is Meant to Last

I don't know a single project or ghetto where life is good. I have never heard anyone say it was their calling to live in those places. Most people do it out of resignation, and everyone dreams of getting out. So why take into account the opinion—even a majority opinion—of a world you don't want to belong to anyway? Over time, and over behaviors, a natural selection happens in friendships. I stayed on good terms, and in touch, with very few of the people I grew up with. I'd say one in ten. I had the pretension to believe that some of them envied my beauty, my body, or my brains. I really was pretentious, but I had to be sure of myself and of what I was worth—nobody was going to do it for me. My confidence is the flip side of my strengths. And I was completely off. What they envied was that I had set my own rules and followed them. To them, I was a heathen, an outlaw—outside the law of the projects—who denied herself nothing, doing whatever I wanted with whoever I wanted. That's what some of them envied to the point of hating me, and what earned me the disrespect of some of the males. I was a woman who behaved freely. I dressed how I wanted. My culture and my studies showed in the way I spoke and the way I thought. I made my own choices. I followed my own religious path. I met people who marked me. I learned from the world, I loved, I cried, I laughed, I danced, I drank, I flirted, I had a blast, and I got blasted—just for the wordplay, and within reason. I sometimes failed and sinned, but I got back up to pray. And I survived. In the projects, according to some, I was a girl of loose morals who would end up with seven kids by five different fathers, living from shelter to shelter on welfare. Everyone has their own definition of success. But knowing that my adult life proves wrong everyone who took pleasure in dragging me through the mud—that has an exquisite taste. The saddest, or funniest, part is that some of them have exactly the life they predicted for me. Which goes to show: mind other people's business in bed too much, and you end up in deep shit.