Listen to the words, don’t read them with your eyes. Read them with your voice. Read these words and feel.
POPS on The Good Men Project is about visibility, about voices being heard. We need to take the time to listen, to think, to process the words we hear. The voices of POPS unlock details for social reform.
Where are you from? What environment did you grow in? Does where you are from tell us who you are?
Going back to the beginning of the story can help define the way forward.
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I Come From
By Jessica Jeanes
I come from a mom who did drugs until she found out she was pregnant. Telling me I saved her life and that I am the most important person to her.
I come from being 13 years old and getting hit by a car while on the back of my dad’s motorcycle. Remembering the pin of the sky at 5:00 p.m. as the impact threw me to the sidewalk. Seeing my femur sticking out of my leg, not registering what was happening, thinking it was all a bad dream. Hearing my dad yell f___ as he lay on the sidewalk, wondering if he was okay. Screaming in pain as reality set in and it wasn’t a dream.
I come from repeating 8th grade and changing schools for something out of my control.
I come from a mom who lived a hard life and in a cry for help decided to kill herself in my dad’s apartment bathroom.
I come from seeing my mom’s cold, lifeless body in ICU, the only thing keeping her alive were the machines hooked up to her body. Seeing red marks around her neck from the rope she used to hang herself.
I come from almost dying at the age of 13 to losing the most important person in my life at 15 and four years later still managing to smile on days when it seems impossible.
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Visit Popstheclub, or find them on Twitter @popstheclub and on Facebook
Please check out the other POPS Updates:
California Students Transform Through Art With POPS
Teaching Kids to Open the Tap on Creativity
If You Wrote Someone Who is Incarcerated
There aren’t Fathers Where I am From
“They Stereotype the Students”
Listening and the Difference Caring Makes
His Blood Runs Through Me Remember This
I’m Still Being Punished for His Crime
I was Homeless at the Age of Eight
Photo: Ian Sane/Flickr