Day 236 – I write from a coffee shop in Greenwich Village, New York City, where I have sat for the last three hours writing memos, email copy and mail copy for my clients. I hopped a cab and told the driver “drop me off at the most artsy part of the city.” This is where I landed.
I explored for about an hour, stopping by Gray’s Papaya for a hotdog, before the rain forced me to Joe The Art of Coffee for retreat.
I just stepped outside and looked down the street where I saw the Empire State Building peaking out over top a series of skyscrapers. The skies told me it wasn’t quite time to leave my shelter and I sat back down for more work.
While writing a mailer for SC Representative Mike Forrester, my thoughts drifted to the awesomeness of this experience. There was a time in my life when I thought I would never see such things. New York City, the greatest city in the world, was always going to be beyond my reach. It was left for television, movies and of course, Dick Clark. I was stuck to live out a life in a single-wide trailer.
Last week blogger Benton Wislinki provided a thoughtful response to my blog post “Join me in not being robot,” stating:
However, perhaps there exists the potential that Dems think people are born at different starting points or with major disadvantages (e.g. socioeconomic factors or disabilities) and so they promote entitlements to help people who don’t stand on the same ground that you were born on and walk upon to date, Wesley. Your assumption that all are created equal is how you are able to espouse that people should “be different.” Maybe, just maybe, they want the opportunities you’ve had, friend.
Benton has a point, but his premise is completely wrong and its because he’s wrong, that I hold certain political beliefs. I will explain those political beliefs in a future blog post, but this post is not meant to discuss politics. It is meant to build a foundation.
It has come to my attention that in order to write about who I am, or where I want to go, I must write about where I have been, as uncomfortable as that may be.
There are things that I cannot, or will not, discuss at the moment. Perhaps later. I will just say for now there were things my sister and I should have never seen and I took on this profession because I do not want other children having those same type experiences.
I am a white, bow tie wearing entrepreneur who hangs out with politicians and because of this, I find that Benton is not in the minority. Most people believe that I was some country club kid born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I lived a great deal of my childhood in a single-wide trailer, living solely off government entitlements. After an abusive marriage, my parents divorced and my mother raised me and my sister on every government handout we could acquire. We lived in Section 8 housing. We ate off food stamps. We lived off Medicaid and welfare.
My sister and I visited my father frequently until he stopped paying support and dropped off the map, only to land in jail for possession of cocaine and crack, among other things. When visiting him on his death bed, the doctor told me “it wasn’t the cancer that killed him. The drug abuse never gave his body a chance.”
My mother tried to overcome, but the beatings caused chronic back problems, which led to pill addiction, which led to death by accidental overdose in 2004.
My mother did remarry before dying, and after years of not liking each other, Robert and I became closer when I left for college. He died of a brain tumor in 2008.
I have what I have because I work as hard as I can. I left home on my own. I paid for college. I started my own company.
I’m not rich. I’m not overly-successful. Frequent trips out to San Francisco, where I see 23-year-old millionaires, show me these facts.
However, I have freedom to do what I want, when I want, how I want. These are all the riches I need at the moment. I’m chasing the New American Dream.
I now have what I never had as a prisoner of a single-wide trailer. Today that’s a view of the Empire State Building from a coffee shop in Greenwich Village.
- Wesley Donehue
PS – Social media is not for therapy. It is, however, for storytelling. Now I’m ready to tell you some stories because a lot of kids are going through Hell right now and they are being forced to believe there is no escape, when in fact, hard work creates escapes.
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments
[...] 1 part this. [...]