Who Am I? (Full Circle)

Pain is a wilderness, but artists possess the gift of fostering new homes in bleak and barren forests and using their scenery as inspiration for new paintings. In 2017, the first piece I found the courage to share on my blog, was titled “Who Am I.” God was in it. Like His presence in the garden, God quietly saunters in everything I write, and my early work was tightly woven with faith as well as my unsettledness in my identity. People strangely found solace in my struggle stories.

​I followed up with Pt 2 a few weeks afterward and received the same esteem. I was celebrated for hurting as if wounds don't decorate the bodies and lives of us all. Blind to everyone’s fascination with pain, I still wanted to get the word down no matter how it sounded or came out. Honesty toned my writing, and writing gave me downtime.

In 2015, Between my musings on Kendrick’s stories or Outkast’s old records and loathing at my job as a cook at Zaxbys when I wasn't in class, writing met me in the middle. While bearing the weariness of being in college with no transportation; walking to work or catching the UCF shuttle and city bus to class and haircut appointments, I wasn’t sure of what good things I expected to happen during this time, but a life of letdowns is a life of tirelessly hoping. James Brown’s albums, drum breaks, and Cole’s, “4 Your Eyez Only” made bus rides feel more like the final credit scenes for a movie; because I housed the belief that any day my life could pivot, or end.

I wrote both well and horribly. My thoughts were vivid, yet hadn’t fully developed. But my vulnerability offset any typos or misuse of words until I learned to wield my pen with precision and sharpness. My own stories were all I had to tell, first. They transitioned into informed opinions, album reviews, and assessments of the state of hip-hop and the culture. I was in my second year of community college and knew I had all the right things to say, but words would flow better onto paper or blank documents than off my tongue.

I was long-winded and needed an outlet. Life will find ways to make you a student so I remained one, in the classroom and in my free time. I sat beneath God’s voice and my own tenets when I couldn’t find mentors.

I didn’t mind asking hard questions or tiptoeing around layered conversations but feared it would become overwhelming. So I spoke quietly and wrote loudly, in the silence of my room, in an apartment surrounded by booze with roommates who could imbibe from 10 PM until 4 AM, then casually show up for a class in the morning. Rarely leaving the solace of my own space, I’d return home from school or work and sidle to my room, interacting as little as possible with sometimes a living room full of peers. Being a storyteller required a nearness to myself, and we can’t paint pictures of images we refuse to sit next to.

I’ve always felt safest and most productive as a recluse. I also was never a big drinker. My first drink was at 21 years old, and definitely not an experience I’m willing to replay. But I ended up living through it, repeatedly, when I got to The University of South Florida in 2018. Community college was where my passions thrived before transferring to a University.

At a point, I abandoned my moral compass. This was reflected in my relations with women, gaining prestige, and fraternity demands, still trying to spread what wings I believed I had. I became virile, although safe, and men on campus usually seek to imprint themselves on as many beautiful women as possible. College both helped me fly and brought turbulence, but ultimately suffocated me until I had to breathe through new holes, and function in skins and spaces that didn’t allow me to exhale, deeply. The piece of my identity I left on the ground I never remember returning to save.

Many experiences, people, and opportunities I welcomed into my life because I believed they’d add substance ended up clashing with and eroding my morals and integrity like wind or water wearing away rocks and soil. I kept these things tucked away though. I, as well, inserted myself into a lot of people’s stories without having fully matured, attempting to add value I believed I carried, but ultimately mishandled what I lacked hands to hold.

A college campus is undoubtedly a place where the value of a man’s reputation is protected or shattered by what broken hearts have to say about him. Cordae’s “Lost boy” in 2019 was a timely expression of my attempt to navigate school while remaining upright and aware of who could rescue me and who was a threat. A man whose chest pumped softly with the heart of a fragile boy.

I changed, but maturation, ultimately, didn’t happen. The difference between growth and change is what separates green peppers picked from a vine and yellow or red peppers left to fully mature and live through their stories. Our connection to the vine is what leads to whether we mature, or are used before we’re fully developed. God watched me run freely after picking myself from a vine He would've wanted me to hang a little longer, for longevity and the nurturing of my mind and spirit. And freedom means there are more opportunities to slip into bondage, again.

Storytelling and vulnerability have freed me more than anything else. Through 2018 and 2020 I continued writing. People were drawn to my stories and how much of reality they carried in them– my reality. Eventually, I drifted away from this, not writing, but storytelling that carried Jaykwon in the stories being told, and no one else. Does your art hold you?

In 2018 I opened up about depression and black boys who are emotionally congested and restricted, unable to express themselves through any means outside of anger or intense dejection. But even in these moments, we hide. My stories have always been a fight for authenticity.

In 2020, I briefly thought writing like others or making my writing mirror my influences would make it read better. After a while, I became unsure of my own words and stories and needed to be told if they were good or impactful. Flowers and affirmations for our art are like believing alcohol is needed to celebrate. At the moment, it’s validation that symbolizes we’ve done something good, but too much can make us forget why we’re celebrating ourselves in the first place. Don’t create if you need this kind of assurance about your art.

Our pain offers itself to help us make things new, what looks like it might be the end, becomes the genesis of a new dream. For an artist, the wilderness is just scenery and a new place from which we draw inspiration. A haven for creativity and introspection, then rebirth. The pictures we paint while stuck in our pain are what we hang in our homes.

If the blood that spills from your work doesn’t go from emblems of wounds to props for creativity, find something else to do. After being stripped bare in 2020, my pain made me return to my words and stories. The stories I left untold, and allowed them to keep me in bondage. Art happens in inescapable cycles; I return to 2017 and am, again, burdened to tell everyone who I am, only to be applauded for how well I wear my pain. But if it looks beautiful, let your hurt adorn you.

Let pain test your authenticity. When I was wounded, I returned to my pen, words, and writing. I returned to the fire inside of me that made me want to get the word down in 2017 when words ran from my heart through my pen and onto paper. Artists, it’s okay to go back home. Create from home; and wherever your art pulls you, take it. And if it doesn’t inspire you, then who are you creating for? Who are you?

Told by: Kwon