growNman
growNman
I am growNman 125 Breaking the Cycle
What happens when your home feels more like a battleground than a sanctuary? From enduring physical abuse and emotional neglect to creating a life of purpose and peace, this raw exploration of environmental influence reveals the remarkable journey of breaking generational cycles.
Growing up with an angry, drug-addicted father and a mother who never learned nurturing skills left me constantly seeking escape. My ADHD was misinterpreted as defiance, and I heard messages that I lacked common sense, was hardheaded, and essentially unwanted. This toxic foundation created defense mechanisms – like becoming the bully I despised – and a desperate need for friendship connections to replace the family warmth I never experienced.
The turning point came when I recognized that true transformation requires active creation rather than passive acceptance. After leaving home at 17, I gradually discovered that happiness isn't something others provide – it's something we deliberately construct through consistent self-improvement. Now, as both an educator with 22 years of experience and a parent committed to conscious child-raising, I've witnessed how environmental factors shape development from multiple perspectives.
This isn't just my story – it's a blueprint for anyone feeling trapped by circumstance. Whether you're fighting to escape toxic patterns or simply seeking greater fulfillment, the message remains the same: you can change anything with focused effort. The ceiling that limits your potential usually comes from the environment you inherited, not your inherent capabilities. Ready to build something better? Start by making today greater than yesterday and remember – be great on purpose.
what up, though, and welcome back to. I'm growing man. It's your man, john d, in the building, and I'll be coming on here coming up with these thoughts and ideas, but I I really started to ponder on how did I get to this point in life? And I started, started to think about, as children, the environment we grew up in, the environment that I grew originally grew up in before my parents separated. It was very toxic and unhealthy for any kid. My father was an angry man. He was a very angry man, very abusive man, very abusive. My mother, I can't say, was abusive, but she wasn't very loving. You know the type of the type of conversations you hear when people talk about their mothers. I wasn't able to do that because my mother didn't know how to do that. Her parents died when she was a kid, so she was raised by her older sister, and her older sister didn't even have kids until well after I was born, like it was, I might have been like nine or ten, maybe twelve, before she had a baby, so she didn't even get to see the motherly instinct that my aunt had, uh, prior to her having a kid, because she just didn't have a kid.
Speaker 1:But I wanted to talk about why I was able to get out of the environment. I was in as far back as I can remember. I didn't want to live in my household. My father was a mean man and he was very hands-on, very physical, and I can't say that I was the best kid. However, I can say that I wasn't out here trying to mess up on purpose either, but it seemed like my ADHD, add, lack of understanding got me in a lot of trouble. I mean, I have adults that say, john, john, you was so bad when you was little and that's disturbing, right, but I wasn't trying to be bad as a man. Today I look back. This is what I chalk up to my behavior being the way that it was. My father was on drugs at the time and he got my mother pregnant and I think that some of that just got into my chromosomes or something, because I could not sit still and that's all I could really come up with. But being that I couldn't sit still, I heard a lot of negative feedback from my father specifically Didn't have any common sense. I'm hardheaded, I'm selfish. It was a combination of so many different things, but the point of this episode is to tell you how I got here.
Speaker 1:And then I look at the people in the environment I grew up in or I thought the environment I grew up in and I started to analyze the way they looked at life and I think that they were just happier kids than I was. Because I wasn't happy. I never wanted to be at home. I was finding ways to not be in the house. I know it's a lot different now, but I did not want to be in the house because I got in so much trouble and so I just was outside. I was out here in these streets and I wasn't doing nothing bad, but I was unsupervised and I was with a bunch of other kids that were unsupervised. We weren't out breaking a law, but we probably weren't the best examples of kids at any point of my age.
Speaker 1:All the way through young adulthood I still made poor decisions, but the environment I grew up in made me wanted to completely change how I was living and it took. Well, it took shorter than normal because I left my household at 17. I did. I moved to Michigan to get in-state fees because my father did tell me he said if you go to college you'll get a good job. Come out making 50, 60,000.
Speaker 1:Now, mind you, none of that was true, but that was enough for me to feel like I needed to do that to change my environment, because my environment was so abusive that my sister that I grew up with she didn't even look at the way that I was raised differently. She thinks that we were raised the same and we live two different lifestyles. Now and I look back and I'm like she don't want to live the life she lives. But I think that the father that we had created an environment that was protecting his daughter, so he thought, and she just got comfortable in it. And I wasn't nowhere near comfortable. And I know I'm talking about my sister. But I have friends too. I have friends that I grew up and everybody says this that you'll have friends that will end up in the same place that they were when you left. And not to say that they're doing bad or anything, but I do have some friends that are not in the best positions of life and I wonder, like, what motivation did they have to get out of the environment that they were living in? Like I do want to say like I didn't grow up in no street life or anything like that, but I didn't grow up in the household I grew up in.
Speaker 1:Now, well, the household that my kids are growing up in, we're so much more aware and conscious of the things that we're saying that we're trying to improve to get a better result out of them in comparison to us. I've noticed that other parents in my peer group they shower their kids with gifts and not realize, and they're creating this expectation, that you're supposed to live like this when in all actuality the parents worked hard enough to provide. But it makes kids ungrateful and I know people say that you know, speak for yourself. I teach kids. I've taught kids for 22 years and I can compare students that have parents that just want to give their kids everything versus making them earn it and say that this is my expectations to get it. And those parents they run out of energy for their kids. They feel like they've done everything they could because they tried to provide their kids with what they thought they needed when they were a kid, and I can see why a parent would want to do that. But it's rules to this parenting and a lot of us didn't come with it and the rules that we're learning now me and my wife is just kind of trial by error and reading up on other people who had similar experiences in raising kids, where we can get better ideas to put our kids in lucrative opportunities to succeed.
Speaker 1:Now, growing up, I've always heard this thing like John, I'm so proud of you, you're doing so many things. I don't know what they thought I was going to do, but I was going to succeed regardless. And when I say succeed, I wasn't just going to get a job and just exist. I was going to try to move things. And I look back different stages of my life. My whole intent was to try to move and help people. And now I've gotten into this, this position in life where I enjoy the culmination of life. I understand what I had to go through, I understand what I was going through, I understand how I got to this point, but the journey of it all was like what did I want? And when I watch other people, some people's journeys are just there, they're just existing, they're doing the bare minimal. And this is how I'll tell you and some people may find this offensive, but people who complain all the time they're not happy. They may not know that they're happy, but the idea that you complain about everything. You find the pessimistic possibilities in every scenario. There's unhappiness living there and I remember being that person. I'll give you this I've always been known as a top-notch player hater, because I was hating on everything, no matter how good it was.
Speaker 1:I'd be like it's all right, it ain't all of that and I was just making fun. But I grew up in an environment where people would just say any and everything about you and you had to figure out where you were supposed to be and the personality that I had. I wanted all of this it's name calling to stop, but it wouldn't. So what I had to do I had to create my own energy and reciprocate what I was getting. The problem with that was is that I got really good and I did not turn it off, so my environment created this bully. I was a bully for a long time and I got really good and I did not turn it off, so my environment created this bully. I was a bully for a long time and I didn't even know I was being a bully, but that was the environment I was living in. I lived in an environment where it was just a bunch of bullies and I'm very good at figuring out systems.
Speaker 1:I learned very quickly on how to become a bully. That was not my intent. It was just to stop everybody from bothering me and I may have spoken about this before, but I'm black and Korean and being black and Korean as a child and in a city where that's not regular, there's a lot of name calling for black and white people and Asian people and I didn't get it from Asian people but I can only imagine what they were thinking and that's could be insecurity. But I definitely heard black and white people say a lot of Asian jokes that I had to. I had to learn the hard way because you know sticks and stones will break my bones, but words would never hurt me. You know what type of kid you got to be for that to really matter. I wasn't the kid. All of those words hurt, they were very heavy. I wasn't the kid. All of those words hurt, they were very heavy. And now I look back and I see why sometimes my tone can snap because it's a trigger from my childhood, but I'm still learning to unlayer that.
Speaker 1:However, I was able to get out of that environment. I almost ended up moving back home. My home is Louisville, kentucky, and I'm glad I did it, because my mind was moving way too fast for me able to do whatever I thought I was going to do if I were back home. But I do know that my day-to-day interaction was going to look totally different from the people that I grew up with and the family that I have there, because I'm a total different person. I have learned to enjoy my peace, like me doing this episode. I enjoy doing this because I know that I'm trying to give information that could possibly help the next person find the happiness that they couldn't find at home.
Speaker 1:You know, I have students they watch my podcast. They're in middle school. I have students to say hey, mr Lewis, I found your YouTube or your TikTok you be kicking that real stuff. And I'm like that's dope, because I'm teaching all day and you telling me that in your free time you're willing to listen to me. That's the best motivation I could ever come up with, because I only want to plant a seed or give them the information that would put them in a situation where they don't find comfort in living in their environment.
Speaker 1:Now, even if they grew up in the best environment possible, there's always a better one, and if you don't work toward it, you'll end up with a ceiling that you didn't even create. Most of the ceilings that we have in our life are created from our parents and the environment we grew up in. I remember I'm going to say this and I'm going to close out, but there was this guy that I considered my best friend for years and you know he used to say you ain't got no talent, I'm supposed to live your life, you doing all of that and I'm the one with the talent. He said that to me and it didn't even bother me either. I was just like you ain't working hard enough, that's what you get right.
Speaker 1:But then, as time went on, I started to analyze. I was best in my head, I was best friends with this guy that would say something like that to me, and you know where he is. I don't know, but I know that he's not as happy as he could be, and if I had his mindset, I'd probably be in the same situation, complaining about whatever's possible, and I just hate that. The worst part of creating that relationship with him was that I'm the one that held on. I don't think he really wanted me to be his friend because at the time as I was maturing, I was very immature in areas and I had bad information and he probably getting like any of my practices and that probably ultimately ruffled the relationship, but he still kept staying around and then it got to the point where, you know, we, we just walked our separate ways and that was when I got to really reflect. Do I miss him? Not at all. You know, it's hard to miss somebody when you think about some of the things that they said to you and it could have been in joke or in jest, but overall that's how they felt and Jess, but overall that's how they felt.
Speaker 1:And to get to this point, I looked at all of my friendships and I was thinking about am I keeping the relationships alive? I thought about it for a long time and I thought like, maybe I am. So the environment I grew up in I needed the friendships because my household was it was a bad place for kids. Well, for me, even though it was only two kids in the household, my sister was spoiled. We didn't have the same roots and, being that that was the case, my house wasn't my safe place. I created relationships with friends outside of my household and some of them I still have to this day. But I needed those relationships in the beginning. I needed them throughout life.
Speaker 1:To be honest, the first time when I realized that maybe I didn't need the friends like I was thinking I needed them is when I realized I was giving more energy to my friends than my own family. And then I had to think about, like, why am I doing this? Because my friends were my family growing up and I didn't know how to give my family that energy they deserved until, like, I turned 40, 41, something like that. And then I realized I was out here just surviving, you know, and surviving I mean like I was just existing in that capacity when I realized how important my family was. I just put all my time into them and I can see the results from it now, the relationships that I had before. They're not as close, but most of them I'm pretty sure that you know we could always bounce back and chop it up, that you know we could always bounce back and chop it up, you know reminisce or build together for the future. But I just couldn't imagine not having that friend group because of the household I grew up in. So how I got here was being in an unsafe environment, creating friends throughout stages of my life to make me feel like I was important, like family wise, like I didn't. I don't think I thought I was that important because my parents didn't know how to to give me a childhood that probably was safer than the one I had and when I say safe, I'm just talking about I was. I was angry about a lot of things and I see the students that I teach. They're angry and all I can do is hope that I can plant a seed so that they don't get comfortable in their environment and end up there.
Speaker 1:You can change anything you want. You just got to put that work in, and most people don't want to put that work in. Like, I was listening to a couple of scientists and one of them said that you should never focus on one thing. You should keep your horizons open, but that's if you have a good environment to grow up in where you could think like that. If you grow up in a sheltered environment where your parents aren't the best, you should focus on something until you're so good where people got to pay you and then you could probably open up to other things.
Speaker 1:But to change your environment, you can't be scatterbrained and distracted by anything you like. You have to become so polished in an area where you can create your own happiness. If you don't create your own happiness, you're looking for others to fulfill that part, and I've learned in the last six or seven years that the harder I work on myself, the better I feel and the better people feel around me. If you talk to any of my coworkers or anybody that I talk to, they see I'm optimistic about every single thing possible because I don't worry about anything I can't control At least I try not to and when I do I try to remind myself is there anything I can do? And then my happiness returns.
Speaker 1:You know I don't want this episode to look like I'm attacking anybody. I'm just saying like, if you want to change your environment, you have to work on it. Even if you're happy in it, they can get better. But if you don't work on your environment I mean work on your practices to change your environment you'll become a product of it, and I don't know if anybody really wants to do that. There are less households doing well versus those that aren't, so the products that we are creating are unsafe environments for these kids.
Speaker 1:I see kids get taken from their parents because they don't know how to parent and what are the kids supposed to do. Some of them don't have enough information to grow and become who they would like to become. So all of you that actually watch this and can feel what I'm saying, I challenge you to always find ways to improve, because it will change your mind state the best thing that could have ever happened to me was me intentionally creating a routine to work on myself, because it just changed my perspective on life. Like if it's anything I can give you, it's yours, I promise. But if you can't give that to people, it's because you have to continue to work on yourself, because the more you work on yourself, the more you're open to understanding where people are.
Speaker 1:And as I've worked on myself, I realized that a lot of people haven't had the time to help develop themselves where they can be happy with their output. So hopefully, for the rest of my life I remain healthy as possible and I can give this information to help maybe change somebody's future, because nobody wants to grow up and live a tough life, but it seems to always happen. I really do appreciate you guys kicking it with me. Y'all make today better than yesterday. Don't worry about anything you can't control. G-a-t-a get after that action or that action will get after you. Be great on purpose Boom.