My name is Cortez Range.
I'm proud to be born in the city of Newark, New Jersey.
Even though life was rocky as the child of a single mom who couldn't teach me lessons about being a man that she had never learned.
I expected she would always be there.
With the rose colored glasses of an innocent child, I didn't know she had HIV/AIDS until my relatives told me when she died when I was 4 and a half.
Her death was the first broken promise I experienced in a series of many.
As a young child I had to go through harsh life lessons even though my family tried to protect me.
This is the reason why I'm passionate about my work.
When it comes to speaking to teenagers in a realistic way rather than speaking like a pastor who has done no evil. I hope people can receive from me while I'm exploring my own voice in this crowded room that has many slogans for other people but not many solutions for the root causes of real problems that no one wants to talk about.
As a kid from the streets, I never expected to be able to give a presentation at the APSE conference last year. My hope for this YTC conference is to be a living example of what real people go through, not just a photograph selected for a brochure. I hope other people can be a listening ear to what they normally wouldn't hear. I want to help the people who assist people like me to understand how I see the poker game of the system we're all living in so we can work together to achieve a dream.
In spite of my many bad decisions, I'm still running the race toward my goals even though I never thought I would have the job of being a mechanic that I have today. Instead of being a problem child, I'm trying to be a solutions adult just to be handling my own responsibilities that my grandmother tried to whisper to me about being an honorable man.
Now I live independently despite dealing with crippling depression.
I wish it would desist, but I have to give the highest credit to the people who are able to stand by me. As a young child, I didn't have the intellectual range of being able to self-identify my own problems to not be a juggernaut and deal with the circumstantial difficulties in a proper way.
Now, as a person trying to be a productive man in society I can better manage the ticking time bomb inside me.
I know it's hard for people from different sides of the railroad tracks to understand each other but I'm trying to be the missing link who can close the divide.
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