by Mikhail Markhasev
I came to America at the age of ten. I could be whoever I wanted and whatever I chose. The problem was that I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, or where I was headed. Less than a decade after coming to America, I was in prison, serving life without parole. How did I get from a good and humble kid, “fresh off the boat,” to a violent knucklehead who turned his back on his family and harmed innocent people?
My path to prison began long before the dope or the homies or dropping out of school. No, all that came only after I stopped caring enough about myself and the things that mattered. I became careless about the blessing before me: family, school, sports, a worthy purpose in life.
So I took for granted the good people who tried to help me: my neighbors, teachers, coaches, probation officers, juvenile hall counselors, and others who tried to reach me in my slippery slide to destruction. You see, the drugs and the streets moved in only after I abandoned my family and my future. I became a selfish idiot and rejected the positive influences in my life. I did what I wanted and received everything I didn’t want, throwing away the keys to my own life.
Today, I’m given a chance to encourage you to avoid the insanity I willingly embraced. It’s not about simply avoiding prison. Many of my old friends are still picking up the pieces of their lives and recovering in their 30’s and 40’s from the bad choices they made in their teens: drug addiction, broken homes, regrets, disappointments, death.
Today, you are not simply at a crossroads in your life. In a continuation school, you are already those at-risk youth, who are statistically closer to end up in prison. Already, your education, which is the key to your future, is slipping out of your hand. You are already lumped with the wrong crowd, and the odds are stacked against you. But, from the echo chamber of your future, I am telling you today: I only wish I could be where you are and have another opportunity to fight for my life, just like I fought for the worthless things I am ashamed of today.
If you are coming from a broken home or a gang-infested area, don’t think that you are destined to fail. You must decide today to fight for yourself, being confident that God (your higher power) will help you and send you the right people to assist you to lay down a firm foundation for your future. But only you can decide to extract something worthy from your youth and circumstances. Will you settle for excuses for yourselves, living on regrets and resentments as so many do in and out of prison? Or, will you become the people you were meant to be, overcoming these challenges and showing that life can knock you down, but never out?
Don’t you wish you had a brand new chance to do things over? A fresh start in life, to do it right and undo everything that you regret and are ashamed of? Well I had that chance when I was ten. My family brought me to America, leaving behind my old friends and my old world.
We settled in Hollywood, a grimy spot in the late 1980’s, flying all the colors of a UN convention: Whites, Blacks, Russians, Mexicans, Salvadorians, Guatemalans, Koreans, Filipinos, everyone from everywhere. The path to choose success was before me, but as I mentioned before, I did not know who I was or where I was headed. As the old saying goes, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
If today I could go back in time, I would say to myself what I am sharing with you today: don’t worry about being cool or being down, or fitting in with the crowd. Worry about making the most of your time, of your life, and don’t be afraid to take the difficult path, which demands sacrifice and hard choices.
Your life is given to you only once, and it is easily lost. Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen: sooner or later, everyone dies and must answer to God for how this life was lived. But even now it’s possible to be the “living dead,” existing, not living; floating through life in a make-belief world of internet profiles and false identities, which will be regretted and worthless at the end. Death will reveal who I truly am by how I was with others around me.
I would tell myself to pay attention to my family, all of whom sacrificed just so that I could have a new life, and all of whom were struggling to make ends meet in this land of milk and honey. I neglected my loved ones and chose my homeboys. I thought that being a man meant holding down a street corner, getting high, and living the party life. But now I see how stupid and empty that whole scene is.
As a result, I lost both my family and my future, gaining only concrete walls and steel doors in prison. It took a life sentence for me to figure out that being an authentic person is more important than my homeboys telling me that I’m “down.” Instead, I must be “down” for the right things, for what I will not lose: God, family, community.
Life is a battleground to determine who you will be once death’s curtain collapses on its stage. You did not choose to enter this arena but now you must decide who you will become.
Will you settle for being an actor in someone else’s play? Will you settle for just drifting through life, surrendering yourself to what feels good, or will you fight for your soul and actually become good? This is my struggle today, after more than twenty years in the joint. It doesn’t have to be your struggle. You can learn from my mistakes and avoid making them.