I wanna be famous because… It’ll provide me with the opportunity to be the role model that I desire to be. Let me explain.

I am 20 years old. I have lived in morristown, nj for most of my life now. If you’ve been around there for long enough, after a while you’ll realize that the faces don’t change much. By that I mean its sort of like pleasentville or “unpleasentville”, the same people doing the same things everyday. Its really a shame. Growing up, you would always here the adults, or old heads as they say in town, telling you to get out of morristown, that’s its a trap. I never really understood it until recently. When I found myself, those I grew up with, and those I “looked up” to falling into this trap.

Just like everyone else I had dreams of being successful in my life. However soon after highschool I found myself loosing sight of my dreams. I wasn’t in college and I was working as a manager at a local video store. I worked at that video store for a year in a half when I realized that I was falling into the “trap” of morristown. Doing the same thing everyday and never really living up to my potential. It started to become clear to me when the kids, on the other side of town, that I graduated high school with would visit the store to rent movies. I found myself getting upset, asking myself why I wasn’t in college, what made them better than me. What made them better than all of these people that never made it out of morristown. After work, on the weekend when my friends where in college, and my days off I had plenty of time to think and figure it out.

I thought back to my last year in junior high. I had an intrest in football. I loved watching the towns high school football team destroy other teams in the county. As a kid back then I dreamed of doing it myself one day. I was well on my way too. I worked my way up to being the team captian on my football team my senior year, and after the season even getting a scholarship for $3500 for being a leader on and off the football field. All the freshaman, sophs, and juniors looked up to me. All the parents loved me.

However, in the end things just didn’t go the way I had planned. I know now that that’s where the problem starts. For my four years in high school I stayed away from the party crowd, kept decent grades, and stayed out of trouble. You know, the basic stuff you hear everyday. Yet I hadn’t been accepted to any of the colleges I want to get into. I was confused. I didn’t understand where I went wrong. I knew who I was. I knew what I had done. I knew what I hadn’t done. I figured that I had done all I could do. So I guess I just gave up. I started doing everthing that everyone else was doing. Parties, drinking, and smoking. I figured why not. Nothing else could go wrong at that point. Besides the seniors the year before did it. Little did I know that would lead to the begginning of the end I guess you could call it. I partied all through out the summer of my senior year. All the way until all my classmates went to college.

When I look back on it now I guess I just didn’t realized then that I was doing everything that everone else was doing that got cought in the “trap”. The trap where local celebs turn into drunks, drug addicts and drug dealers. The trap where a kid has everyhting going for him and gets a girl pregnant.ETC And it all started when I took my eyes off the prize and gave up on myself. It hurt, but it started to hurt so much more when I realized all of the people I was letting down. People that belived in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. People like my mom, my three younger siblings, all the younger kids that looked up to me, all the older folks that believed I could be someone. I was letting them all down. If that wasn’t enough I had even stuck around long enough to see the same kids that looked up to me fall into the same trap.

That right there is when I decided that I had seen enough. I had witnessed people that I had looked up to fall off, or not live up to there potential. It was happening to me, then I even saw kids behind me doing the same thing. I saw it happen to my uncles, cousins, siblings and close friends. It was like some horrible ripple down effect. I came to the conclusion that it was because they or we didn’t really have strong role models in our lives.

Me myself I lived with my single mother who had 6 kids. And the father was never around. Neither of them graduated high school or knew anything about college really. My mom used to say if you want to be anything in life you have to get an education. Stay away from these girls out here. Stay out of the ‘streets’. She grew up in morristown herself. So im sure she had seen what I was seeing over and over again. And of course now I realize why she said what she said.

EXAMPLE: My oldest brother, her first son, was an artist and a rapper I looked up to him soo much. He was good at everthing. HE got all the girls, was a great basketball player, got good grades, all of that. He dropped out of college in his senior year when his grilfriend got pregnant. Now he has 3 kids and job at the hospital. I mean sure he’s supporting his family, But I know he would love to do so much more. And he can’t because he took his eyes of the prize. He’s really a good guy I hate that things didn’t work out for him. There are so many other examples I could make.

Bottom line is of cousre there’s your mom or dad to tell you to stay out of trouble. Sometime that’s enough and that’s good, but then there are those that need a little extra push. Those that need a role model. There are too many cases of someone having so much potential and ending up not doing anything with it because they took there eyes of the prize. And all the needed was a little push in the right direction to stay on track. A Role Model. This is exactly why I want to be famous. So I can change the future. Prevent these people from falling off the map. So I can be a good role model to those that looked up to me. So my elders can look down and smile. So my sick mother who has lupas and R.A can see one of her kids actually make it. So my two youngest siblings age 13 and 8 don’t fall into that infamous trap. This is why I wanna be famous. Thank you
Nahshon Jackson