This essay is part of How to Live With Regret, a series exploring the nature of regret and the role it plays in all our lives. Read more about this project here.
I was 11 years old the first time I picked up a gun. I should have been playing Nintendo or riding my bike with friends, but instead I was in front of a mirror, posing with the nine-millimeter Glock pistol I had just stolen from a neighbor’s house. My mom was at work and I was home alone, skipping school for the second time that week.
The thick pistol was heavy in my little hand. I shifted the gun into different positions, trying to see which looked most intimidating. I knew it was loaded because the first thing I did when I got it was release the magazine. I was just a kid, but I knew how. I had seen other kids do it countless times.
It was 1992, and my neighborhood in Tacoma, Wash. — an area called Hilltop — was held captive by the crack cocaine epidemic: overpoliced, consumed by poverty and tormented by notoriously violent street gangs. Shootings were common, something kids like me saw all the time. In Hilltop, you could lose your life over a pair of Jordans. If someone wanted your shoes, you had better be able to keep them on your feet. If you let someone take something once, you were a target forever.
In my early years my home was an abusive one, and by the age of 11, I had been mugged, sexually assaulted and jumped by other kids while walking home from school. I was tired of feeling weak and unsafe. I was tired of being a kid. And looking at my reflection holding the gun, I finally saw myself as a man.
At the time, I thought that gun was the solution to all my problems. But little did I know that my choice to pick it up was the first step in a long journey that would lead me to commit many acts of violence against my own community. It would lead to a night at a bar when I would lie bleeding from a gunshot wound. It would lead me to take a young man’s life. And, eventually, it would lead me to prison, where I am serving a 45-year sentence for robbery and murder.
