Extract from Burrel’s memoirs: “Tattoos On My Soul” - “I Should Be Dead By Now”
“I’m not the man I was and I’m not yet the man I’m going to be.” ~Burrel Lee Wilks III
No Sugarcoating.
I’m no saint. Never was, never will be. I did a lot of wrong before I did right. A man can’t be judged by his mistakes though, but by what he puts back along the way. When my personal balance-sheet is totted up, I guarantee the credit will far outweigh the debit.
Let’s face it I’m an ex-everything. An ex-syrup-sucking, coke-tooting, gun-toting, gang chief, wrapped in the skin of a passionate, ambitious black man, There’s little I haven’t seen, haven’t done or had done to me.
My days as a gang chief, hustler and crook may be far behind me, but history can’t be denied. We are the sum of our experiences, the good, bad, ugly, sublime and absurd.
I can’t separate myself from what I did as a young man but neither am I going to trail my past behind me like dirty linen, or unwanted baggage. For years the ghetto was my home, my classroom, my livelihood and proving-ground. I’m molded from this clay and shaped by these streets. I have tattoos on my soul.
And What a Journey!
Extracting myself from the stew of narcotics, violence, fast money and cheap life that was my birthright was tough, the wisdom acquired along the way, hard-learned.
Along the road I battled demons, won victories and made just about every mistake a guy could make. I took knocks that could have leveled many a man and killed some. I lost friends and fortunes, experienced pain and betrayal and I did something no father ever should. I buried my son.
But I wouldn’t have missed this ride for anything.
Fearless, thirsty and passionate in the extreme, I threw myself into life with the force of a hurricane, gusting full-speed through every door. More than a few slammed in my face–breaking my nose but never my spirit–and as if by magic, a thousand times as many opened wide in front of me. You see I’ve never accepted that there’s a designated place for me in this world. I believed when I was just a scrap of a kid, and still believe today, that I can achieve anything I set my mind to.
With acute self-awareness, dogged self-reliance and relentless resourcefulness, anything is possible.
In the ghetto you scrabble in the moment because you know, tomorrow may never come. Everything is short-term, immediate, instant, life chillingly cheap. The generations of young men lost to the bullet, needle or penitentiary borders on genocide. If he survives an early grave, a kid from the streets will all too likely find his way into a different kind of tomb, behind the walls of drug addiction or prison.
Look at me: conditioned to be a crook, catapulted out of the cradle into a world of doing wrong. As a ghetto-born, African-American male, a gang-banger and cog in the narcotics-apparatus, what were the odds I’d make into my thirties?
I should be dead by now. I’ve come close. My friends are, my son is, but I refuse to be a statistic.
No Overnight Transformation.
Mine is a rare, celebratory story of transformation. But if you’re looking for an overnight conversion, a phoenix rising from the ashes, then I’m not your guy. I wasn’t a bad kid who one morning woke up a good man.
Real life is far messier and more complicated than that. There was no blinding epiphany for me, no sudden moment of stunning clarity. I wasn’t a nice, neat science project and I wasn’t born again. Transforming Buddy Burrel into the man he is today, took determination, commitment, faith, tenacity and time. It took me years to get my Streetwise MBA–and I’m still studying.
From gangster to life-coach and from foolish boy to wise man, my growth was progressive: evolution rather than reconstitution. The man I am today is the sum of hundreds, even millions, of choices made, as I forged my own, very unique path through life. I would like to share that journey with you.
I am Burrel Lee Wilks III and I am a Master of Being Alive.
