Ishwer - 36

We don’t choose the family we are born into. There are a lot of things that happen in life that are out of our control. This is a story of how I used my fear to challenge the coward in me and become a hero for myself. 

Cus D’Amato once said, “The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.’’ I have spent most of my life in fear balancing between the hero and the coward. I grew up in violence, and many people wouldn’t know after meeting me just how much violence it took for me to be this peaceful.

Today I no longer fear my father, but for most of my life I feared this man so much I wished I would never wake up. My earliest memory of violence started around the age of 6, I had pushed my father’s chair in to get something out of the fridge and he smashed me into the wall and proceeded to beat me. The next day at school I took a considerable amount of time to get changed after gym class and a teacher saw the bruises on me. I told the teachers and authorities the story my mother prepped for me, “I fell down.”

On my 18th birthday my father knocked me out which resulted in a severe epileptic seizure. I told the medical staff the story my mother prepped for me, “I must have had too much to drink.” Sometimes I would get beat after my father had a drink because I looked too much like my mother or because I had to ask for field trip money. The reasons were many and the hell lasted decades. The violence that was inflicted on me didn’t make me tough, it left me with self-doubt, sadness, disassociation, worry and worst of all fear.

There was a lesson here that I never appreciated, you see, I would use my pedigree as some sort of rationale for why things in life were difficult for me. It’s as if I wanted the world to be gentler or kinder because of the hell I grew up in. Despite graduating university, getting my master’s, and going to law school, I was a coward. For years I let this fear allow me to become just that.

It wasn’t until I was 32, homeless and living out of my car for 6 months that I became a man. I reached out to a distant relative who let me live with him and his family for a year. He brought me around a variety of strong men where we’d hang out and shoot the shit. He used his connections for my employment and had an honest and vulnerable conversation with me about having a plan in life. He told me what happened in my life was wrong but, to endure all of that and still be here regardless of me feeling like a coward, there is a hero inside.

With that, I got my own place, paid off my debts and worked on my career and self. I had plenty of opportunities to move back home, back to the comfort zone, but I didn’t. I embraced fear and used it against my biggest opponent, which in this case was the coward in me. There are a lot of sad and angry boys who become sad and angry men. Life can suck, shit ain’t fair and nobody has to give a rat’s fuck about you. But you are enough and “you” is all “you” need. Take that fear and do something with it, challenge it, and you will find you will be the hero of your own story.

Music - Ishwer’s music choices during our photo session included Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Big Daddy Kane and Public Enemy.