Life Began At Union Station

My life started on August 19, 1988.

That was the day I left my home and family in Los Angeles and headed to San Jose State University. I was eighteen years old, sitting at Union Station with my life packed up and no real idea what was coming.

The truth is, I should never have found myself there.

I grew up in a time and a place where I didn’t think much about higher education. My goal was smaller: get away from the poverty and tragedy I’d lived with for so long. I wanted to be normal. At the time, I thought I was.

I was a bright kid. I spent more time with my face in books or taking apart electronic equipment than I did outside getting into trouble. School bored me, though, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was a latchkey kid. My mother wasn’t around much, so I was often on my own, and I rarely went to school. My grades showed it.

Then, during my senior year, I went with my best friend to see the college counselor. He was filling out college application papers when she turned to me and asked, “You wanna go to college too?”

I shrugged and said, “Okay.”

I filled out the paperwork and sent it in, sure my terrible grades and attendance would disqualify me. I didn’t know my SAT scores were high. I’d also taken aptitude tests during Career Day and forgotten all about them. Somehow, those scores did the heavy lifting.

The counselor called me in and told me I’d been accepted into an early enrollment program. Then she explained the problem: my grades were so bad that making up the requirements would be close to impossible.

I asked her for a list of what I needed to do in the six months before graduation.

The list was enormous. But there was one thing about me: I never backed down from a challenge. I got through the requirements and agreed to take my final three courses in summer school. Somehow, I pulled my GPA up to a 3.75.

I walked out of summer school on August 18. The next day, I was at Union Station, waiting for a bus to college.

And that’s when my life truly started.

The rest is a blur of decisions and consequences, some of them close calls, some of them hard to understand even now. I don’t know how I survived all of it. I only know that I was there: eighteen years old, frightened, and leaving home because some part of me understood I needed to go if I wanted a chance to become something.

Sometimes I think about that kid at the station. I wonder what he was thinking. I wish I could sit across from him for ten minutes—not to change what happened, and not to tell him everything would be easy. I’d want to help him brace for what was coming. Maybe I could lessen a few of the blows.

I hope that kid would be proud of who he became almost forty years later.

If I had those ten minutes, here’s what I’d tell him.

1. You may not be responsible for what happened, but you are the one who gets to choose your next move. Life will hand you things you never asked for. You can hate that it happened and still take charge of what happens next.
2. Decide what you can live with, and say it out loud. The people who care about you need to know where your limits are. When you keep moving them to avoid disappointing someone, resentment will eventually speak for you.
3. Some things will remain unfinished. You can spend years waiting for a clean resolution that never comes. A hard thing can stay hard while your life grows around it.
4. A frightening thought is still just a thought. Your mind will build a disaster out of a possibility and present it like a fact. Check what’s real. And when the spiral keeps going, tell your mind to shut the fuck up.
5. You don’t have to audition for a place in someone’s life. Be kind, be yourself, and notice who meets you halfway. The relationships worth keeping won’t require you to constantly prove you deserve to be there.
6. You’re allowed to outgrow a dream. Something can matter deeply and still stop being right for you. Letting it go may hurt, but you don’t owe your whole life to an old version of what you wanted.
7. Pay attention to who keeps showing up. A small number of people will know you through more than one season of your life. Make time for them while you can, and don’t leave the important words unsaid.
8. When the days feel impossible, make your world smaller. Breathe. Get through this hour, then this day. You don’t have to solve the future to stay for it. It will get better.
9. Let people be more than the first moment you saw them. A rough day can make a rough first impression. Give someone a little time to show you who they are, while still trusting yourself if a pattern tells you to step away. One of them may become your best friend.
10. Keep a claim on what brings you joy. Your music, your work, your small rituals, the things that make a day feel like yours—protect a place for them. You don’t need anyone’s permission to keep loving what you love.

The bus came. The kid got on. He had no way of knowing which parts of his life would break him open, which parts would surprise him, or who would be there when he needed them.

He only knew he had to go.