You Can’t Read Me in a Glance…That’s Not Random, It’s By Design

Photo by Hubert Nowik on Pexels

People want coherence. A clean narrative. Something they can clock in five seconds and file away: preppy, academic, corporate, soft, safe. Or the opposite: rough, street, angry, dangerous.

But my life never offered me the luxury of a single lane.

I grew up in a rough neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan — an environment shaped by drug addiction, sex work, and survival economies that didn’t leave much room for innocence. Several of my uncles were involved in the drug trade. One of them was deeply involved in Detroit’s underground economy and was later killed. Some of my cousins followed similar paths. Violence, hustle, and hypervigilance weren’t abstract concepts; they were ambient noise.

At the same time, from preschool through fourth grade, I attended a predominantly white Catholic private school across town in Redford, Michigan. I wore uniforms. I attended Mass. I learned how to speak properly, sit upright, tuck in my shirt, and navigate institutions built on respectability and restraint. My mother made that choice deliberately — after realizing my sister’s local public school was failing her, she pulled both of us out. When it came time for me to start school, my fate was already sealed.

That’s where my preppy demeanor comes from. The conservative exterior. The dapper look. The tucked shirts and polished presentation people still comment on today. It’s not an affectation — it’s an adaptation. A learned language.

But just down the street from that school-uniform version of me was another reality. One of my closest childhood friends came from a family deeply involved in drug dealing. I remember standing on the porch watching police raid their house and shut the operation down. As a child, I learned early that the world runs on parallel systems — and that survival depends on knowing which rules apply in which spaces.

At ten years old, my parents divorced. I moved with my mother to Southfield, Michigan, and entered predominantly Black elementary and middle schools. This was during a time when Detroit public schools were shutting down, pushing students into surrounding districts. The schools were rougher. The energy was different. Respect was negotiated, not assumed. I shed some of the prep and picked up a sharper edge.

By fourteen, my mother remarried, and my sister and I moved again — this time to Rochester Hills, a predominantly white suburb. By then, my style and demeanor were heavily influenced by hip-hop culture. Once again, I was out of place. Too loud. Too unfamiliar. I learned — again — how to code-switch, recalibrate, and survive cultural whiplash.

That pattern followed me into adulthood. At 18 I moved to California to pursue university and my dreams of working in the animation industry. So after earning an internship at Nickelodeon at age 22 before I could even finish my degree, I’d end up being raised throughout my 20’s in high-profile corporate and major studio environments (with multi-millionaire dollar budget tv/film slates) — spaces that demanded polish, calculation, and emotional regulation. By then, I had already spent a lifetime navigating opposing worlds, so I knew how to be precise without being hollow. Professional without being domesticated.

The result is someone people struggle to categorize.

I’m academic, proper, and strategic — yet I still carry the imprint of the neighborhoods that raised me. I can be calm, philosophical, and deeply reflective — shaped by higher education and now graduate study in human sexuality — while also being assertive and guarded when necessary. I value self-defense and personal safety, not as a political posture, but as a logical response to environments where safety was never guaranteed.

My taste reflects the same duality. I love R&B and hardcore rap. I also love classical music and composers like Nicholas Britell. My inner life is just as layered as my outer one.

So yes — my social media presence may feel random. Chaotic. Hard to pin down. That’s not confusion. That’s fidelity to a life that has never been simple.

I am preppy and street-informed. Calculated and instinctual. Soft-spoken and confrontational. Traditional on the outside, radically non-conventional within.

You can’t read me in a glance — because I wasn’t built in one place.

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