I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [32]
Once the school day ended, I would head out to the baseball fields. That was the other thing I never missed: baseball practice. If I had skipped school that day, I still made sure I got to the locker room in time to head out to the field. I was the pitcher for the Manassas Tigers, and thankfully I wasn't quite so tall yet that finding a blue and gold jersey was impossible.
I know I'm not built like your typical baseball player, but I was pretty good as a pitcher. I mean, I could throw a football almost seventy yards--pack that same power into just about twenty yards and that's some heat behind a baseball!
The bigger and stronger I got, the more I started thinking about what I would do when I was grown up. I could look around me and see that there didn't seem to be any other kind of an escape. The teenage girls I knew were all starting to have babies, the teenage boys were becoming part of the gang scene, selling drugs, or both. It was as if everyone around me had given up on ever leaving the ghetto.
But I knew I was different because I had a secret--something I'd not told anyone. I'd figured out how I was going to leave the ghetto years back in 1993, when I was still in second grade.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MJ and Me
Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream, and so does every kid in foster care. Our dreams might not be as big as his were, but they are just as important. Having some kind of a goal is absolutely essential for kids trapped in poverty and bad family situations, because if we can't hope that things might be better someday, then we basically lose a reason to live. It's a lot easier to fall down, or to stay where you are, than it is to fight gravity by trying to pull yourself up.
Having a dream can be the first and most important step in making it out of the system. It's got to be something more specific than just, "I want a lot of money" or "I want to be famous." You've got to know not just what you want, but why you want it. A goal of being rich isn't enough to make you put in the work day after day; you have to know why you want money--to buy a house, to take care of your family, to be able to always put food on the table, to make sure your spouse and kids aren't stuck in the projects--whatever it is that is your dream beyond just the surface of what sounds like an easy life.
You also have to have a sense of what you are naturally good at. For example, if you have trouble with numbers, you should work on that, but you probably shouldn't look for a career as an accountant. If you are a terrible singer, that probably isn't the best road to go down. If you're very shy in front of people, you probably should look for a different career from being an actor, even if you like movies. But maybe you're good in science class and like studying it--then becoming a science teacher might be just the right job for you. If you always get good grades on writing homework in school, then maybe you should make your dream to be an author or a journalist.
Of course it's great to dream about doing all kinds of different things, even if no one else thinks you can. I don't mean to say you shouldn't dream big, but if you are fighting against odds that say you're going to fail, you should make sure you know what your talents are, what makes you stand out, so that you can work on developing those things that make you different; because just by recognizing what it is that you're already pretty good at can give you a head start on working to make your dream something real.
For me, that dream came to me when I was seven years old.
THE TIMING COULDN'T HAVE BEEN BETTER. Right around the same time that the social workers came for us and took the littlest kids away, I saw something on TV that would change my life. It would give me something to hold on to over the next few years as I bounced around to different foster care homes and hospitals. It would give me something to keep in front