I Beat the Odds_ From Homelessness, to the Blind Side, and Beyond - Michael Oher [78]
There is sometimes a sense of "They knew me when, so I owe them. Otherwise, I'm a sell-out and disloyal." I appreciate the idea of not forgetting where you came from, but a true friend wants you to succeed for who you are and not for what you can give them. In my senior yearbook at Briarcrest, each of us was supposed to include a quote as our parting thought at graduation. I adapted a line from a rap song and from the movie Hoop Dreams: "People ask me if I ever reach the top will I forget about them? So I ask people if I don't reach the top will y'all forget about me?" It's unfortunate, but things change when you start succeeding, and I wanted to know who was going to stick with me even if I didn't make it.
While you are coping with any negative influences in your family or from your friends, you should always be keeping your eyes open for positive influences. Try to find those mentors wherever you can, because they will become a new kind of family for you. In my case, they literally became family when the Tuohys took an interest in my life and helped me grow into everything I could be. But there were other mentors, too, who I've talked about in this book. They all helped me, in their own way, to see that there was something more than the way of life I knew, and they each gave me a little boost toward reaching it. It is so important to find someone who can show you how to make good life choices and how to live responsibly. That kind of wisdom is a gift whose value can't be measured.
I've been very blessed to have some great mentors and friends in my life. I know that they all made a difference--some big and some small--but every positive thing had an impact and helped get me to a place where I was able to achieve my potential. People like Ms. Spivey and Velma were mentors to me, even though I didn't realize it at the time. They had my best interests at heart and were trying to help me find a better path than the one I was on. Tony and Coach Johnson, Steve and Craig, were all that kind of mentor for me, too. Maybe it sounds strange to have mentors who were kids, but I admired the dedication and character Steve and Craig had, and I know that having them around helped keep me out of some of the more serious trouble I could have found.
The role of a mentor is so important, but it's not an easy one for either party involved. It can be tough for an adult to wade through all of the trust issues, bad behavior, and attitude problems that a kid has picked up because they were never taught any different. For a kid, it can be hard to accept that someone might actually have your best interests at heart--that you can trust them to be true to their word and to really care about you. It can be a challenge not to be closed off or to keep your head down, or worse, to put on an act of being cocky and full of yourself.
No matter what is going on around you that you can't control, your attitude is the one thing that you can control. Think about how much better you are than your circumstances. Just by being able to recognize that fact, you're already light-years ahead of people who let other people's mistakes control them.
Another challenge to consider in looking for role models is one I personally struggled with--the thought that no one could possibly care about a kid like me enough to really want to get involved. It was hard for me to believe that anyone had that much love, to believe there's that much love out there anywhere in the world. Of course there are people out there who have love like that, but coming where I come from, you're not going to meet many of those people.
If I hadn't ended up at Briarcrest or been taken in by the Tuohys, I would have had to take a different route, of course. Maybe I'd have gone the junior college route to a football career. Maybe I wouldn't have had a football career at all. I might have tried to do it and failed. In fact, if I wasn't in the NFL, I