I was hit by a car when I was 13, and the rumour was immediately that I had been playing chicken with the car with my best friend Kenny in front of the Nutmeg Pantry, which was the only shop in Sharon. In fact, the guy who hit me was inebriated.
I lost a lot of homeboys growing up, a lot of family, at early ages.
The majority of my interactions with police were not good. There were a few good ones who were actually protecting the community. But then you have ones from the Valley. They never met me in their life, but since I'm a kid in basketball shorts and a white T-shirt, they wanna slam me on the hood of the car. Sixteen years old.
I can say that I had a particularly painful teenage-hood.
When I was young, to have a big nose, big lips or dark skin was the worst. You were the wretched.
My first breakup happened when I was in standard 9th. I remember being very lost, and for me, it was like the end of the world, and I will never find another girl.
Being stuck in adolescence - that's a hell. 'Peter Pan' is a dystopia, and we forget that. Neverland is a bad place to be.
I know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
At 14, I was beehived out. I'm glad there are no pictures!
It's drones over Brooklyn, you blink, you could get tooken, And now you're understanding the definition of 'Crooklyn.' Pigs on parade, but bacon fryin' and cookin', Cause kids' tired of dyin' and walkin' round like they shooken.
Growing up in a system that tells you just because of your skin colour you are not good enough - you learn at a very young age to toughen up.
I spent five years of my youth in prison - some very bad prisons.
I was 11 years old and was racially abused on the pitch. It was obviously disappointing to hear it at such a young age.
I want to go to Heaven, and I don't want to come back. I don't wanna come back and be a baby, and be a teenager again. Oh my God, no! No, I don't want to be a teenager again. It's too awkward.
I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
The Cry Baby character is so, like, based off of myself that it just really is just from personal experience. And when I was younger I was called a cry baby and made fun of for being super emotional and taking things way to personal.
I saw the things that my sister went through - she's dark skinned - with boys not considering her attractive in her youth and the pain that it caused her.
I found myself in the middle of a race riot when I was about 14 years old, and I found someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to run or they'd shoot me.
Growing up in the '80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.
I got beat up by the comic-book kids when I was younger! They were cooler than me. Talk about levels of geekdom, I was a couple rungs below the kids who read comic books. Yeah. Not so cool, man.
I was a veteran, before I was a teenager.
I spent most of my seventh grade summer dehydrated, green-tongued, and smelling like a Malaysian whorehouse.
When I was growing up, particularly during puberty in my teen years, I was so miserable because I elicited so much teasing and meanness from my teenage cohorts.
Young people across the country have grown up traumatized by the gun violence epidemic.
I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.
