Brandon Stanton's Blog, page 309

"Sometimes it feels like I’m not a part of anything. There...

"Sometimes it feels like I’m not a part of anything. There are so many people here, you’d think that I’d be able to make friends with one of them. But it always seems like everyone has got their own thing going on, or their own group of friends that they hang out with. Most weekends I just take a long walk, or go to a restaurant by myself. I’ve done some neat things alone, and I’m glad that I did those things, but I’m really getting to the point where I’d also like to experience things with other people. Everybody tells me: ‘You should do this,’ or ‘You should do that.’ But nobody says ‘Let’s do this,’ or ‘Let’s do that.’"

“My parents had me young, so my grandmother raised me. She was...

“My parents had me young, so my grandmother raised me. She was already retired when I was born, and started working again just so she could provide for me. Her favorite thing to say is: ‘I’ve got your back.’ Whenever something really good happens, or something really bad happens, she will send me a card that says: ‘I’ve got your back.’ We live together, but she actually mails the cards to me.”

"I’m a classically trained singer in a culture that values...

"I’m a classically trained singer in a culture that values classical music less and less."

“My grandparents abused me because they hated my mother. I...

“My grandparents abused me because they hated my mother. I decided when I was eleven years old that either I was going to kill them, or they were going to kill me, so I went to school one day and told my teacher, and they placed me in a group home for nine years. That’s how bad it was. It was so bad, that even at eleven, I knew I had to get out and break the cycle.”
“What cycle?”
“The cycle of people taking out their feelings on their family.”

"It happened back in graduate school. For years, I was...

"It happened back in graduate school. For years, I was constantly questioning whether I’d done something to deserve it. I knew I was drunk, but I chose to walk home at night. I noticed he was following me. I noticed that he followed me into a coffee shop, and I could have stayed in that shop, but I chose to continue home. He pulled me into a car at knifepoint. I didn’t tell anyone. Not even the police. I was an actress, so I just sort of thought I could act like it never happened. It was hard for me to continue performing, because when you’re raped, you feel like you’ve been seen in a way that you shouldn’t be seen, and the last thing you want to do is be seen anymore. You gain weight. You wear baggy clothes. It took me years of being in a rape support group to even get to the place where I can talk about it. But I’m in a great place now. I just finished self-producing a cabaret show. Not a sparkly one. It’s a little dark. Well, dark and sparkly."

“I’m trying to raise my daughter with the same values that I...

“I’m trying to raise my daughter with the same values that I learned in Jamaica, but it can be hard to instill gratitude and appreciation when we are surrounded by such abundance. When I was growing up in Jamaica, every time I wanted something, my grandmother made me go through the same list of questions: ‘Why do you want it?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘Is it going to make your life better?’ There wasn’t enough money for things we didn’t need, so we were always forced to ask those questions— even for simple things like a new pair of shoes. The necessity of that ritual really helped create a deep appreciation for the things we had.’”

“My father came from Nicaragua and got a job as a construction...

“My father came from Nicaragua and got a job as a construction worker. My mother immigrated from Puerto Rico and got a job as a cleaning woman. One day he was working high up on some scaffolding at an office building, and he saw her cleaning inside, so he knocked on the window. And here I am.”

“My dad’s out of rehab now and he claims that he’s sober and...

“My dad’s out of rehab now and he claims that he’s sober and he’s even got my name tattooed on his arm which is kind of weird. He came up to me on the street recently and asked why I would never talk to him or answer his calls. He said that I’m selfish and that my mother has brainwashed me.”
“So why don’t you want to talk to him?”
“Because I know that a phone call will turn into an afternoon, and an afternoon will turn into every weekend, and I don’t want him to influence me until I’ve figured out who I am as a person. l don’t want to spend time with him until I have the ‘umph’ to create this presentation of everything that’s happened, present it to him, and say: ‘This is what you did.’”

“I want to be a hematologist. That’s a blood doctor. Well not a...

“I want to be a hematologist. That’s a blood doctor. Well not a blood doctor, exactly. But a doctor that finds cures for blood diseases.”
“How’d you decide on that?”
“We were dissecting frogs in class and learning about how the blood flows through the body. And I went home that night and wrote an essay. And it wasn’t like any other essay I’d ever done. Normally when I write essays, it takes me a long time, but this was the fastest essay I ever wrote. So the next day I was asking the teacher mad questions, and she was like, ‘You know you can get a job in this.’ And she pulled it up on the internet, and was showing me all about hematologists.”

"What are you proudest of in life?""I feed the pigeons and the...

"What are you proudest of in life?"
"I feed the pigeons and the rats when I have extra food."