I couldn’t get a word down. Writing something true, writing something real, putting the “game” aside, felt like standing in the middle of the Cross Bronx, butt-ass naked. I realized quickly that I was afraid of many things: what people might say, how they might respond to how I actually felt, to what I actually thought. In hindsight, my mistake was that I did not dwell on this fear, did not interrogate it or push through. Instead, I chose to stick to the script. I decided to give people the version of the story they wanted to hear.
