I Was Somebody's Little Brother: The Boys We Become

SOME BOYS ARE TAUGHTHOW TO FIGHT LONG BEFORE THEY ARE EVER TAUGHTHOW TO HEAL.After surviving a childhood shaped by violence, instability, abandonment, and emotional silence, Malik enters adolescence carrying pain he never learned how to name.The streets taught him how to survive.But survival is beginning to cost him pieces of himself.Now older and emotionally guarded, Malik struggles to navigate loyalty, masculinity, grief, anger, and the pressure to become "hard" in a world that punishes softness in Black boys long before they become men. As friendships shift, violence closes in, and the weight of generational trauma follows him into every room, Malik begins wrestling with a question he has spent his whole life avoiding: Who is he underneath the survival?While those around him confuse emotional numbness with strength, Malik quietly battles anxiety, rage, loneliness, and the fear of becoming everything that hurt him. And as the people he loves begin falling to the streets, he finds himself standing at the dangerous crossroads between healing and self-destruction.Because some boys are taught how to fight long before they are ever taught how to heal.Even hard boys break.

Pagina's: 63, Paperback, Independently published