Twenty-year old Olen Harris sports a bright blue mohawk and a wide smile, signifiers of a self-assuredness that he has gained over the last several years of living independently in Atlanta, Georgia. After struggling to decide on a focus at the University of West Georgia, Olen decided to take some time off from school. Though he now wants to focus on studying marketing and Spanish, at the time he was pursuing subjects ranging from computer science to math. “I wanted to recollect what I wanted to do,” says Olen. “I kind of went [to college] not for myself. I went to do what society said I should do, and get a degree, and I just didn’t want to do it.” The decision was a difficult one, heightened by a break with his parents, who wanted him to stay in school. “I’m not going to say I’ve been to hell and back. Everybody has their own personal struggles,” he says. “But I’ve pretty much been through, for me, the worst that I’ve been through. I’ve had my parents at one point in time turn their backs on me completely, having to grab a suitcase, grab my clothes, walk to my best friend’s house at one in the morning and stay with her for a week until I moved out.”

Born in Virginia and raised in the small town of Jackson County, Georgia, Olen decided to move to Atlanta after moving out from his parents’ home with his best friend after hearing good things about the city from a cousin. Though Olen worried about adapting to the city and being pegged as an outsider, he says the transition process was easy. He was hired at Publix, and he and his friend acquired their first apartment, building a new community of neighbors and co-workers. “We all came down here without having a job and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “We were like, we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna start fresh and make something of it.”

This period in his life concretized Olen’s view that a uniform path doesn’t exist for everyone. “Whatever it is that I should be doing, that doesn’t mean that I have to,” he says. “I should be graduating this year. I should be wearing a business suit, and I shouldn’t be decked out in bracelets and 10,000 piercings and whatever else. But we’re not robots. I don’t agree with the things society says, and to be honest I just don’t care about what other people think.” His attitude, though seemingly defiant, is inherently pragmatic. To those who criticize his choices, he says, “You’re not paying my bills and you’re not the one putting the roof over my head,” he observes, “So, I appreciate people’s input but don’t really care.” On being in one’s twenties, Olen says “I think that’s when you’re judged the most, by society, your peers, your own friends sometimes.” He counters that pressure with his personal philosophy: “Do what you want to do, what makes you happy, and that can still put bread on the table. Do what you want to do. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do this, you won’t do this. That’s just crap. That’s just literally crap. If you really want to do it and your heart’s set on it, you will find a way to make it happen, and it will be taken care of.”

“I don’t like to plan out how I’m gonna land. You kind of have to figure out what’s going on, and you just have to go with it.”

After almost three years in Atlanta, Olen seems to have figured out what he wants to do, and he’s doing it. One day after work at Publix a year and a half ago, he stumbled into Boxcar Grocer, a nearby local business, and was immediately charmed by the space. “My reaction was either ‘This is really cute” or ‘This is really neat,’” he says. “You walk in and it’s this little mom-and-pop place, and they have the organic versions of what you would find in a grocery story. The whole store was kind of foreign to me. It intrigued me and made me want to keep going back and looking through what they had.” Olen filled out an application to work at Boxcar. After interviewing with them several days later, he was hired on the spot as their intern. “It’s very coincidental the way in which it all just kind of flew together,” he reflects. “It just worked.”

Siblings Alison and Alphonzo Cross founded Boxcar Grocer on a strip of land near downtown Atlanta given to them by their father. Seeking to create a community hub that would provide access to healthy, affordable food to local residents, the pair set up shop in what is considered a food desert, hoping to strip away that label. Though the team markets the store as a convenience on their website, they stress the point that they are challenging the concept of a traditional convenience store, seeking to provide a holistic food shopping and eating experience within their community. The store is a for-profit business, offering a coffee and tea bar, prepared meals, and community events in addition to groceries.

With its many facets, the business attracts a wide range of shoppers. “We have such a broad spectrum of customers; it’s awesome,” says Olen. “We get your health nuts, the random people who come in saying, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about this place, I’m just gonna come in and try this.’ Some of our customers I actually hang out with outside of work. It’s almost like a giant family, that’s how it feels with our customers.” Thanks to this family-like atmosphere, reception to Boxcar’s presence has been incredibly warm and supportive, says Olen. “It’s good to see that we’re actually making a difference,” he says. “No one is giving us a pat on the back. People are actually saying, ‘We’re supporting you guys, we’re 100% behind you.’ It’s a good feeling.”

Olen’s official title at Boxcar is “Clerk/Marketing Intern,” but as the store’s only employee, he wears many hats. “I do things ranging from stocking the floor to running the POS system; the social media I handle as well. As far as the interning, it’s more about the financial aspect of Boxcar, they’re showing me the ropes about how the business runs.” Olen says he has learned a lot during his year and a half tenure at Boxcar. “It’s been an eye opener, in a good way of course,” he says. “It’s been a lot of things to take in. We have such a broad spectrum of customers, it’s neat to talk to them and it’s also neat just to have something like this in Atlanta.”

Boxcar hopes to expand, however, and though he hopes to return to college soon, Olen says he may be interested in helping with that growth. “We’re in Georgia, and we want to move to California, to have stores in New York, Philadelphia…all those areas,” Olen says. “We want Boxcar to be seen. We want people to see our logo and be like, you know what, that’s Boxcar Grocer.” The store’s website states that they hope to expand to twenty U.S. cities. Olen observes of his role at Boxcar that “For me being so young, I think that this is a really good experience for me to have, understanding how a business works and staying with it as it grows to see how it progresses, applying that learning to whatever I may be doing. Things could change, and I might be a manager of a couple of Boxcar Grocers, I’d be ok with that. You never know.”

Of his other interests, Olen says, “I’m a nerd. I’m a cat lady.” A devout lover of pizza (he professed to wearing pizza underwear at the time of our meeting), Olen also practices parkour, which he describes as a blend of free-running off of buildings and gymnastics, and tumbles in local parks in his free time to stay in shape. Though he did gymnastics as a child, he and his friends taught themselves parkour tricks at a gym back home. When asked if he ever got scared, Olen replied “All the time.” His philosophy on risk-taking in parkour uncannily mirrors his approach to living. “When you’re doing something, you have to either commit to it 100% or don’t do it. There can’t be a 70%, because that 30% will come back and bite you. I mean, yeah, some of the things that we do are scary. We’ll climb up parking garages and jump off the sides, and you don’t really think about how you’re gonna land until you’re in the air. I don’t like to plan out how I’m gonna land. You kind of have to figure out what’s going on, and you just have to go with it.”