The Exhaustion Lifestyle… to be continued.
A Look into the “Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop.” Mentality.
A lot of rappers use this coined term to describe their lifestyle of “the grind” or their work. Many rappers grow up in a life of adverse effects, whether its due to race, neighborhood, or society’s reaction to them based on the former two.
I guess we can give a little shout out to Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop,” since the meaning behind her words are meant to be the same thing, but that’ll be enough.
Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, even came out with a movie in 2017 with the famous phrase, explaining the roots of his passion for creating music as well as being enveloped in a community that included Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G (aka Biggie Smalls), and other infamous gangster rappers or just gangsters.
There is no option but to work as hard as you can, until you get through it. Giving up is not an option.
Now, I am not going to say something ridiculous like “I live that gangster lyfe, gotta get that paper,” but I will say I can understand the fundamentals of this lifestyle.
Four years ago my aunt was diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. Then, only a short year and a half later my own mother was also diagnosed with Cancer.
During this time I was taking 19 units of classes, playing a sport, was a board member of a very active club, as well as a member of various other academic clubs, and applying to new schools. My father was working far away (came home as much as he could, while supporting the family financially) and my family also had two dogs. It seemed like nothing else could be added to all of this.
I had to adopt the lifestyle of “Can’t Stop. Won’t Stop.” There was no other option. I’d commute to school, sometimes spend as much as 14 hours there, come home, feed the dogs and sometimes myself, keep the house in order, do my homework, and begin to fill out school applications.
This didn’t even include the hospital visits I would make after school to make sure my mom, who had just had an extensive surgery, was not alone during this time. I would spend my time there until nurses would tell me to go home. The hospital was also not close to home either. So, exhausted, I’d trek back home to my two dogs, one of which was a master at destroying the house, so I would usually come home to shredded books, torn up paper, half eaten shoes, and one time flour everywhere (but that’s another story).
But again, there was no other option than to just do.
I knew I could not put any other thoughts out there into the world other than that in the end everything would work out (and I’m not saying this in some supernatural/religious/metaphysical way, just that I would have to accept the terms as they were given to me and that I would be okay knowing I did everything in my power to make things work out as best they could).
Finding this regiment of working hard though gave me some sort of solace. That may sound a bit odd, but in the grind I was unable to just think about all that was happening, I just had to do. This was my lifestyle now and to get through it I just had to work hard, there was no time for this “woe is me” mentality.
My mother also adopted this new lifestyle. She would do everything to survive. No option unturned. She also did not want to know her stage because she felt this would actually dishearten her efforts to survive. It was not an “ignorance is bliss” approach (which by the way, I really despise that saying) but one that would only add negativity and no constructive help. The people who needed to know (the doctors), knew, and those were the only people who mattered. Once people hear stages it’s difficult to think about the positive. Stages are most often related to “death rate,” a term not so enlightening. Words, labels, and sayings do have the power to change how we think.
In the “end” my mother survived a two year battle with cancer (later finding out she was stage 3b), I passed all my classes with A+’s, was awarded for my efforts in the clubs, and accepted to all the schools I applied to (#FightOn). My dad finally finished his work away and was able to stay at home for a while, something extremely important to me because to me, family is everything. The dogs, well… we learned how to hide things.
