I Wanted To Be 2Pac When I Grew Up

The problem is, he was killed before he was given a chance to truly grow personally or grow up in general.

The first 2Pac song I recall hearing was his rage-fueled, infamous diss track “Hit Em’ Up”, when I was roughly eight years old — and from the very first listen my mind was fucking blown. He had made a fan for life, in less than ten words.

I mean, seriously imagine being eight years old in 1995 and hearing that song, with that intro, unedited and unsupervised. It changed me internally — and eternally. I would never be the same again after discovering 2Pac’s music, much like rap itself was never the same again, once Tupac Shakur discovered it, or was introduced to it.

I bought everything with 2Pac’s name on it. The albums, posters, shirts, movies, documentaries — and even the poorly written ‘unauthorized biographies’ by authors who knew less about the man than twelve-year-old me did.

In my freshman year of high school, my Mom bought me the poetry book of 2Pac’s that was published after his death, The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

That book to this very day, remains one of the biggest yet incredibly subtle influences, on me ever deciding to write as a hobby or attempting to seriously pursue it professionally. It wasn’t just the words of his poems that resonated so deeply with me —but whether I knew it or not, it was the fact he wrote actual poetry at all, I admired most.

After all, here was this multi-platinum selling self-proclaimed gangster rapper, openly comparing himself to a flower — a rose more specifically, right there in the title of the book.

Tupac was undoubtedly referring to himself in that poem — he was the rose that grew from the cracks of the concrete that is society.

It was also this concept itself I found intriguing — The Rose That Grew From Concrete. Even when I first picked up the book in my early teens, I knew what Pac meant. Our lives and journeys, vastly different in just about every way imaginable and in every aspect possible. Yet — I got it.

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