High school... it is a time in our lives that we go through and it ends up being a bigger part of our lives then we would have thought. It is a place where we meet new people and gain some of our strongest friendships. It also can be a place where you lose some of your childhood friends that you've taken on the world with until this time. People will tell you, "Live it up! It's the best time of your life." For some people it may be, but if you're anything like me, then it's not all that it's hyped up to be. While you may have a good time and live it up, you may also find yourself in a lot of problems. These problems may stem from friendships, relationships, school work or maybe even addictions.

If you're anything like me when you start high school as a freshman, you'll feel at the bottom of the food chain. You'll be intimidated, nervous and you'll rely on your friends to help you get through those next four years. Those feelings are natural to have, but eventually you will overcome those feelings. The feelings I had and the person I was at the beginning of my four years completely changed by the time I started college. I had gone through addiction problems. I had lost a lot of good friends due to me getting caught up with the wrong crowd. I lost a great friend due to a fatal car accident. I even lost myself at times. All the things that I went through made me realize that I don't want any kid ever to have to go through what I experienced during the “best” four years of my life. This inspired me to create something that would be able to relate to any kid in America. Kids would be able to understand it whether they were in high school currently, whether they had graduated or had dropped out; it would even be relatable to kids going into high school. I use the language of the World to try and reach out to the youth. I spoke through music. A few months after I graduated high school, I dropped an album titled HighSchool on a website called SoundCloud. Within five days, it reached 30 thousand streams and then would find its way to iTunes and Apple Music, two of the largest music streaming businesses in the world. In this article I will be explaining what the project really means and where the inspiration came from.

When I was a freshman I was like every other kid. I walked in with two best friends of mine; we had been friends since elementary school. We had done everything together up to this point. We were kids that claimed we would never party, we claimed we would never drink or do drugs because "we can have fun without those things." A fun time for us as kids was playing Call of Duty for seven hours straight and trying to level up the fastest. Soon that would change. Eventually our whole mindsets would change and take us down a rough path. We stuck true to our word until we reached the end of our sophomore year. On May 14th, 2014, my best friend lost his father due to a heart related condition. This would cause us to change our way of thinking. I remember having conversations with my friend after his father had passed and listening to him cry about how much he missed him. The pain that I felt was unbearable, it felt as if the world had stopped rotating. It felt as if there was no solution because no matter how much we prayed, no matter how much we cried, we could not bring him back. Once the reality finally sunk in, we wanted to fill the empty space that we felt in our hearts. We turned to drinking and that would be the start to a dark road. My friend and I would drink every weekend. We would partake in parties and began to attract ourselves to a new group of friends. This caused my friend and I to become distant to our other friend. We left him behind as we would join the “popular” group of our high school. That summer going into junior year I can only remember a very select few of the nights we had. That summer my friend and I, along with our new group of friends drank and got intoxicated every night. That summer was filled with countless drinks as well as countless sex. At the time, I felt on top of the world; I felt as if nothing could stop me. I was with the popular kids that everyone wanted to be with. Those summer days were filled with planning and purchasing of beer for the night. Those summer nights were filled with drinks and memories I don’t even remember (Do those really count as memories?). That summer alone I spent $2,000 on alcohol. Almost all the money I had saved up from working with my grandparents since freshman year I had spent on beers and liquor.

Going into junior year I was still feeling unstoppable. I was a varsity football player that started and was still hanging out with the most popular crowd in school. In the mornings before the bell would ring, our group would meet at a lunch table in the middle of the cafeteria like we had mental assigned seats. The conversations that would occur there would consist of talking about the weekend’s memorable moments and then we would plan who's house we would be getting drunk at for the upcoming weekend. This paragraph would be longer, but this was a reoccurring cycle for the entire school year. I felt as if life was amazing. I thought that all the kids in school wanted to hang out with us because we were the “popular” kids. I thought kids wanted to be us because they would see all of our Instagram photos and Twitter posts and they would want to be where we were. I thought I was living the dream. Going into my final summer of my high school career things would begin to change.

Going into my final summer my best friend and I would get jobs at an amusement park. We would work all day to get money for the long summer nights that we were going to partake in. We literally worked to burn our checks on beer and liquor. At the time, I saw nothing wrong with this--I just thought I was being an average 17-year-old boy and living up the “best” four years of my life. The beginning of my summer consisted of going to football practice in the morning, then I would head straight to work, then after I clocked out of work and got home I would go party all night and repeat the cycle for two and a half months straight. The group of friends I had started to fall apart slowly. We all began to split down to individual small groups. This gave my friend and I less places to go get drunk every night. This caused us to begin to go to random house parties. This caused us to go somewhere new every night. We would end up showing up to a random stranger’s house and party all night. This would end quickly for me after a house party my friend and I attended on the last weekend of June. We arrived to this house party and knew absolutely no one there. I don't mean that as an exaggeration-- I mean that as literal as possible.

The night was going great; it was just another night of us drinking, laughing, dancing and meeting new people. I was feeling amazing. I was even starting to tell myself this night is one for “the record books," (you know, one of those record books you see kids at your school tweet about). Everything was going great. I was feeling good and the night was coming to a close when a fight began to break out. I was just watching the fight, not getting involved, just watching it from the distance. The fight started in the kitchen and some how made its way outside. It was between these two guys that got in a fight over a female. My friend and I began to walk out the front door to the front yard to watch the fight continue. Little did I know, my life would literally change in the next 30 seconds. As my friend and I walked off the front porch and began to take out our phones to record the fight for Snapchat, one of the guys in the fight finally swong. His punch connected and everyone at the party gave out a loud “ooh!” The guy that got hit shoved the guy that hit him and he then pulled out a pistol and shot it into the air. The guy shot into the air to give off warning shots so that the fight would stop, or at least he thought. When he fired into the air he fired too quickly, shooting the guy he was fighting in the head. I watched as his lifeless body hit the ground. All I could hear was screams as people began to disperse in terror. I looked to my right and my best friend since the age of five was nowhere to be found. I have no clue how to explain this next part due to how fast everything had just happened; my mind made myself freak out. Since I couldn’t find my friend I began to think the bullet somehow had hit him. I began to yell his name at the top of my lungs. I yelled three times until I realized he had already made his way down the street trying to make it to the car. I then bolted for the Toyota down the street. That ride home was very quiet. I didn't attend any more house parties that summer; I would only drink at my friend’s house, where I knew it would be safe.

Before I continue, that’s crazy right? I just watched a person get shot and lay lifeless in front of me. I was in this situation due to me wanting to drink and party and live the “popular” high school life. With that being said, I had no intentions in stopping, I wanted to continue drinking and I just wanted to put safer limits to what I was doing. Note to self - there is no such thing as safe limits when it comes to partying and drinking. Continuing the story, at this point I was still drinking just only at my friend’s house. As the summer progressed, my friends wanted a fast way to make money. They came up with this idea that selling drugs, such as weed, was the answer. As I watched my friends sell weed, I watched them lose themselves. I watched as money and greed tore friendships apart.

My friends had resulted to selling weed as that would be the answer to get them fast money. The only way their business would work is if they went to three parties a night and tried selling to people in order to make big profit. They started this new job at the end of July. I was too scared to go back to parties in places like the city after what had occurred only a month prior. My friends tried to convince me that I should help them out. My friends told me that the money we would receive would be worth the risk. I was always wondering where my friend's thinking process came from. I continued to tell my friends that I did not want to partake in selling drugs. I told them I wanted to focus on my job and making music. One of my friends sat me down on the couch in his living room and told me to become realistic, he told me that music would never work for me because I didn’t have what it takes. We sat on the couch for three hours, and for three hours he tried to convince me that drug selling would get me the material items I needed. I eventually left his house telling myself I would prove him wrong-- that I would do something big with music no matter what it took. It would be months until I talked to my group of friends again.

During this time, I worked, continue training for football and wrote and practiced music. On a night in late August, I had gotten off work early and was at home recording music with a few of my friends. I had seen on my Snapchat that my “popular” group of friends were out partying, so I assumed they were selling drugs. Late that night as I was recording music, I got a phone call. It was one of my friends that was selling drugs. I answered, wondering what he could possibly want. He tells me my best friend was laying on the ground, with his eyes rolled in the back of his head. He tells me that he has taken eight Xanax. At this point, they believed he was dying due to an overdose. My best friend, the friend I had since I was in kindergarten had overdosed. Now this hit me hard, due to the fact that at his father’s viewing his mother told me to take care of him because he looked up to me. I was the one that brought him into the world of partying and drinking. He had lost control somewhere down the road which caused him to have an overdose. So you can only imagine the feeling when I left my house immediately to drive to his house at 2 a.m. to bang on his door and wake his mom up. I saw the fear in her eyes when I had told her he was being sent to the hospital. I saw the tears in her eyes as she had just lost her husband a year prior. As I sat there and saw her crying, while waiting for her to get dressed so I could take her to the hospital, I couldn’t help but to blame myself. I couldn’t help to blame myself because I lead my best friend down the wrong path. That night my life changed. That night I made a promise to myself. I promised myself I would never drink again. I promised myself that I was done and I would change. This would change my whole high school experience.

When I entered senior year everyone saw a different me. I wasn't worried about partying anymore. I wasn't getting drunk on the weekends anymore. I had changed my life around. The teachers and students that used to judge me and talk about me now had nothing to talk about anymore. I actually changed my life around so much the people in my life changed. I was accepted into the IB community and not an outcast to them anymore. Everyone I hung out with had plans for their futures and weren't living in the now, they were living for the future. This helped changed my outlook on life, it helped change my outlook on partying and drinking. I even ended up having a chance with the girl I had a crush on since freshman year. This actually blew people’s minds; it probably would have blown your's too. Trust me, a girl like that, having a thing with someone like me, nobody wanted to believe that. One big change, if not the biggest, was the way I looked at the “popular” crowd. I’m talking about my old group of “friends.” Remember when I told you I felt on top of the world and I felt as if everyone wanted to be us? Boy was I wrong. Once I stood on the outside and didn’t live in my own world that revolved around selfishness and partying, I realized the biggest thing that you could possibly realize. That “popular” group of kids that you think everyone wants to be around, is actually the least “popular” group of kids in the school. When I stood on the inside of the group I thought everyone wanted to be with us, I thought everyone wanted to be us, but little did I know it was the opposite.

Once I stepped away from my “friends” I realized everyone couldn’t stand us. I realized honestly everyone hated us. I realized no one really wanted to party with us. The few people that did want to party with us were the ones that had lack of confidence. See we weren't the popular group. There is no such thing as a “popular” group in high school, it’s all a mental state of mind. If you're reading this article and you are one of the “popular” group of kids at your school, trust me when I say this, no one wants to be you. Trust me, they don't care how many photos you put up with blurred cans. Trust me when I say they don’t care about the outfits you wear and trust me, they don't care how many times you yell "SENIORS" in the hallway. It’s all in your head and honestly that’s why the only people that show up to your exclusive parties is the same people every time. No, it’s not because people aren't good enough to party with you, it’s because no one even wants to party with you.

It all started with drinking, if you would have asked me four years ago I would have told you that there is no problem with drinking. I now know that the reality is drinking is the starting point. It started with drinking for my group of “friends,” then went to only smoking occasionally. Then it turned to smoking every weekend. It eventually turned to hard drugs and overdosing. The phone call I received that told me my best friend had overdosed will always weigh heavy on my mind. I will always blame myself to some extent. I don't want anyone to ever feel the pain I felt. I don’t want anyone to go through the experiences I went through.

On September 7th, 2016, "HighSchool" was released on the music streaming website SoundCloud. For those who haven't listened to it, you may want to give it a chance. For those who state that it is like all other “rap” music and talks about drugs, sex and women, you're half right probably like you always are. If you really listen to the lyrics, if you really listen to the concept, you'll see the meaning. The first four tracks talk about my life before I lived these life changing experiences. It talks about the partying I went through. It talks about the countless times I skipped school to hang out with friends. Once track five plays you'll be brought into the realization that partying is not all fun and games. Track five talks about the place I come from and how to some of us it feels like we're trapped in a box and we are held back from chasing our dreams. It talks about how the only thing for the youth to do in my town is to party and get drunk. Track six talks about how I watched my best friend throw his life away due to the prescription drugs he became addicted to. Track seven talks about the fact that I went through a time where I thought selling drugs was the answer and I put myself into bad situations but that it’s not the way to go. Track eight takes you into my religion and shows you how I found God and how He changed my life and showed me what is important and what’s not. The rest of the mixtape speaks for itself. I don’t want to make music to be famous and make money; I want to make music to help save the kids and help lead kids to God. I know what God did for me and if He can fix me, He can fix any kid out there I promise. At times, it may seem like everyone is against you and everyone looks down on you, but His perspective of you never changes. You are always His child and I feel as if we need to remember that.

So think of it this way, after reading the rest of this article imagine being in my shoes. Imagine losing yourself due to the addiction of drinking. Imagine watching your best friend overdosing and you don't know how to save them. What would you do? Maybe you don't care enough about yourself to make changes, but imagine you have a kid-- would you want them to go through these things? Better yet, imagine your little brother or sister-- what would you do if you saw them on the floor, eyes rolled in the back of their head not moving? There is too much negativity in this world to allow it to keep consuming us. So let’s start to save the kids. Let’s start to change society. Let’s make it a better place so when our kids play outside in the street in however many years it may be, they can do so in peace without you having to worry about drugs, epidemics, and violence. HighSchool is available now on SoundCloud and for Apple users, it is on Apple Music and iTunes. This project was dedicated to Dylan Ballard, due to him being a childhood friend I lost on April 23rd, 2016. We miss him as a community, so I dedicated this project to him for being a childhood friend, a brother and a teammate to me as well as always supporting me and telling me to keep pursuing my music, even when it was terrible two years ago. Love you, my man, we all do. Let’s change the community.

https://soundcloud.com/ody_qualk/sets/highschool-1