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\u201cMy mom had me when she was 15, so I was always with my granny.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhile my mom was growing up, my grandmother was on crack cocaine. My mom witnessed a lot of things during that. Since my granny was on dependent drugs, she wasn\u2019t aware of what my mom was doing all the time, which led my mom to doing anything she wanted to do. That\u2019s how she got pregnant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy granny also had two kids around my age, so they were my uncles, along with my older uncle who was out of the house. She stopped doing drugs after my younger uncles were born. The reason why I was at my granny\u2019s house so much was because my mom and her didn\u2019t get along too well due to their past, and my mom worked a lot.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up, I was always getting good grades, and my uncles, they didn\u2019t really care about school except for sports. It was always an image portrayed on me to be the smart one and do good in school, even though we were all in school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was bad in elementary because I felt like if I got good grades, \u2018What can y'all do to me?\u2019 I had a sense of entitlement to do what I wanted because my only job was to do good in school, so since I was getting good grades, I behaved the same way in school like I did at home. I was just being loud and said what I had to say openly, whether it was rude, mean or funny.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was in one school from kindergarten through seventh grade. Mostly, all of my childhood friends had a perception of me as being rude and tough, so I carried that mentality with me throughout the neighborhood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up around gangs, and even some of my family members were involved in them. One time, I witnessed all my friends being taken downtown for carrying guns and shooting. That\u2019s what made me realize that lifestyle was not for me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that, I was just working on myself and staying in my own lane.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDuring that transition, my uncle \u2014 the older one who moved out of the house \u2014 was murdered. He meant a lot to me, on a deeper level that most wouldn\u2019t understand. So I was going through a rough patch. Around the time he died, it was really bad. I was acting out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA few months after that, one of my old friends got shot five times, and he was left paralyzed. He was my age.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWithout time to grasp the other two, another friend had died, like a really close family member. He was killed by one of our friends after school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI took these experiences that I went through and made a two-way pass. I realized that how my mom turned out, and some of my friends turned out, was because of the similar mentality they held about life and doing whatever they wanted.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen my mom told me to do the exact opposite of what she did, I realized that I could have a better outcome.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI went to a new school, got into playing sports, and my grades were doing really well. My sophomore year, my counselor invited me to apply for the Young Scholars Program at Ohio State, which usually starts in the sixth grade. I got accepted, and maintained above a 3.0.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGoing to college, I came in with an open mind and was just ready to start. It\u2019s a whole different atmosphere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you see people, like, in the morning, up and going to class, it\u2019s like, \u2018Dang, everybody is here to go to class and get a degree,\u2019 which is not the same at home.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI came from where they came from. For us to have two totally different outcomes, it\u2019s kind of crazy. Like, your mom wanted the same thing my mom wanted for me. However, we\u2019re doing two different things.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tGo back to full list<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chyiah Johnson, a first-year in criminology and criminal justice studies, was one of the few students in her sophomore class in high school to earn a spot in Ohio State\u2019s Young Scholars Program, which serves students from the nine largest urban public school districts in Ohio. Keeping up with academics and playing sports became her outlet as she grappled with tragic shootings and gun violence in the streets around her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4076,"featured_media":1040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"

\u201cMy mom had me when she was 15, so I was always with my granny.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cAfter that, I was just working on myself and staying in my own lane.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cA few months after that, one of my old friends got shot five times, and he was left paralyzed. He was my age.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cWithout time to grasp the other two, another friend had died, like a really close family member. He was killed by one of our friends after school.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cWhen my mom told me to do the exact opposite of what she did, I realized that I could have a better outcome.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cGoing to college, I came in with an open mind and was just ready to start. It\u2019s a whole different atmosphere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u201cBut I love my community. I wouldn\u2019t want to be anywhere else other than where I\u2019m from. I don\u2019t have nothing but love for my community. They made me who I am.\u201d<\/span><\/p>","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"coauthors":[13],"class_list":["post-1082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hilton-sp2020"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/files\/2020\/04\/Chyiah-Johnson-2.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4076"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1082"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1082\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1082"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelantern.com\/projects\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}