The Intro

I apologize for starting this out in such a cliché format, but if I didn’t pay homage to my fragile beginnings the true definition of Black Collar wouldn’t resonate as well. A definition is still being written in my personal book, and is actually more of a connotation for whoever the audience is.

I was born in April of 94 to a 15-year-old mother who has worked profusely and strategically with me and our family in mind behind every clock-in. A gentle mother who has shown me the true definition of motivation, dedication, and most importantly…LOVE! Despite the trials and hardships of life, she has reached a level of success that I dream to obtain. My father was 18 when I took my first breath. It would be easy to say that my father was absent in my life until recently, however it would not be true. My father at his most complex form…is a simple man who seeks LOVE and has always offered that to me to the best of his experience! He has unknowingly given me the meaning of “mental toughness” and how important it is in this thing called Life.

Fast forward to September of 2009, You may remember this weird thing called swine flu…Well, I had it. Actually, it wasn’t as severe as news coverage made it seem, but during the same time, one of the most important people in my life also fell ill. Her name was Bea Bea. She was, for a lack of a better word, my rock throughout my childhood. She was initially diagnosed with bronchitis. Even as a sophomore in high school, I knew that bronchitis was something we could recover from. However, as I began to progress back to my normal self from the swine flu, my aunt only seemed to get worse. Somewhere between September and December of 2009, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I remember standing in St. Francis hospital off of Poplar, only a few blocks from where I work now, gazing at her lay in this bed motionless. I vividly remember that annoying slow beep from the heart monitor pinging into my ear. I couldn’t show it at the time because I was with family and was trying to be a “MAN,” but that noise made me furious…Probably because I knew they were about to unplug it. December 24th, yes Christmas Eve, was the last time I was able to tell MY Bea Bea that I LOVE her to her face.

In 2012 I graduated from THE Central High School with no earthly idea of what to expect of this imaginary thing called my future. Baseball was my first love and I’d spent my junior and senior year working my behind off with hopes to play college ball. My last high school baseball game was only days before graduation and no, I had not signed with anyone or been offered any big-time scholarships. However, after losing by a score I won’t bring up, my coach started his end of the season speech as we stood in the huddle. This was now my fourth and final time hearing it. It sounded very similar to the previous three, but this time it felt like his words were punching me in the face. It almost felt like the rest of the team wasn’t there and he was talking to me personally. After spending four years under a man who I thought knew everything about baseball, the sport I loved, the words that resonated with me the most were, “I don’t care if I didn’t teach you a thing about baseball…but I do hope you learned something about being a man.”

For some odd reason, I skipped out on baseball scholarships to a couple of D3 and JuCo schools to move six hours across the state to attend the University of Tennessee. I graduated in May of 2016 with a degree in Communications and had no idea what I was supposed to do with this so-called knowledge. Finally receiving that piece of paper almost felt useless. I had been applying to jobs all spring semester and all I could show for it was a pile of rejection emails. Excuse my French, but I worked my ass off in college, finishing with four internships from what I would call high-end companies and even a 3.0 GPA. Yet, everything I applied to, even the jobs that only asked for a high school education, turned me down. The night before graduation, a family friend of mine living in Atlanta called to congratulate me. He asked me what I had planned after graduation, and I sarcastically said, “good question.” I didn’t know exactly what his role was, but I did know that he worked at BET. On that same phone call, he offered me a production assistant job on a reality show and a place to lay my head in Atlanta. Thank you for a memory and an experience I will never forget, T.S.!

I lived in Atlanta from May 2016 until January 2017. I use the word live very loosely in this sense because it felt more like simply existing. Atlanta was by far one of the most stressful, draining, eye-opening, educational moments of my life…even more so than the previous four years I spent in Knoxville. I went to college expecting to learn so much about philosophy, theory, brain stuff I’d call it…but I realized shortly after graduating that college taught me about networking, relationships, and true feelings! All the things that grow the heart! Atlanta became the total opposite. I learned how to be a director, editor, gaffer, location scout, and my favorite…true cameraman there. However, I’d never been as heartless in my life. I had a few friends in the city, but at least 6 out of the 7 days in the week I was on set chasing around “Reality Television” and I wasn’t even happy in my own world. I was literally walking around with $50,000 cameras, and making more money than I’d ever seen (still not that much), but felt a literal sense of being broke for the first time in my life since Bea Bea passed away. For an aspiring photographer/creative, a job in the film industry right out of college seemed like the Disneyland of careers, yet I was beyond miserable on set everyday…I was depressed.

I woke up one day and got the courageous idea to tell the director of the show I was working that I would not be coming back to set once the week ended. Surprisingly enough, she understood with more emotion than I think I had ever gotten from her. She even wished me luck at the end of the conversation. I guess I figured that someone I’d been literally running to get coffee for at 5a.m. in the morning wouldn’t have any sympathy for me, but it was the exact opposite. That was midway through November in 2016. With no idea where my next check was coming from, and thankfully a little cash that I was smart enough to stash in my savings, I was as vulnerable as I’d ever been in my “adult” life…but I did feel a sense of relief that I’d never experienced before.

Jump to the next scene of this biopic and I’m just about dead broke sitting on my couch in a 560sqft apartment that wasn’t even technically inside Atlanta…that I was spending over $1,000 a month on. Trust me, there was nothing nice about it, but it was the cheapest thing I could find in my transition to the city and a place to lay my head at night. The new year had come in and it felt like I watched the calendar change in slow motion. I was still jobless and running out of my hard-earned savings account, and was somehow supposed to be excited about the upcoming months that I didn't have rent for. Random photo shoots here and there were the only things keeping one nostril above water. Just like senior year of college, I’d applied to at least three jobs every day since the day I walked off set…nothing but rejections. I was applying to be a cashier at retail stores but wasn’t getting anything at all. At this point, I was dressing up every day and walking in the mall with a folder full of resumes and wasn’t coming home until I’d passed them all out. Still nothing…

One evening in early January my mother randomly texted me. I’ll never forget…I’d just put my laptop down from looking for jobs and picked up the PS4 joystick to take a mental break. I read the message from Mom and saw that it was a link to job postings in the Memphis area. I found two that instantly caught my eye; a media content position at the zoo and a multimedia specialist position at one of the largest companies in the world. I instantly paused the game and applied for both. Applying for jobs was almost routine at this point so afterward I shut my laptop and finished my game of Madden and didn’t think twice about it.

…To be continued.

Editor- A.O.S.

Live with LOVE,

B.J. Crawford