The Soil That Grew Me: A Story of Roots, Ruin, and Revival🌱

They said I won't ever bloom.

I grew up in a concrete jungle where the closest thing to a blade of grass was the mold creeping up the walls of our apartment (and yes, we were still supposed to pay rent). I learned what hunger was before I even learned what algebra was. My mom was working three jobs to just keep a light on, while my dad didn't even get to show up as himself; he just haunted us with empty promises. I would look outside at the cracked pavement below our window, dreaming it would just split open to show me something alive. But hope doesn't pay bills. Desperation does.

I dropped out of school at 16. Not an act of rebellion; an act of survival. I cleaned toilets, sold fake perfumes, even gave plasma two times a week to afford one meal. Then, there came that winter that I lived out of a borrowed car, my breath steaming up the inside of the windshield while I traced patterns in the condensation: leaves and vines, really anything but the suffocating weight of failure.

But here is the pain in all of this: the universe doesn't spoon feed you miracles; you have to dig them out of the dirt you have been handed.

I did it. I dug out miracles. I borrowed a library book on hydroponics and made it my sacred text. I took a stolen cone and turned that into a stolen planter, grew lettuce under the streetlights, and sold it to hipster cafes who never asked why a kid smelled like muddy dirt and desperation. Each leaf was a "fuck you" to the life you made me live.

Now, I design vertical farms to stretch toward the sky like cathedrals of chlorophyll. My calloused hands - from both hunger and precision - now design ecosystems in glass towers where tomatoes ripen under LED suns. The kid who starved now feeds cities. The artist who saw beauty in cracks, now throws composition under strains of chlorophyll.

So when I say agriculture is revolution, I don't mean it poetically; I mean it viscerally. Because hunger isn't a bellies call; hunger is a graffiti of the soul. And, this will be my life's work; to erase it one crazy plant pixel at a time.

(Also, I have really enjoyed kissing in greenhouses. The humidity does things.)💋