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Would it be my choice? This damn city wouldn’t even crack the top places to live. There had to be better opportunities out there, but I wouldn’t know.

Here I was, in NYC. They call it the city that never sleeps. When would it, with crime lurking around every corner?

Four years I’ve spent as a ghost, walking the same streets as the riffraff, blending in just enough to fly under the radar. To say it was a dangerous place for a teenager would be a fucking understatement.

A handful of reasons kept me around. Oddly enough, it was this twisted sense of belonging in a city drowning in criminals and wannabe gangsters.

For my first big girl purchase I got a computer at a pawn shop in midtown. It took months to figure it out, but once I did, I was unstoppable. A whole universe was at my fingertips, waiting to be discovered .

I worked hard to make sense of the new world I’d entered. I came close to cracking the code on society’s divisions and where I fit in. There were a lot of things I wondered about, but it was really the danger I wanted to understand.

To learn everything there was to know about the very thing my mother warned me about.

To understand the world, you had to be ready to face the ugly reality offered. To navigate it? The best way was to jump headfirst, become a part of it, and accept the consequences.

A simple concept, once you identify the power figures, except I had no intention of joining in.

Society split into groups based on affiliations. Everybody was on someone’s payroll. Some were born into their roles; others chose them based on heritage. Most were recruited or pushed into this life, desperate to survive. For the rest? Postcodes stripped them of their choices.

The territory was owned and divided by the biggest players. Powerful men fell so others could rise. The dynamics shifted quickly. You lost as fast as you gained in a full domino effect.

A mobster’s mentality formed at a young age.

A code everyone respected and abided by.

The saying: Snitches end up in ditches? In this world, they ended up carved up into pieces, shipped back to their families wrapped as Christmas presents.

Don’t ask me how I know. The video would remain a vivid image, playing on the screen of my mind.

Punishments were both ordered and executed by their own people. Disobedience wasn’t tolerated. You had the strong, the weak, and the patsies, a term for the collaterals. Those caught in between.

There was no justice among criminals. Natural selection had sorted out the weak and kept giving to the strong. The ones who dared to take.

Law enforcement got generously paid to look the other way. Hell, for the right monthly contribution? They didn’t even bother to show up .

It was the right decision to never approach anyone for help. Who knows where I would have ended up.

It took me some time and a whiteboard to fully understand the hierarchy. I was no longer the girl who’d been dropped off at an unknown location downtown with nothing but a backpack full of questions.

I quickly realized what a sheltered life I’d lived. The simplest things like navigating public transport or going to the grocery store were things I’d only briefly understood.

I cursed everything that had led me to this point. It felt like learning to walk again, except I had no one to lean on.

I wasn’t talking about regular teenage troubles, like what clothes I fancy or which hairstyle suits me, but what to do with my life and how to move forward.

The only thing childhood prepared me for was the solitary lifestyle. With no hobbies and barely any skills, I spent months trying and learning everything until I found something I was good at.

Thirteen-year-old me would never have guessed I was an adrenaline junkie, or that I had a particular talent for sneaking into places where I had no business being.

At first, rage filled me, and unanswered questions plagued the day. All I could focus on was the panic that overtook me, the paralyzing fear I felt.

My brain wouldn’t stop spinning with thoughts when I just wanted to turn it off. For the stupid organ to shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

I was a hormonal teenager with no one to talk to and no way to vent. Emptiness had settled within me. I was chasing the same rush I’d experienced years ago, just to face it head-on this time. With basic needs covered, everything else became unimportant.

I lived for a sole purpose: to show the world who I could be . Who I will be.