Jasmine Shares Her Heart

When I was 12, I smoked some weed with some girls that I thought were my friends and they weren't. They had laced the weed (with a chemical). After I smoked it, I started tripping and I thought my sister was going to kill me. I went to the hospital. They told me that there was crystal meth laced in the weed I'd smoked and that I could have died.

After that when i was 14, I used to think I was grown. I started talking back to my mom. I used flip out. She bourght me a phone for Christmas. One day, she threw it at the wall and broke it. She bought another phone for her boyfriend and I to share.. One day I was using it and I didn't want to give it back . Phones are addictive when you are young. I told her I was going to burn down her house. So she called the police and the police came. I started acting tough. They put me in handcuffs.

When i was 15, I used to hang around this girl. She would do bad things that I wouldn't do. Karma will come back on. I learned that using people and acting disrespectful to people, you won't get anywhere in life. And being caught up in the streets is not good.

If you hang around with bad people you can get caught up in it easily. Growing up in

East Oakland is cool. It depends on what crowd you hang out with. You can hang around with the geeky, nerdy kids or the gangsta, thug kids.

I have found out that my mother was right all along. In the streets, you can't trust people. People act like they're friendly when in reality they hate on you because they don't have things that you have.

I would like to a fashion model. I dropped out of high school because they had an Asian dude teaching class and he was just teaching about his immigrant culture. It wasn't relative to my life at all. They lied and said I wasn't going to school. I am smarter than other kids. I dropped out in the 11th grade. That was two years ago.

In school, people smoke weed and they stare at the board in a daze. People just act dumb when they smoke weed. I could sit in a room with private tutor to learn but I can't sit and concretrate when people are acting stupid all around me. Because they smoke weed before they come to school, they are not really there.

I trust my best friend and my mom, that's all. My boyfriend has a good heart.

Other than the two of them, I have learned not to trust people. I got a kind heart and that's a problem. I do stuff for people more than I do stuff for msyelf.

Every Sunday I go to church and I pray for a place so I won't have to live in no shelter. I don't want to live with nobody; none of my relatives.

If I could give advice to some younger person, I would say stay in school don't worry about boys. You have to worry about what he's doing and you're missing out on what you need to be doing. I would tell her that when you are 14 years old, you are not really grown. When I was 14, I couldn't even get my nails done.

When I went to middle school. I didn't dress all hoochie in half shirts. When girls dress like that, men want to take advange. They think you're a hoochie or a prostitute. In Oakland, I've seen girls on the track (the area where youth are commercially sexually exploited). I've seen girls hopping in and out of cars talking to men their grand daddy's age. People say you only live once. If that's true do something smart. Don't do nothing dumb. I didn't need to impress anybody but myself. I was not put on the earth to do dumb stuff.

Older folks can't understand my generation. Your granddaugther walks in the door and she's got on mini-skirt. You'd tell her, "Hell no." Parents get on you because they love you and they care about you. They don't want you to follow in her footsteps. This one girl I know didn't worry about boys. She only worried about her school work. I was proud of her.

It ain't hard to change you life around. You have to tell yourself that you can do this. You can change. Don't let nobody change you. You can change yourself. I like going to church. I sing in the choir. In church they say, "It's a new year. Leave those people back in 2015." I believe that's the way to go. One of my dreams is to be a model another is to write books.

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