When I was a freshman in high school, I got placed into an experimental class filled with seniors. It was a creative writing class, with an emphasis on allowing anything to be written without repercussion from the school. You could’ve wrote something along the lines of dismembering everybody in the entire state if you wanted to, and we’d still find a way to discuss what was written. Everything I wrote was pretty vanilla compared to half the seniors in that classroom, mainly because they were chosen by other teachers to try this class as a way of learning how to vent properly with ink and pen instead of handgun and toothbrush shank.

The teacher they had chosen for this experimental class was the right fit. She respected your work as long as she believed that you actually tried. She also once told me that she saw me as a professional bull rider or rodeo cowboy as my future occupation. I have absolutely no idea how she even came to that conclusion, but I wouldn’t have minded becoming the first Asian-American professional bull rider. Chicks dig bull riders. The class was like a mixture of Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, with a little Good Will Hunting peppered in. Now everybody had their own story and background that made things interesting, but one individual in particular stuck out to me, mainly because I was assigned a seat directly next to his. His name was Jack.

Jack was massive. At six-foot-five with arms from an 80s Sylvester Stallone movie, Jack was the most terrifying man on the planet to me. When casting directors needed to hire a high school bully to pick on a helpless kid because he was scrawny, they wouldn’t have hired Jack because the idea was to instill fear that the bully was just going to give you a black eye and take your lunch money. Jack looked like he’d take your life if it meant getting super-sized fries at McDonalds instead of a large.

But Jack was nice. Asides from the punch-to-the-arm which served as Jack’s affectionate way of greeting someone (which I’m also sure is responsible for fracturing several arm bones to several others), Jack treated me with kindness and was always cracking jokes with me during class. I remember asking Jack one day why he didn’t play football, we could’ve use someone like Jack on the squad, the Dallas Cowboys could’ve use someone like Jack when he was sixteen, honestly. His response was something that only Jack could get away with without people laughing off as a joke. He looked at me with a big grin on his face, and told me as his t-shirt sleeve rolled back a bit to show the nine-inch scar from armpit to bulging, inner-bicep, most likely from a knife fight of some sort where Jack ended up eating the poor guy.

“I can’t play because if I get out on that field, I’ll seriously hurt someone, and I don’t want to hurt nobody. That’s why I don’t play football.”

Now normally, if you or any of your buddies said this while huddled around a bunch of beers and wings with the conversation of all of you prospectively playing in a flag-football league next September, you’d get laughed at and promptly told how much you suck at life and that your penis resembled a sample spoon from Baskin Robbins. But not Jack. Only Jack could say that and have everyone present understand that Jack doesn’t want to be the reason an entire hospital wing was created for all the teenagers he paralyzed from playing high school football.

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about Jack, it’s because he helped refine my style of writing, my voice. Because I was seated next to Jack in class, we’d always have to swap work with each other during exercises to full blown short stories. Jack always made me feel proud of my work. When he read my short stories, he always asked me to tell him more about the fictitious characters I wrote about, and that telling him was no good because he wanted to read it. Jack taught me how to paint images in other people’s minds through writing. He’d always laugh out loud when the entire class was silently reading and editing, he’d make remarks on how the stories I wrote were always funny, and most importantly, he gave me some of the most important advice I’d ever receive in my life.

“David, don’t ever let some bitch-ass, motherfucker grind you down. Don’t let them tell you what you can, and can’t write. What you can, or can’t do. Just do you, and life will naturally sort everything out for you.”

Why that piece of advice resonates with me to this day isn’t a mystery. Jack was like the bigger, older, Polynesian brother I never had. Everyone is given advice nearly everyday, and more than 95% of the time, it shoots into one ear and is already on its way out while the person is still talking to you. But Jack didn’t just tell me this without acting on it, he did the most critically important thing one could do. He instilled confidence in me. He made me believe in myself.

Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” If you’re grinding away and you find yourself tired, stressed out of your mind because there’s only so much clawing you can do to your face out of frustration, just keep going. And if there’s people telling you to stop, or to reconsider, or even that what you’re doing is pointless, whatever that may be, refer back to the advice Jack gave me. Don’t let the bitch-ass, motherfuckers grind you down.