Before I could help anyone take the mask off, I had to take off mine.
I'm AJ. My biggest dream was to be a father. I was raised by women who made me believe I could become anything. This is the story of the people I love, the people I've lost, and how I finally began choosing a life that felt like mine.
The women who raised me
I'm AJ. I'm 32 years old. I'll be 33 December 27th. I was born in 1993 to Burma Autry and Frank Hill.
I come from a loving, strong Black family. I was raised by women, my mother and my grandmother, and my uncle is my father figure. But on my day-to-day, the people who were in my life more than anything were my mother and my grandmother, because that's who I lived with, and my sister, who I grew up with.
I've been loved by the women in my family in ways most people could probably only dream of. From the time I can remember, the women in my family have always made me feel like a beautiful Black man. A Black man who can do whatever he sets his mind to.
But I also grew up with a grandmother who was very stern and ladder-like, is what I would call it. She believed in working your way up the ladder. I was the black sheep of the family, and we always bumped heads because of that.
I felt like, you didn't want me to be who I wanted to be. You just wanted to make sure I had the easiest life possible. And sometimes the easiest life isn't the happy life. It hasn't been until I got older that that started making sense.
I grew up in an abusive home. I've seen things most kids should never see, hear, or go through. By the age of, I'd say, eight, my grandmother took me in. My mother was never on drugs or anything like that. My grandma just wanted us to be in a safer environment.
But my sister didn't want to stay, so my grandma really took me in, and my sister came to visit more and stayed with my mom.
Since I've been a little boy, I've been raised by my grandmother pretty much, but my mom was still very present in my life. She always made sure I had what I needed. She always made sure we spent time together. She made me feel like she wasn't giving up on me or leaving me to my grandma. My grandma just had better resources for what my mom wanted for me in life.
My grandma's a sports lady. She knows more sports than most men do. Between her and my uncle, they made sure I didn't have an idea what the streets were, that I would never grow up to want to be in the streets.
Because, as some people would say, I had a silver spoon growing up, to the Black community at least. I went to a majority-white school. I lived in a majority-white neighborhood. I'm a suburban Black kid.
But that doesn't change me being Black at all. I've dealt with race wars at my school because of a situation I went through as a Black man protecting himself. I've been pulled over driving while Black. I've been mistreated or judged because I'm Black with dreads.
So my story is no different than the next Black man's. I just never let my story or my past or my childhood define my future and the man I wanted to become.
My biggest dream was to be a father
I had to lose my first son at 17 and my second son at 20 to illnesses related to prematurity.
My kids were my lifeline and my backbone. Those were the things I prayed for. I prayed to be a dad because I didn't grow up with a father for the most part.
I always told myself, even as a kid, I would be a better dad than my dad ever was. So, like some kids have football dreams, I had those too. But my biggest dream was to just be a father.
To make sure a son or a daughter never has to feel like me and my sister felt growing up. And to make sure, when I did have a kid, the woman I had a kid with would never have to feel like my mother felt: single, alone, abandoned, because she chose herself, her safety, over the man's needs and wants.
My mother was my backbone
At 28, I lost the person that I never thought I would lose. At least not at the time I lost her, or the age I lost her. My mother.
That was my backbone. My lifeline. Just like my kids were my lifeline and my backbone.
I stopped smoking weed. I stopped doing all the numbing things that our culture usually does when we're in pain, because we were taught to just suck it up, right? Especially as Black men in America. It's not cool to be emotional. "Nobody cares," is what they tell us, and I knew that wasn't true.
I met my therapist, Debra, a white lady with what I call a Black background. Debra's story was so powerful. I knew if she could get through what she'd been through, I could too.
She lost her parents at 19. I lost my parent at 28, and I still have one of my parents anyway, even though we're not the closest. That's my father.
Through yoga and therapy, I was able to find peace in the hardest times of my life, watching my mother lose hers. And then she actually lost her life to breast cancer.
Some of the decisions she made shape my decisions today. What I don't want to do with my life, and what I don't want my kids to go through.
Jordan, AJ, and the mask
After losing my second son, I moved to Las Vegas, and I taught myself so many things. I read so many books, and I set a goal to become what I call now AJ.
Jordan had to die so AJ could live. But if it wasn't for Jordan's traumas and tragedies, AJ wouldn't be alive either.
At times, I battled the two personalities, or egos, as some people would call them, because there were still things that I bottled down inside rather than healing and fixing before I shaped AJ. At times, I've been triggered, and that's when I found therapy.
I set out and put this mask on, is what I call it, to be this tech guy. At the time, tech was so empowering and changing so many people's lives.
But those people never looked like me, though. That was the part I ignored. I said, that doesn't matter to me. I would change the narrative. I would be that Black face that becomes the face of why other Black faces should be invested in as entrepreneurs and tech founders.
But ten years later, I found myself unhappy, depressed, guessing my worth, questioning my worth, allowing so many things to shape my whys that weren't me.
After I sat in Ohio for three years, not even doing business while my mom was sick or after she passed away, for the last two, I got back into business. And I haven't been happy, because the businesses I was pursuing belonged to the man behind the mask. They weren't me.
I was building these businesses in fear. If I don't get this money, if I don't get this funding, what if this happens to my family? What if that happens to my family?
I told myself when my son died that I would never put my life into somebody else's business, because I saw what a company doesn't care about when you're going through life. But let it be their kid. They want all the sympathy and resources for them, right?
So I felt entrepreneurship was my only way to take care of my family, but the routes I went in weren't the best. I never had anybody to show me, or sit down with me and help me understand business and entrepreneurship.
I put myself in an environment that I call Trojan horsing. I learned insurance by becoming an insurance agent. I learned financial literacy and management by becoming a relationship banker. I learned how to unlock the money in your walls, as they say to homeowners, through working for a mortgage loan company.
And I've always given back in knowledge as much as I could to the people in my environments, no matter the color.
Choosing my own life
Over these last few weeks out here in Arizona, I've been realizing why I came here. I moved to Arizona with the goal of healing.
Arizona's a resort place, they say, right? It's a retreat, a retirement place. So I knew there would be fewer distractions and more opportunities for me to learn myself, find myself, and be around people who I know want the best for me and are living lives that I can respect.
No, they're not rich. They're not famous. That didn't matter to me. But they never gave up on their dreams. They're college-educated, which means they're disciplined in ways that the people I was around before in Canton, Ohio, weren't.
None of them were college grads. Some of them didn't even really finish high school. A lot of them are street people. But these people out here in Arizona who are my friends, who I've met through high school and college, they're thriving. They're good parents. They're resourceful.
I needed to be around that because I'm a firm believer you are who you hang around.
Out of everything I've been through, I had to realize over these last few weeks, with my mom's birthday coming up in nine days, that I found God. I found so much love in things that I never thought I would, like the gym.
I put so much self-love into myself and focused on me so much over these last six months that I was able to find the business that I really wanted to have.
Why Voco exists
I've always loved helping people. I've always said that's my God's passion. That's my God's gift. That's why God put me here.
It wasn't to be an athlete. It wasn't to do anything that I thought it was before. It was to help people. Help people find their passions. Help people through their traumas. Help people know their whys. Help people not overthink. And help people know they are cared about and loved, and there's somebody they can lean on who won't judge them.
That's why I say, take the mask off.
We don't have to live our parents' dreams for us. We don't have to live society's viewpoints or dreams or outlooks or goals that they set for their civilians.
Whoever said you needed to have a million dollars to be successful?
Success can be so many other things than financial. You can be successful making six thousand dollars a year if you know how to manage that six thousand dollars, your kids are happy, your home is safe, your kids' environment is safe, and you enjoy what you do for work. That's success.
Some people don't even have that. Some people hate their jobs, but they stay in them because they make a lot of money. Some people hate their lives, but they stay in them because they're scared of change.
A lot of people are wearing masks that they want to take off, but they don't have the courage or the support to.
That's why you can come here and join Voco, join our free community, BHIVE, work with our upcoming partners, and we help each other heal.
Because I'm a firm believer it's hard to do it on your own. Yeah, you can achieve some parts of it. But as a whole, why put yourself through so much pain? Why put yourself through so much uncertainty?
My mother always said life and parenting didn't come with a playbook. Neither does healing.
If you don't know how to manage your trauma before you start trying to self-heal, how can you heal yourself?
Ignoring things or sucking it up isn't dealing with it. It isn't healing. That's just masking and putting things so deep that eventually they're going to come back up. And when they do, it may change your life in ways that you can't come back from.
So that's my story. That's my why.
The mask got you where you are. It's also what's killing you. - AJ
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