With three buildings, each having eighteen floors, each floor with four apartments, the Place Vendôme apartment complex was my home for ten years. There, I saw friends of mine growing into drug users, one young adult being stabbed inside an elevator, and had a mafia boss as my neighbor. Sounds like a fiction story, right? But those are examples of what I’ve seen and experience during a great portion of my life.

I moved to Place Vendôme when I was six years old. At that time the late 70s buildings were still a good place to live in, with great management and entertainments such as two pools, a multi-sports court, and playground. The apartments themselves weren’t so great. They had two rooms, one kitchen/laundry area, a living room/dining room, two restrooms, and one small closet. After a few years, the complex became one of the worst places to live in; the management wasn’t the same anymore, all of the entertainment became old and useless, the drug users were everywhere, and the gray tone of the complex’s free area made it look dead. The only reason we still lived at Place Vendôme was because we couldn’t afford somewhere else.

My first few years there were not bad, but they still taught me some lessons. I had to find friends in this new place, and my first idea was to frequently go to the sports court to try to play soccer with someone there. Once I got close to the court I saw, for the very first time, people explicitly using drugs; there were three young guys clearly smoking Marijuana and drinking alcohol in front of the court. I was scared, and my first reaction was to hide and wait until they left. “I don’t want to become someone like them, what they are doing is wrong! How did their parents allow them to do that?” I thought while hiding behind concrete stairs. I took that for life. The early shock and contact with those who lived that way made me stay away from any sort of drug or alcohol.

Once I finally had friends, things started to be different. We were only out in the playground or court when the older guys weren’t around. That’s how it was until I was sixteen. The friends that were always around me, Jonas, Chris, and Lucas (names changed) had also grown into teenagers, but aside from that, we lost all that we had in common. While I tried my best in school and was well behaved, those three grew to become drug addicts, quit school, and became young parents. We all grew up in the same neighborhood, and in a very similar environment, but while I saw the violence and self-destruction around me as something to be despised, they became attracted to that. Jonas was a great soccer player, he had chances on big clubs, but because of his early use of drugs, that chance was ruined. Chris and Lucas had the chance to study at great private schools, but just like Jonas, had their lives thrown away because of drugs. I saw the same things that those three saw. I heard the same gunshots during night. I saw the same blood of an innocent spread across an elevator. But I didn’t turn into what they did. The gunshots at night made me fear for my family and my future, and it motivated me to work hard at school so I could move away from there.

The place people grow up in is something that can play a big role into someone’s life. A rough environment, such as the one I grew up in, can generate two types of people: the ones that admire the reckless way of life, and the one’s that try their best to be successful in life so they can leave that place as soon as possible. I fit into the second type. There were hundreds of opportunities for me to become someone like Jonas or Lucas, but the way I saw my neighborhood made me do my best and it made me take every good opportunity I had and use it in my favor. Those are lessons I still take with me, all because of a decadent condominium.