30 for 30

Sup…My name is Joe Patterson. I am a writer for Vocal.com and last weekend on February 5th I made it to my 30th birthday. In the past I never really thought much about what it would be like if I actually lived to see the age of 30, but here I am. I made it to the big 3-0 and I wanted to write an article retracing the different stages of my life and what I have learned in my three decades in this world.

My journey started in the early 90s when my parents, Joseph Patterson Jr. and Ruby Spencer met in the United States Navy and fell in love with each other.

My mother was a California girl from out west and my father was a North Carolinian from down south. They met when they were stationed in Virginia together during their time in the Navy. My mom already had a daughter from a previous relationship, my older sister, Rudy Spencer and when my parents got married my dad took care of her as his own. I was born on February 5th, 1993 in my dad’s hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina.

I had a big head that was bigger than the rest of my body. I spent the first three years of my life living in Greensboro in one of the worst areas of the city. My parent’s relationship slowly became undone in my earliest years and they eventually split up.

I ended up staying with my mom and visited my dad on the weekends. I lived in a neighborhood filled with crime, dysfunction and death. I remember looking at roaches in the bathroom every morning when I woke up and every night before I went to bed. When I was three years old my mother’s closest friend in our neighborhood named Marques committed a murder suicide in our area where he butchered his girlfriend and came home right next door to us and shot himself dead. This event was beyond traumatic for my mom and eventually she moved us out of the neighborhood. For a short time we lived in a house just outside of Greensboro before she eventually moved us to Chapel Hill when I was four years old. It was in Chapel Hill that I became the Joe that everyone knows so well.

My top favorite pass time as a kid was going to California to visit my family over the summer and getting on airplanes. California will always be my second home and has a place in my heart from which it can never be removed.

In Chapel Hill I lived in the projects and eventually a much nicer looking area and being surrounded by all the people I met in these areas really shaped my way of thinking in regards to how I relate to others. While growing up I struggled with severe asthma and it kept me hospitalized on countless nights. Growing up in Chapel Hill I attended Ephesus Elementary school, Seawell Elementary school, Glenwood Elementary school and Phillips Middle school and these places all blessed me with some amazing life long friends and teachers who would eventually become family.

My mother was a realtor by career. So I lived a childhood where we were either doing very well financially, or very bad financially. By late 2005 the housing market was terrible and my mom being the hardworking hustler that she was, decided to get a second job at a truck stop where she witness the business of being a trucker. This inspired her to take up a career in truck driving in South Carolina. When she decided that being a trucker was going to be her new calling she took both my older sister Rudy and my younger sister Kindal and moved to South Carolina. Being that this move was all too sudden for me I decided to stay with my dad in Greensboro because it was closer to Chapel Hill, closer to home.

In the short time that led up to me living with my dad in Greensboro I was living in an unfit situation and an unstable household with my mother. Living with my dad definitely brought me to a more stabile life, but I was in a severe state of depression. I was homesick and missed Chapel Hill and it was killing me inside. My dad would take me to visit my friends in Chapel Hill every other weekend, which was great, but also brought me a great deal of pain, as it reminded me of the home where I was no longer living. I was living among great people in Greensboro, but I struggled to get adjusted to my new setting and dealt with the depression of being homesick on a daily basis.

Being that I was lazy and A.D.D I struggled with school a lot and got myself in a lot of trouble those first couple years living with my dad, as was always the case before I lived with him as well. As I came into my high school years I started to slowly but surely get my school life together. By the 11th grade I finally made it to a place where I was doing well in school with little struggles, but no trouble. During July of 2010 just one month before my senior year was getting ready to begin, the most impactful event on my future took place, my mother died in a car accident.

I had issues with my mother for all the heartache she caused me in her last years and I struggled to forgive her. She even tried to call me and make up with me one year before she died, but I did not want to hear what she had to say. It would be on the day of her funeral that I finally forgave her and began my journey of living a life of which she was no longer living.

My senior year in high school came and went pretty fast. My school year ended on a great note, I graduated and college was even a possibility. I never saw myself going to college as a kid, but after I graduated high school I ended up attending Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina. It was here that I finally realized what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to be a writer. In this new chapter of my life called college I struggled with financial aid a lot so I spent a lot of time in and out of school for the first couple years before I got a job working at Bojangles. Between work and college I met a lot of great people who became friends and family. These people all helped me through some of the worse times of my life and were here with me when I made it to my best.

Those people were there for me on the day I graduated college and earned my first degree, my Associates in Arts in May of 2019. This was perhaps the proudest moment of my life because the younger me never thought this was possible. Who would have ever guessed that lazy little Joe would go to college and earn a degree, as well as pursue a career as a writer? I would have never guessed it 20 years ago. I know my mother was looking down on me smiling that day because I finally achieved something she had been encouraging me to do my whole life growing up.

After earning my Associates I went on a journey to earn my Bachelors in media studies when I started attending UNC-Greensboro. This was also beyond incredible for me because younger me would have never even dreamed of attending the University of North Carolina. I am still on this part of my journey but I will make it to the finish line. Fast forward to today I am now a published writer for Vocal.com who has written many stories that have garnered thousands of reads and working on my first novel in the near future.

So who am I? Joe Patterson. A nerd from North Carolina who loves film, music, literature and writing. I am a talented rapper and I love recording music. I have always had a goofy personality and a wrinkled head of which people like to poke fun. I have a relationship with my faith and God that I take serious. I am aspiring to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived and I have been blessed to have lived 30 years of an amazing life. I have learned that life comes with some bad times, but it also comes with some good times as well and at the end of every dark tunnel there is a light. I have also learned that you have to appreciate who and whatever you have or else you will never truly have more. My greatest treasures are the people in my life and these 30 years don’t mean anything without them and may God bless me to see another 30 years.

~~Dedicated to my younger self. Yes, we made it here.