I was doing a lot of growing while I was writing this poem; I wrote a short, separate poem to the instrumental version of Big Pun's Still Not a Player in 2018 after attending the National Museum of African American History & Culture's Young Historian's Institute (where I learned about the socio-political origins of rap and its links to poetry) and it inspired this poem. I wrote and submitted this poem to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 2018 and it was the first writing competition I had ever entered. This was a way for me to process the political goings on from 2016 forward and my new awareness of social issues and the activists working to fix them. 2018 still had a lot of growing to do, though. The first part of this poem, which is not included in this excerpt, calls out contradictory mentality and hypocrisy, even though its author would later learn the personal can be political and that she, too, needed to examine how cognitive dissonance plays out in her life.