I was born. My mother was an ex-Catholic who had watched her brothers be raped by the priests. She painted Matisse flowers on the walls, searching for her own peace. I grew up studying the strange shapes and bright colors. My father played reggae on his sound-system. My mother went to Africa. She brought home beads, tapestries, and drawings of insects. I was the youngest child, with two bullying older brothers. We grew up in a tight home in the countryside of South-East Michigan, full of love and hatred, small moments of grand joy within years of emotional violence and chaos. I would draw with my grandmother for hours on summer nights. These were the most peaceful times. As I grew, I became fascinated with music. I picked up instruments: banjo, oboe, saxophone. I wrote poetry. My parents fought, money got tighter. I suffered years of emotional abuse trapped as a family black-sheep. The neglect and the pressure to absorb everyone's pain took its toll on my young body. Our ghosts are all at war. Tensions rose, and with it, my lack of safety continued to turn my nervous system into a battlefield. I resisted with joy. I started high school. I acted in plays, played in an orchestra, wrote poetry, directed films... I knew I was going to be a great artist. My brothers moved out, I was alone with my father. My mother had left us. He cried as he drove me to school. We fought off dark thoughts together. Family is beautiful, tragic. I was always sensitive, yet never allowed to feel. I found something that would take my pain away. Somehow, art and drugs gave the self-worth back to me from where it had been denied. They soothed the verbal abuse which was foundational in my self-image; for once I felt big, not small. It was set in stone forever now, I was to be a great artist. A mental breakdown... Was it insanity? Awakening? The pressure of my youth erupting in a psychosis. Maybe it was the pressure of all my trauma culminating in my mind shutting down so it may process it all. Maybe it was a gift. I disappeared into a thunderstorm. I moved to Chicago, sitting up late at night in an armchair, fighting this strange new insanity. My poetry grew dark within me. My life became a blur. My body was in a tundra. Culturally disconnected, underestimated, and with no one to believe in me, I found inner strength. When it wasn't there, I prayed for it. I connected to strength so beyond anything I'd ever known. It was to fuel me, my art, my truth. 

I refused to give up. I believed that angels were guiding my experience. I learned how powerful I was when divinely connected to self-expression. I had spent decades surviving, and I found the strength within myself to turn all of it into my art. My beauty. I am just who I am. The only Tyrus Archer on Earth- who took a bad hand and turned it into greatness.