I Found the Love I Was Missing in the Streets

Malil Scott

Before the streets became part of Malil Scott’s identity, he remembers being a happy kid.

He was good in school. He played sports. Football gave him something to imagine for himself. But around that boy was a life that required him to understand things children should not have to understand yet. His mother had him young and was navigating struggles of her own. His father moved in and out of his life while dealing with incarceration and addiction. Malil was surrounded by adults who loved him, but many of them were also trying to survive their own lives.

That distinction matters.

Because sometimes a child can be loved and still not consistently feel the presence of that love.

Malil describes watching his mother search for love in relationships while feeling like he and his siblings were not receiving enough of her attention. His father tried to give him structure and warn him about decisions that could change his life, but his own struggles sometimes made it difficult for Malil to fully receive those warnings.

So Malil started looking somewhere else.

By middle school, he was spending more time outside of his home. Friends welcomed him. Their mothers took him in.

The neighborhood gave him attention. There were people who noticed him, understood him, and made space for him.

When people questioned why he was hanging around certain people, his reasoning was painfully simple: the love he was looking for felt easier to find there.

Eventually, football and the streets began competing for the same young man.

There was talent on one side and belonging on the other.

And belonging won.

What followed included violence, tremendous grief, juvenile incarceration, criminal charges, and eventually a prison sentence that took years of Malil’s life. But reducing his story to the consequences would miss the question underneath all of it.

Because Malil was not a little boy dreaming about prison.

He was a little boy trying to figure out where he belonged.

And sometimes the place that welcomes you can also become the place you have to survive.

The Room We Clean: Belonging

There is something deeply human about wanting to know that there is a place where your presence matters.

You want somebody to notice when you walk into the room.

You want somebody to notice when you leave.

You want people who understand your language, your experiences, your fears, and maybe even the parts of yourself that you do not know how to explain yet.

We call that belonging.

And when you have it, you might not spend much time thinking about it. But when you are missing it, you can spend years searching for somewhere to put that hunger.

That is what kept standing out to me while listening to Malil.

The streets did not initially present themselves to him as violence, prison sentences, funerals, or lost years. They presented themselves through people.

Friends.

Other families.

Attention.

Acceptance.

A place where the rules of life made sense to him.

That is important because we often judge where people end up without becoming curious about what they were looking for when they got there.

Maybe your version of this room has nothing to do with gangs or the streets.

Maybe you found belonging in a relationship you knew was unhealthy. Maybe it was a friend group that required you to become somebody else to remain accepted. Maybe it was a workplace where achievement became the price of being valued. Maybe it was a family where keeping everybody happy was the only way to maintain connection.

Sometimes the dangerous room does not look dangerous when you first walk into it.

Sometimes somebody just saves you a seat.

The difficult part is that unhealthy environments can still contain real relationships. People can genuinely care about each other inside systems, families, communities, and relationships that are simultaneously hurting them. That complexity matters in Malil’s story.

I do not think we need to flatten his experience by pretending every relationship he found in the streets was fake. He describes love there. He describes loyalty. He describes people he cared deeply about, including people whose deaths affected him for years.

But belonging always shapes us.

Spend enough time in any room and eventually you learn its rules.

You learn what earns respect. You learn what gets you rejected. You learn how conflict gets handled. You learn what emotions are acceptable. You learn what strength is supposed to look like. Eventually, some of those rules can become so familiar that they stop feeling like rules at all.

They just feel like life.

Malil said something during our conversation that stayed with me: he could not dream for very long because he had to learn how to survive.

That sentence changes the way I hear his story.

Because it makes me wonder how many young people are being asked what they want to become while spending most of their emotional energy figuring out how to make it through the environment they are already in.

It also leaves us with an uncomfortable question.

What happens when the first place that makes you feel wanted is also teaching you how to survive things that could eventually destroy you?

Maybe that is one of the hardest rooms to clean because cleaning it does not require pretending there was never anything good inside of it.

It requires becoming honest about what belonging gave you, what it asked from you, and eventually, what it cost.

Therapist Perspective

As I listened to Malil talk about his childhood, one thing kept standing out to me: before we talk about behavior, sometimes we need to understand the need underneath it.

Belonging is a human need. We want to know that we matter somewhere. We want relationships where we feel seen, protected, accepted, and understood. When those experiences are inconsistent early in life, the need for them does not disappear. Sometimes the search just moves somewhere else.

That does not mean every person who experiences abandonment or instability will end up in the streets. It also does not mean Malil's environment made every decision for him. What it does mean is that context matters.

When Malil describes spending time with friends, being welcomed by their mothers, and finding attention outside of his home, I hear more than a young person choosing a social group. I hear a young person discovering an environment that was meeting needs he may not have had words for yet.

As a therapist, that distinction matters to me.

Sometimes we focus so heavily on getting someone to stop a behavior that we never ask what the behavior, relationship, or environment is doing for them.

You can remove someone from a room, but if you never understand why they kept returning to it, they may spend years finding different versions of the same room.

Another piece of Malil's story that stayed with me was survival.

He talks about reaching a point where he could not dream for very long because he had to learn how to survive. Later, he describes himself as someone who does not cry much anymore because he cried enough when he was younger.

Experiences like chronic instability, violence, repeated loss, inconsistent caregiving, and unsafe environments can shape how someone learns to move through the world. People may become guarded, highly independent, emotionally restrained, quick to react, constantly prepared for conflict, or uncomfortable depending on other people.

Those responses can make sense in the environment where they developed.

The problem is that survival skills do not always recognize when the environment has changed.

You can leave the room physically and still carry its rules with you.

Maybe you learned that vulnerability makes you weak. Maybe trusting people gets you hurt. Maybe disrespect must immediately be answered. Maybe nobody is coming to help, so you have to handle everything yourself.

At one point those beliefs may have felt protective. Years later, those same beliefs can begin affecting friendships, intimate relationships, parenting, conflict, work, and your ability to experience emotional safety.

 That is why I think it is important to distinguish between being strong and always having to be armored.

Malil's story also raises another difficult conversation for parents.

Children listen to what we say, but they are also constantly studying what we do.

They are watching how we handle anger. They are watching our relationships. They are learning what we tolerate. They notice how we respond when we are hurt. They see where we go when life becomes difficult. They watch how we treat people we love.

That does not mean parents must be perfect. There are no perfect parents.

It means modeling matters.

Malil's father could warn him about the streets because he understood where that life could lead. At the same time, Malil was growing up surrounded by examples that sometimes reinforced the very world he was being warned against.

That contradiction appears again later in the episode when Malil and I talk about young people paying attention to whether an adult's life actually matches the advice they are giving.

Sometimes the most convincing lesson you give a child will never come out of your mouth.

It will be the life they watch you live.

And this is where Malil's story becomes even more complicated because eventually he becomes the parent.

He begins looking at his own children and recognizing that some of the instability he experienced growing up could appear differently in their lives. He acknowledges decisions he made and circumstances surrounding his incarceration, relationships, and parenting that have affected his family.

This is where generational patterns become difficult.

You can know exactly what hurt you and still unintentionally recreate pieces of it.

You can promise yourself that your children will have something different and later discover that breaking a pattern requires more than wanting the pattern to stop.

It requires recognizing it.

It requires asking uncomfortable questions about what you learned about love, conflict, relationships, parenting, masculinity, emotional expression, and belonging.

And eventually, it requires responsibility.

One thing I respect about the way Malil tells his story is that he gives his environment context without allowing that context to become permission for every decision he made.

I think we need more room for both of those truths.

Your environment can shape you deeply.

And you can eventually become responsible for what you do with what shaped you.

Understanding why you became a certain version of yourself is not the same as giving yourself permission to remain that version forever.

Sometimes understanding where the behavior came from is simply where the work begins.

If You Recognize This Room

Maybe you have never been involved in a gang.

Maybe you have never been incarcerated.

Maybe your childhood looks nothing like Malil's.

But you might still recognize the room.

Maybe you have stayed in relationships that hurt because leaving meant being alone. Maybe you change yourself depending on who you are around because acceptance feels safer than rejection. Maybe you tolerate disrespect because losing the relationship feels worse. Maybe you have built your identity around being needed, respected, desired, feared, successful, or useful because somewhere along the way those things became connected to belonging.

If you recognize yourself here, I would start with a question that sounds simple but may take some time to answer:

What am I receiving here that I am afraid I will not find somewhere else?

Maybe it is attention.

Maybe it is protection.

Maybe it is family.

Maybe it is validation.

Maybe it is identity.

Maybe it is simply the feeling that somebody notices when you are gone.

Do not rush past the answer.

Because telling yourself to leave an unhealthy environment without understanding why you need that environment can sometimes leave the deeper need untouched.

The next question is about survival.

What rules did you learn in the rooms you grew up in that you are still following today?

Never trust anybody.

Never let anyone disrespect you.

Do not cry.

Handle everything yourself.

Do not let people get too close.

Always be ready for something to go wrong.

Those rules may have a history. Understanding that history does not mean you have to continue living by them.

If you notice these patterns repeatedly affecting your relationships, parenting, emotional well-being, work, or ability to function, therapy can give you a place to understand where they started and what continues to reinforce them. You do not have to wait until your life completely falls apart before deciding that something deserves attention.

Sometimes you learned how to survive somewhere. Now you may need help learning how to live somewhere different.

But maybe you are reading this because you see someone you love in Malil's story.

Maybe it is your child, sibling, friend, student, athlete, or somebody you mentor.

If so, connection may need to come before correction.

It can be easy to look at someone making dangerous decisions and say, "Those people are not your friends," "You need to get away from them," or "You're throwing your life away."

Those statements might even be true.

But they may not address the reason that person keeps going back.

If that environment gives them belonging, protection, attention, identity, status, or family, you are not simply asking them to stop hanging around certain people. You may be asking them to surrender one of the only places where they currently feel wanted.

That does not mean accepting dangerous behavior.

It means becoming curious enough to understand what you are actually trying to replace.

Ask them:

What do you get there that you feel like you cannot get anywhere else?

Then be willing to hear the answer without immediately turning it into a lecture.

Malil talks about being 12 or 13 years old and needing adults to tell him something he could actually relate to. That matters.

Young people need more than warnings about where one road leads.

Sometimes they need access to another road.

They need adults who consistently show up. They need coaches, mentors, teachers, parents, family members, therapists, community leaders, and other people who can demonstrate another way of handling anger, money, relationships, conflict, grief, disappointment, masculinity, responsibility, and success.

If you want someone to believe another life exists, help them experience pieces of that life before asking them to imagine it.

Give them somewhere healthy to belong.

Because belonging was never the problem.

The question has always been what the room requires from you in exchange for letting you stay.

There is much more to Malil Scott's story than what I could explore here. Our conversation moves through childhood, family, addiction, violence, grief, incarceration, fatherhood, responsibility, and the complicated process of looking backward at the life you lived while trying to build something different going forward.

If any part of Malil's story made you think about the rooms that shaped you, or the people in your life who may still be searching for somewhere to belong, I encourage you to experience the full conversation. Some stories make more sense when you hear the person who lived them tell you what those rooms actually felt like from the inside.

When you clean your room, you can change your life.

Payton Hogan MS, LIMHP