I didn’t set out to write a book. For most of my life, I was too busy trying to survive to think about documenting it.
I was working overnight security shifts in Albany, $18.50 an hour at first, then $19, paying $1,050 a month in rent, filing visitation paperwork for my son during the day, eating one meal on the bad days, and somewhere in between all of that, writing things down. Not for a publisher. Not for an audience. Just because I needed somewhere to put what was happening to me.
The thought that it might become a book came slowly. And for a long time, I talked myself out of it. Who wants to read about a kid from the Marlboro Projects who didn’t make the NBA, lost visitation of his son, and ended up in Albany working nights? I had to answer that question honestly before I could write a single page.
The Answer That Changed Everything
The answer was: every father sitting in a family court waiting room right now. Every kid in a housing project who uses basketball, music, or writing as a way to breathe. Every person who has ever felt invisible in a courtroom, a classroom, or their own home has kept going anyway.
I grew up tying the frayed laces of my sneakers before sunrise to get to Shady Park before anyone else was awake. Not because I was disciplined. Because inside the apartment, arguments were bleeding through thin walls and a cold linoleum floor and a mom counting out coins at the kitchen table. The court was the only place where none of that followed me.
That feeling of being completely free inside one specific place is something millions of people know. They just haven’t always seen it named. That’s what I wanted this book to do.
What Was Hard to Write
The Brooklyn chapters were actually the easiest. Distance helps. I can write about the eight-year-old with the frayed laces and the cherry ice from the candy spot on two quarters with some softness now. I can write about my brother cleaning his sneakers with an old toothbrush every night and arguing with me about the Knicks vs. the Bulls. Ewing’s got the heart, he’d say; Jordan’s got the rings, I’d say, and feel mostly warmth.
What was hard was writing about the in-between years. The romantic relationships that failed because I had no template for healthy love — only the model of my parents’ arguments, which I then unconsciously repeated. The loneliness of adulthood in a city of millions, where every conversation stayed surface-level. The slow fade of the basketball dream, not in one moment but piece by piece, shift after shift.
And hardest of all: the Albany years. Writing about choosing between the gas bill and eating properly. Writing about the night I called National Grid expecting to hear a number I couldn’t pay, and the woman on the phone told me, “Mr. Powell, you don’t have a gas bill. It has already been paid.” I still don’t fully understand that moment. But I wrote it exactly as it happened because I need people to know that sometimes, when you’ve done everything you can do and you’re still standing there with nothing left, something else steps in.
What I Had to Be Honest About
I didn’t write a book where everyone who hurt me is a villain. That was a choice, and it wasn’t an easy one.
My parents were people doing the best they could under circumstances that would have broken most people. My father’s absence hurt. My mother’s exhaustion hurt. But they were carrying things I didn’t understand as a child, and I am still working to understand now. Writing about them honestly, not to condemn, but to see clearly, was the most demanding part of the process.
I also had to be honest about my own failures. The relationships I damaged. The moments I wanted to give up. The years I let pass without the right fight for my son. A memoir that smooths over those parts isn’t really a memoir. It’s a press release. I didn’t want to write a press release about my own life.
Where I Am Now
I live in Albany, New York. I work in security. I play basketball when my body allows it, the injuries from the car accident that nearly took my life still announce themselves most mornings. I am rebuilding my relationship with Jahlon, who is fifteen now. Some of our conversations are easy. Some carry the weight of all the years we can’t get back. We’re building, call by call.
I’m also working on new books. The Bounce Back is the beginning, not the whole story.
People ask me sometimes what I want readers to walk away with. The answer is simpler than most people expect. I want them to know that the ground doesn’t have to be solid for you to keep walking. I spent years waiting to feel ready to fight for my son, ready to believe things could be different, ready to tell my story. That readiness never fully arrived. I did it anyway.
“The bounce back is not a destination; it is a way of life. It is the choice you make every morning when you wake up and decide to keep going.”
That’s the whole book, really. Everything else is just the details of how I kept making that choice on cracked asphalt in Brooklyn at age eight, in a family court hallway in Schenectady at thirty-five, in an Albany apartment at forty-three with a phone in my hand, waiting to hear my son’s voice.
If you’ve ever been in the middle of something that felt impossible, I wrote this for you.