Brodrick Williams

The Cards I Was Dealt: Transforming Circumstance Through Community

I recall numerous nights in my life watching my father spread a deck of cards on the kitchen table at our cottage, his calloused hands moving in practiced dexterity.
“Life hands you cards,” he muttered through his heavy eyes, "the community teaches you how to play them.”
That moment of silence was the bedrock creating my comprehension of resilience and connection. Everyone is dealt bad cards but our communities are what show you how to love life.
The first struggles of my life weren’t intellectual, they were real world. My dad lost his job and Mom stretched one rooster into three meals. The fridge shrunk but our table grew longer, covered in arguments or calm. The scarcity of days made me wonder how communities both magnify and mitigate systemic oppression. Education was the only way my parents saw us have a better life.
“They are robbing your mind,” my mom would use that metaphor that they cannot take from you! This my hard times belief drove all of my academic zeal.
In HS Catalyst, a local coalition of people who experience food insecurity taught me about the power in community.
“Rest up Mrs. Rodriguez we are not giving bodies fuel-tickets we are feeding souls.”
I learned more about actual change than any textbook ever did watching kids gasp in wonder as we removed carrots from the soil. Community was not charity… it was mutual support.
College redefined for me what community is. I flipped mental switches around ethical dilemmas confronting genetic testing and class discussion on nutrition science. Dialogue with peers shifted my paradigm, blended personal story into the academic. Critiquing Margaret Atwood’s “An Angel” with classmates, I learned control and intellectual humility, and the impoinance of community understanding—but, mostly, yet almost incidentally: time.
Yet my most intellectual challenge as an undergraduate was juggle. 3 am research assignments: The worse memories I have of college. A new type of change came by way of Clancy who is an intern at my job. Her useful method—splitting things down into smaller chunks and reducing the fear of failures radically changed how I do my homework. Discipline is not stifling creativity, it liberates it.
As I moved through the halls of academia community reflected mirror and compass. I was challenged by professors and peers at ever deeper emotional truths to be expressed. What I came to understand was that good writing—and thinking isn’t simply about technical skill.
It was a challenge demonstrates the change in thinking that will follow this change. Constraints became opportunities; hurdles became paths to discovery.
Education is not merely personal transformation—it is social uprising. The most profound lesson of my academic journey is that it is not what we receive, but what we share.My community lifted me. Now it's my turn.