There is no better word to describe the ascension of Jelly Roll than “phenomenal.”
“To this day, my mother calls me Jelly.
That said, he certainly wasn’t exposed to a whole lot of affluence while growing up.
In addition, most people he knew were doing drugs and eventually he was too.
As he grew older, he graduated from doing drugs to selling them.
It wasn’t particularly lucrative, but at least it afforded him a bit money.
“I don’t remember nobody with real money.”
But I felt this need to take care of my mother back then,” he toldBillboard.
That responsibility he felt wasn’t just emotional.
It also had financial implications.
He was just 13 when he was arrested for the first time.
All told, he would go on to be jailed about 40 times over the next decade or so.
“And that’s how I felt about the streets.”
“Jail was like a high school reunion for me,” he toldThe Guardian.
The rotating door of the judicial system, it’s rough, man.
“He said, ‘DeFord, you had a kid today.’
I said, ‘What?’
He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you had a child.’
And I was like, ‘What’s her name?’
And he said, ‘Hell, I don’t know,'” he recalled.
The first matter of business was getting his GED, given that he’d never graduated high school.
He studied and passed on his very first try.
He was 25 when he exited prison for the final time.
“Being a father is so important to me,” he explained in an interview withPeople.
“The single most impactful event of my entire life was having my daughter.
It changed everything.”
“I had to learn that you could drink alcohol without doing cocaine,” he told People.
“I didn’t have a choice.
It was me or them, and I had to learn to love myself.”
But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
Such was the case in 2018, when the relationship hit a major obstacle.
“Our castle in the sand had to crumble so we could rebuild on solid ground.”
As he later revealed, he’s also grappled with issues involvinghis own mental health.
“I have moments of extreme productivity where I feel like nothing can stop me.
It was also deeply personal.
““The biggest thing for me was just letting those emotions out, in a public way.”
“I’ve been obese since I was a small child,” he wrote.
“All I’ve ever known was being fat, and I’m f***ing miserable …
I want to LIVE a normal life and have a normal relationship with food.”
“I was a part of the problem,” he declared.
“I brought my community down.
I was the uneducated man in the kitchen playing chemist with drugs I knew absolutely nothing about.”
“And they want two grand, five grand, a car, a house,” he explained.
“So you read them.
And it just hurts.”
“The guilt you feel creates a spiral of shame,” he explained.
“But it also hurts to separate yourself from these people.”
