Today we’d like to introduce you to Jorden Elebor.
Jorden, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
This story is a little different. I’m a Nigerian American glass-child, born into a lower income household with emotionally abusive parents, unrealistic expectations, and a lack of support. I’m one of the blessed few who managed to escape from my generational curses and begin building something of my own. In other words, I’m a 23-year-old who has overcome what would have ended the lives of many others and am using my experiences to bring light to others.
Since childhood I’ve had to deal with a family ripe with mental illness, financial illiteracy, illegal activities, and drug use, but I did what I could to make things work regardless. Thanks to my mother, who spent most of her time educating me on reading, writing, and cognition, I was able to move far ahead other students my age. Whenever I wasn’t writing a new chapter of a story or doodling a new comic strip, I would sit down and teach myself game development on the family computer. Adults were “generally” fascinated with me- especially the coworkers of my parents who would hear about my latest achievements for the fifteenth time that week.
“Generally” is the word of choice.
I was seven at the time, but I often found myself competing with some older figures regardless. Teachers were rather unfair towards me due to heightened expectations, punishing me harder than others for minor reasons. Adults seemingly went out of their way to knock me down a peg, going as far as to tell me I was going to be less-than-successful more times than I could count. My parents, who I felt were responsible for my gifts, failed to love us correctly and put more effort into discipline than encouragement. As this only became more frequent throughout my elementary school life, I began to act out and seek attention and validation. This reached a pinnacle when I hit puberty, where I realized there were little-to-no incentives for hard work and gave up on excellence, shooting for the bare minimum to make room for self-fulfillment.
My grades tanked, my family would regularly tell me I was a failure, and my complete lack of a support system caused me to develop quirks that others considered to be rather strange for most of my middle school life. I was never “bullied” per se, but I was certainly mistreated by both peers and adults, threatened on a daily basis, and told to commit suicide weekly, if not every few days, by other children. This combined with the strange living situation with my dad, who was deep in alcohol abuse and lust at the time, to only make things worse.
If you were to ask others about my high school life, they would tell you about how free I was as a student. My parents left my brother and I to be homeowners during my sophomore year. My brother and I worked full time schedules to pay our parents’ mortgage while they stayed elsewhere and lived their lives. I remember waking up at five in the morning to go to school, then taking an Uber from school to work at 3 PM, then after that working until 1-2 AM the next morning. The chores didn’t stop, the classwork didn’t stop, and my girlfriend at the time was obnoxiously abusive. To spice up my life, I joined a game development team for one of my favorite fangames, which allowed me to do something fulfilling to me, gave me skills of the trade, and gave me cool-kid points at school since a lot of people knew of this fangame at the time.
When COVID hit during my graduation year, 2020, I got hit with a million problems at once. I found I wasn’t in the yearbook and was sabotaged from getting my diploma, I lost my job to COVID and was denied unemployment, my newest relationship was emotionally unfulfilling, and my parents had mostly given up on me. My brother had become diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis which would cause him to become erratic and dangerous when off medication. Abuse became normal in the house. Out of stress, I decided to full send my current career and joined a temp agency, where I worked at warehouses no less than 10-12 hours a day, 5-7 days a week while taking care of my grandma, paying the mortgage, and doing summer school. I stopped doing what made me happy entirely, even dropping off of the game development team to focus on what was important at the time.
Then in 2021, my family sold the house my brother and I were paying for. We were forced to move into my grandma’s house and pay bills there. I refused, which meant I had to leave. Lost my job due to being unable to come into work. I was gladly given the opportunity to stay with one of my closest friends at the time, but also unlucky enough to come around at a time where I had to watch my friend fall deep into cannabis and drug abuse. I attempted to pad things out by getting a job at a burger place and working as much as possible, allowing myself to be exploited by an abusive manager who was paying me under the table. After a nasty argument with my boss, I quit and started to look elsewhere. My lack of income unfortunately caused my drug-induced friend to become aggressive and spiteful, so I swallowed the bullet, begged my family to take me back and returned home. They treated me exactly the same way, but I maintained patience since I didn’t want to go through the same thing again. I was inevitably forced to enroll in college, pay the bills and return back to warehouse work the following year.
In 2023- about a year after I returned- I reached my limit. My relationship was the most emotionally unfulfilling it had ever been, I had gotten assaulted by my brother, I was getting into arguments with my family daily, and I no longer felt safe in the home I was helping them pay for. I grounded myself in faith after a suicide attempt and came to the realization that I needed to leave before my situation killed me. I took the biggest risk of my life to save my life; with little money and several thousands in debt to my name, I left my family for the last time, leaving the majority of my possessions with them and staying at a Pad Split close to my job that I could barely afford. It was difficult being on my own; I didn’t have a blanket nor the money to get one, the heater didn’t work in my room, I had no food, and it was freezing since it was the middle of December. I had to wear every piece of clothing I had and curl into a ball to avoid freezing to death. I maxed out all of my credit cards and tanked my credit score to the 400s. I wanted to go back home.
But I didn’t. I fought through it. Even though it took until 2024, work suddenly became more emotionally fulfilling. Life had started to pick up, my social life began to glow, and I finally understood what it meant to love and take care of myself. I rediscovered who I was and started to pick up programming and writing again with a new vigor. In a few months I received a job offer with promising incentives offering me almost double what I was making prior. This would finally give me the ability to not just live, but be at the top of my family. It sounded perfect!
Unfortunately, I was wrongfully terminated due to competition between upper management and my best interests. I attempted to appeal my termination but was auto rejected. I attempted to pursue a legal battle with the company while requesting for unemployment, but it fell through. My money was tight, I was already massively in debt, and I was now being launched into one of the worst job markets America had seen back in mid-2024. I lost everything; my room, the house I stayed in, my finances, my dignity- everything. Just like the first time, my saving grace was that one of my old friends took me in to keep me off of the streets… but this time, it was for seven straight months.
Staying with this friend was almost a repeat of the original scenario back in 2021- the only two differences being that instead of drug abuse it was mismanaged emotions and frustration, and that I was getting rejected from every job imaginable. I took this as the ultimate final test.
Because I needed him to survive, he began to use me to his own benefit and take away any real humanity I had. He would insist on staying around me and yelling about the caveats of his life daily, introducing an emotionally abusive situation where he would completely deny me any privacy. He would regularly attack my faith and attempt to destroy my newfound maturity and confidence. I found it nigh impossible to do the things I liked to do, such as program and write, because he would deny me the ability to do so. But I found the time regardless.
I used the frustration to create a portfolio for myself and publicize all of my skills and interests. When going out, I continued to document and blog pieces of my life to use my story to motivate others. I spent numerous evenings with ChatGPT to increase my knowledge, using it to pick up new concepts in the programming world and expand my already vast skillset. I created a budget so that I could finally begin to decrease my debt.
Then one day, as ChatGPT quizzed me on the 1,000th advanced SQL subquery, something clicked. Why struggle to stay in the same place when with all of my skills and intelligence I can shoot for the things I truly want to do?
So I did. I began to teach myself data analytics, using previous job experience to connect the dots and figure out the full process of how data is stored in the cloud. I educated myself on database structure, even going as far as to learn the process of how to create one in several different architectures. Then when I understood it decently enough, I took a risk and began applying.
Over one thousand jobs ghosted me. I received maybe 100 rejections. I failed 4 phone screenings and failed 2 interviews. 2,500+ applications across Monster, Indeed, and LinkedIn. But I kept educating myself and applying because I knew all I needed in a sea of No’s was a single Yes… and that Yes finally came on the seventh month.
All of the No’s I had received since childhood ceased to matter. Despite the fact that everyone else told me to give up and to compromise, I am now an analyst working closer and closer to my dream every day all because I found myself and refused to compromise. And now I’d like to motivate others with my story to do the same.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Success is never a smooth road. Either you ride on the rocky road until you reach the smooth part, or you sell your soul paving the road to be smooth for your entire life.
For one, I am still learning what it means to be a kid at 23. Some of us never have a chance to rest or find ourselves. We must make up for that lost time.
The biggest struggles were, and still are, the pushback and lack of support. People treat me differently because I make the complicated decisions most other people avoid. I present myself in the best way that shows who I am, which evokes jealousy from others often to a point where I feel the urge to compromise or change. It goes without saying that I have suffered simply because I compromised on things I shouldn’t have.
My closest friends betrayed me and left me to rot. A huge challenge was ensuring that I didn’t allow their actions to harden my heart or change me for the worse. The people who are closest to us are capable of hurting us and discouraging us without even realizing it.
If I am to be someone who will help others, I need to learn what it means to be helped. You cannot hate those who you want to help in the future.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a Procurement Analyst. My job is to ensure that proper business decisions are being made concerning the buying, shipping, storage, and selling of merchandise, often trying to find where I can increase profits. It’s quite intense, as we are essentially juggling around a lot of items, a LOT of money, and a simple mistake can cost anywhere between $500 and $50,000.
We do our job by “mining” information from a large database which includes the information for costs, shipping, packaging, etc. and calculating differences there. I’m most known for presenting possibly price sinks to managers and creating data visuals to make information easier / nicer to read for others who are less technologically inclined.
I’m most proud of my ability to inform others of what I do. I am a great instructor and trainer, as I’ve been told, and have a way of getting even the most uncooperative people to understand all sides of a situation. I guess that’s what would also set me apart from others.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
One of my favorite childhood memories was going to the park on the last day of school every year, My friends and I used to have a tradition where the majority of us would meet at the park and buy pizza, juice, chips and the like and have fun right before summer break.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://bit.ly/jordenelebor
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordenelebor/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jorden.elebor/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorden-elebor/
