Cousins, They Are Some Crazy Shit

It's amazing how as we grow up (and as a person), we notice the things that we once thought were bad or even good can change as quickly as our own childhood passes. The way I like to explain it is that when I was smaller, people just were and not just existing but they had a role and that really was it. They had attributes to them, but you don't pay attention as much because as a child, abstract concepts just do not exist, therefore we don't notice them. For example, my Tio Ralph. Again he did serve much more than my Tio that worked on cars. But as I gained new "tools" for viewing the world I could see depth within him such as in the way he talks. It reminds me of a middle aged black man, (something that i just never noticed) which makes sense considering he was raised by a black stepfather, but that's besides the point.
On my moms side of the family, I was raised that touching the asphalt in the street without someone holding my hand was wrong, so one can imagine their stance on bad words and drugs. When I would spend time at my cousins on my dads side it was a different story. They had much more freedom to say and do what they wanted such as crossing the street and saying bad words. So I naturally liked going to their house growing up to escape the femininity that i mostly grew up with and embrace a more masculine setting. Well one day my cousin told me that he smokes and after that day I just thought wow I would have never guessed because the idea of drugs was bad and the concept of a family member doing it was so foreign to me that it came as a surprise not as a shock. One day i told him that i wanted to try weed and so he did it with me and the rest is history.
Soon after, me and him just got super close to the point were I was going to his house every weekend. Recently we went to the movie and he told me something that I would have never expected. He explained to me that he a brother to brother conversation with none other than his brother. He had asked him if he'd ever gotten drunk and he said yes, he'd already been to a high school party. Then his younger brother said that he knew what he was going to ask next "are you a virgin?" (which actually wasn't it) but he answer and said three times, once at a room in a rave no less. The last question he asked his younger brother was whether or not he had done weed and he replied "only once". So he explained that he himself does weed regularly. After hearing about his own brothers exploits, he confessed that he had done weed more than once.
The thing that surprised me the most about this story, as he explained it, was that as a last remark, his younger brother said that the one thing that he would never try again was coke. We are learning about topics such as bodily autonomy in school but keep in mind, this is a thirteen year old kid that has had more action than myself. I don't think that what he was doing was bad, it just brought me back to the reality of life: nothing is as it seems. We just learn to view the world in different ways which I feel, leads us closer and closer to maturity.