As teen rapper born without a jaw enjoys fame, mom worries about life after graduation

When he was 17, Isaiah Acosta's first song went viral.

His rap, with its inspirational lyrics about his painful past and ambitious future, drew international attention in early 2017.

Within a month, the Glendale teen was a panelist at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. And on his 18th birthday, he opened for one of the most famous independent rappers in the world, Tech N9ne.

There's one major difference separating him from other rappers: Isaiah can't talk.

He was born without a lower jaw or upper airways.

He breathes through a tracheal tube in his throat, which he has to clean at least three times a day and replace every week. He has never tasted food, and instead eats six times a day through a feeding tube on his stomach.

To the millions of people who have seen viral videos of him, he is an inspiration.

To his mom, he is the Isaiah they don't see: A kid with a disability who needs 24/7 care.

But in Isaiah's own words, he is not disabled.

"That’s what the world sees me as," he wrote in a text-message interview. "I just look different and I have a tube in my neck."

As he prepared for high school graduation Monday, a milestone doctors never guaranteed he would reach, Isaiah hoped his achievements might encourage others who face challenges like him.

"I just wanna make the world better," he said. "I want the people to know anything is possible no matter what situation you are in."

'He loves life'

Isaiah was born with an array of unrelated medical conditions that affect various parts of his body.

The most serious one is agnathia, which is why he doesn't have a jawbone and his upper respiratory tract doesn't work.

In addition to impacting his speaking, breathing and swallowing, the lack of a jaw also puts pressure on his ears because he can't pop them. He's had surgery to insert ear tubes at least 15 times, said his mother, Tarah Acosta.

Because the air he breathes isn’t filtered through a nose or mouth, he gets sick more often than most. Arizona's dry winter air is the worst.

He can clear his throat but he can’t cough, so healing from a cold takes much longer for him than it does for others.

His hearing is perfectly fine, hence his love for music.

And he's smart. His wit and thoughtfulness are obvious within minutes of meeting him. He can make a room full of people laugh with nothing more than a gesture and an expression.

"(He's) outgoing, funny, wild, loving, caring, strong-willed, determined," Tarah said. "He loves life."

'He loves his selfies, no matter what people say'

Isaiah and his family never learned sign language.

Tarah said schools didn't want to teach it to him, mostly because he's not deaf. She didn't want to enroll him in an alternative school dedicated to sign language, so the issue fell by the wayside.

Instead, he prefers to communicate with gestures, animated facial expressions, some sounds and typing on his phone.

He and Tarah have full conversations without him writing a word. He can make a few noises, such as an "uh-huh" with a nod, or a gasp when he’s surprised. His laugh is infectious without making a sound.

And then there's what might be his strongest mode of communication: his style.

"He's very high-maintenance," Tarah said. "He loves getting his eyebrows threaded. He wishes he could do it weekly."

His sense of fashion is hip-hop influenced and youthful. He always wears a big gold watch and one of his 40 pairs of Air Jordans — he's a bit of a sneakerhead.

"I think he has to put in a little more to fit in more," his mom said. "As a toddler, he didn’t like to get dirty; he loved to keep his shoes clean."

MORE: Isaiah Acosta's first music video goes viral

As soon as Isaiah started walking, he loved dancing to hip-hop music, Tarah said. At age 5, he would light up when he heard 50 Cent on the radio, she said.

Last summer, Isaiah won a custom-modified, black and gold 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass in a raffle. He doesn’t have a driver's license but loves having his dad drive them around in it, cruising the town on huge gold rims as if he’s in Atlanta.

"He’s very prideful. He's happy. I wish I had that confidence," Tarah said. "He loves his selfies, no matter what people say.

"When he posts close-up selfies, people always have something to say and that doesn’t stop him from posting the next one."

Doctors have offered to give Isaiah a cosmetic jaw, but he turned it down. As he wrote on Instagram, "just because Society thinks I should look that way don't mean I should have to. Some risks are not worth it."

'All I do is worry'

Tarah had Isaiah shortly after she turned 19. Isaiah arrived in this world suffocating, blue and purple from oxygen deprivation.

"He wasn’t supposed to survive minutes after birth," she said.

After he was born, a nurse stayed with Tarah and Isaiah's father, Sergio, and taught them how to care for him.

Tarah decided that she didn't want a nurse in the house. She wanted to care for Isaiah herself, in hopes that it would feel more like "a normal life."

"As soon as I had him, I never worked again," she said. "We don’t do date nights, we don’t do any of that stuff because Isaiah does require 24-hour care."

An adult has been steps away for Isaiah's entire life.

When he's not with his one-on-one aide at school, his parents stay nearby. When he sees a movie with friends, mom and dad are in the theater.

At a recent Kendrick Lamar concert, Isaiah's aunt carried his large backpack with spare tracheotomy tubes, a resuscitation bag and suction equipment in case of emergency.

At home in Glendale, where he lives with his parents and three younger sisters, Isaiah is allowed to be in his room with the door closed, listening to music on his tower speaker so loud that the windows rattle. But someone is constantly checking on him.

When Isaiah is hooked up to a humidified oxygen machine to sleep, Tarah wakes up every hour or two to check his breathing and clean his tracheal tube. She said she knows she could trust the sound of his heart-rate monitor, "but I don’t rely on machines. They can come off and I wouldn’t know."

Ideally, Isaiah would learn how to take care of some of his medical needs, but Tarah said she understands his reluctance.

"We're praying we get him to where he can do some of these things on his own but that trach is a lot of his fear, and this point in his life he’s scared of his trach and touching it," she said last fall.

"Imagine being underwater or plugging your nose for quite a long time. Changing that trach, it’s like life or death."

A small clog can be catastrophic, and it's happened a few times. Once, when Isaiah was 5 or 6, his tracheal tube clogged in a Walmart parking lot.

"He turned pale and purple really, really fast," Tarah said.

He passed out as she was ripping open the emergency kit, changing the tube and giving him CPR. He ended up fine, but it's memories like that that keep Tarah up at night.

"People say you worry your kids will get hit in the street," Tarah said. "But I mean every time Isaiah is not with me, all I do is worry."

Finding his voice in Trap House

Before he started making music, Isaiah was well known around town for his work supporting Phoenix Children's Hospital and its parent organization, Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

It was CMN Hospitals that had the idea to make Isaiah's dreams of rapping come true.

The nonprofit reached out to Trap House, a Phoenix rapper who has been releasing music since 2009 and has opened for 50 Cent, E-40 and Nas.

At first glance, the two are an unlikely pair. Isaiah stands at a lanky 5 feet 2 inches tall; Trap House, whose real name is Tikey Patterson, looms at 6 feet 5 inches tall.

"One of the biggest things we have in common is we like to get dressed, we both have style. Isaiah is a better dancer than me," Patterson said, laughing with Isaiah backstage before their performance opening for Tech N9ne at Celebrity Theatre on Halloween, which is Isaiah's birthday.

Patterson, who is 33, has long been involved in anti-gun violence work and fundraisers for kids in South Phoenix, but this volunteer offer was special.

"It was such a unique story I almost didn’t believe it," Patterson said. "I had never communicated with someone that is completely mute, so that would be new. But we instantly hit it off and we dropped a record the same day that we met."

The pair recorded "Oxygen to Fly" in November 2016, with Patterson voicing the lyrics Isaiah wrote.

"I don’t care what people think of me / pride and honor, let that carry me / jaw gone but I love myself / like a lion to my family."

The music video went viral immediately and has more than 1 million views.

Suddenly, news outlets nationwide were contacting them. Isaiah and Patterson traveled to Florida and California to perform together. Hundreds of people sent messages saying the song helped them through hard times.

Isaiah's Instagram is a catalog of the celebrities he's met, including Nick Cannon, Jennifer Lopez and Post Malone. He gained 61,000 followers.

Last fall, Patterson and Isaiah independently released their second song, "Hate is for the Weak," which was in part a reaction to the bullying and harassment Isaiah has experienced since going viral.

"Man, they hate me cause I'm different / the difference is I took a negative and turned it positive / turned a tragedy into accomplishment / the whole galaxy acknowledged it."

"I love working with him," Isaiah said about Patterson. "He takes it seriously and I like that about him."

Patterson said he felt the same.

"I will be part of his situation for as long as he wants to use me as a voice," he said. "I hope that we continue to make music that inspires people to keep living, keep growing and not let anything hold them back."

Although Isaiah loves listening to the new, rowdy rap such as XXXTentacion and Ugly God, he keeps his own lyrics inspirational and clean.

"He doesn’t want people to get bullied or be embarrassed of how they look," Tarah said. "There’s a lot of kids that suffer with this. We’re lucky Isaiah didn’t, but there's kids that don’t go out in public or are embarrassed to go to school and are home-schooled, and we're hoping to change that.

"Isaiah really wanted to be a voice for the voiceless."

Turning 18 with a new perspective

As Isaiah reaches for freedom, Tarah worries about how far he'll get.

"Since he turned 18, it's been very emotional and very hard for us as a family because he craves what every 18-year-old wants, that freedom. He turned 18 but that medical stuff doesn’t change," she said. "That’s the one gift I can’t give."

She said it's been frustrating when fans erase his disabilities instead of trying to understand.

"They see Isaiah and obviously they see a famous person but, behind closed doors and cameras off, he's chronically ill and that never goes away," she said. "He'll be sick for the rest of his life."

However, traveling for appearances and performances over the past year and a half has started to open the family's minds.

"We didn’t travel much because, number one, I was fearful of being away from our hospitals and doctors. Two, we think of all the things that can go wrong," she said.

But they couldn't pass up offers for Isaiah to share his story at the Miss America Pageant in New Jersey or perform in Florida, so they were forced to figure out how to pack all of his emergency gear into carry-on luggage and brave a plane.

"It's hard, but I think our fears kind of went away after that," she said. "That’s what he wants to do is travel the world. Now we have the courage that it's possible."

Looking to the next chapter in life

In January, Isaiah posted a video on his Instagram account showing him changing his own tracheal tube for the first time in his life.

"In life you have to overcome your fear," he wrote in the caption. "Something I had to do for 2018. The first time I did it on my own. I had to shut my fear down," he wrote, ending with a shrug emoji.

As he prepares for graduation from Apollo High School on Monday, flooding his Instagram with grad photos and reflections on his childhood, Tarah said she had mixed feelings about him becoming an adult.

"I'm happy that he made it to the finish line, his finish line, and we're happy that he's alive to see this day, a day we were never promised," she said. "But then I'm sad, because I don't want him to grow up, you know?"

This summer, Isaiah plans to get his driver's permit and start practicing parallel parking in his mom's car. He's going to master changing his tracheal tube and start learning how to help himself during medical emergencies.

Isaiah dreams of going to college or trade school, getting a job and living on his own. Tarah said she knows he hopes to one day get married and have a child.

But he and his family haven't yet figured out how he will get there.

"He can’t just run off and do what he wants. Medically, there's a lot of questions," she said. "It’s gonna be challenging ... I think he’s gonna really have to prove himself a lot more. It's kind of scary.

"You know, in real life, doors shut in your face, but I just hope that he finds somewhere people are understanding and I hope people give him that chance he deserves and not, not give him a chance because of the way he looks."

For now, he is enjoying the moment.

Last week, he got dressed up in a red-and-black suit with matching sneakers for prom at Glendale's Westgate Entertainment District, matching his date's cherry-red dress.

He and Trap House have recorded a third song and are planning to release it soon. And Isaiah was invited to attend the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday in Las Vegas, where he will get to share his story with more celebrities and, ideally, their followers.

"What's your why in life? We have one life," he wrote on Instagram before his last day of high school. "I'm here to say tomorrow is not promised or guaranteed. My why is to change what the eyes see, save (lives), give hope as long as I'm on earth.

"A day I thought I would never see is day a way. I never let my dark days stop me."