Where to begin… Part I: A brat is born.

Well, I suppose the beginning should… well, start at the beginning, should it not?

Ah, but how far should I go back? And just how much should I tell?

Let’s start off with this: A year ago, if you were to tell me I’d be 124 pounds lighter and on the verge of becoming an EMT-Basic, with only my state tests in the way yet my class finished, I would’ve laughed at you and probably would have thought that you should be committed. Alright, that’s where we’ll start… And then work our way back… And then forward again.

So yes, a year ago, I was a 315 pound 20 year old World of Warcraft playing prankster with nothing but apathy rattling around in my head. I went through high school like this… And two years of community college the same, only showing with withdrawals, Ds, Fs, and the occasional A or B for classes that I enjoyed, for grades. Quite frankly, I didn’t give two shits from sunday about college. I had no ambition, I had no idea what I wanted to do, and really just didn’t care. But let’s talk about how I got like this… Going back now…

When I was 6 months old, I was diagnosed with asthma. Bad asthma. I’m talking hospitalized 20+ times a year due to acute respiratory problems from when I was 6 months old to about the time when I was 13 and even now, I still take a trip in a rig as a patient at least twice a year. I think the asthma is what partially caused the rift between my parents. They got divorced when I was about 3, I believe. They both cared for me unconditionally but for one another? Not so much. It’s not like I blame myself for this. I came to terms with it a long long time ago. Anyways, moving on. So with asthma came the meds. A fuck ton of meds. One of the heavy hitters being a steroid, which I’m sure some of you maybe familiar with, called Prednisone. Now, Prednisone happens to be one of these “cure-all” drugs which is prescribed for many things. The problem is, is that sometimes… The negatives can equal the positives. Through out my entire life, I was given this stuff… Even now I’m still on 5 mg of it a day. Nothing compared to what it was, sometimes if it was a bad year, I’d be on 80 mg of this stuff a day. And if you know one of the major side effects of Prednisone… you know the weight gain thing.

As a child, I was a spoiled brat. Being a single child, having a fairly bad form of a common disease, my parents absolutely spoiled the shit out of me. I mean, christ, my mom actually found a bootleg of the first Pokemon movie before it was released in theaters so I could see it, because I couldn’t due to being very sick from my asthma and out of school for a month (think so bad where I was intubated). She paid $300 for this thing and only to keep it for a week. This is before the whole P2P era, before torrents, before bootlegging had really hit the Internet. It was on a VHS.

So I got whatever the hell I wanted. This also helped with the weight gain. You’ve seen South Park right? Yea, I was a real life version of Cartman, I shit you not. But my parents are amazing people. Two of the nicest people you could ever meet and they didn’t know any other way to handle a child like me other than to spoil me unconditionally with whatever I wanted. I wouldn’t know what to do either. I think it’s what every parent goes to when they have a child with any type of acute disease.

Growing up wasn’t difficult at home. My parents loved me even though I almost always treated them like shit. I was never yelled at, never really scolded. But at school, it was different. There, I was nothing but a fat kid, ready to be picked on. And I was. I can’t say I feel too sorry for myself now as karma’s a bitch and I deserved it for the way I treated my parents. But man, kids are relentless, let me tell you. In elementary school, I’d get into fights… Got kicked out of a private catholic school when I was in 1st grade because I actually broke a 3rd grader’s nose. The public schools weren’t much different except they were more tolerant so I didn’t get kicked out. I lived with my mom and visited dad on the weekends… And mom moved a lot so I was in quite a few different school systems, which made it increasingly difficult to make friends. But I did make friends. Friends that I still remain close with today. One friend in particular showed me how to use humor as a defense mechanism and as a weapon, which I coveted during my high school years… But let’s not get ahead.

Middle school was the worst. My mom moved to an upper class town with an upper class school during my 6th grade year. The kids in this school were all tight-knit. They all knew each other from when they were shitting their pants till now. And they did not like outsiders. Especially not fat ones. So the vicious cycle started again and again, by the end of 8th grade, we moved again. 9th grade was rough but better. I was in a new school, and now it was high school, so I decided to put on a tough guy front. I wore “gangsta” clothing, hoodies with, you know, baggy jeans and crap like that. It didn’t fool anyone. And again, it started. But before it got too far, remember the humor part? I used it. I started joining in. I made fun of myself and before you knew it, I was the funny kid and people backed off. I realized that if I didn’t take myself seriously, I was immune to any sort of taunting. So that’s what I became throughout high school, the class clown and geek… And I was accepted. I pulled pranks, such as setting off stink bombs in a double period English class, mooning on the bus, and several others, all of which I intentionally got caught for to boost my “rep”. At the end of my senior year of high school, I hadn’t matured at all since 9th grade. I had grown into a 315 lb greedy malicious snot-nosed jerk. Except for one thing, one small seed of hope that my aunt had implanted in me when I was younger… And that seed was Relay For Life.

Continued in Part II: CHA-CHA-CHANGES!