The past, present, and future goals

The following is part of a multi-part series examining my past, present, and future. The columns located in here will be the first "Come Again" columns to be archived in its history due to the significance of what I'm doing. Part 1 will focus on my past and how it shaped me. Part 2 will focus on the present as to where I'm at right now. Part 3 will focus on my future goals, dreams, and ambitions. Be warned that the columns may be quite long.

Part 1 - The past

Rarely does my past come up when talking to people, new and old. There are those who want to know about my family, where I was raised, where I went to school, and other things along those lines, but that's about the extent of it. There are very rarely any in-depth discussions about what I went through as a child.

A large part of this is the fact that I do not carry the personality of someone who went through a less-than stellar childhood. I don't come across as holding any grudges, I don't have an unfriendly demeanor, and I don't push the issue of my past onto people. The most common thing I've gotten from people who've finally gotten a sample of my childhood experiences look at me and have just one thing to say about it: "I would have never guessed."

It's really simply why too. I am an optmistic person. For the most part, I'm friendly with people. I'm not an aggressive person by any stretch, except when I'm driving. I don't appear to hold grudges and I'm typically seen smiling, except on a few rare occasions.

I don't feel the need to push my past onto others. In fact, I rarely bring it up unless the person I'm talking to brings it up first. There are reasons for this. One, I don't to come across as someone who blames everything on his past. I do believe that a lot of what happened contributed to both future problems and my overall personality, I don't use my past as an excuse. Two, I don't want to sound like I'm looking for sympathy. Three, some people just don't want to hear it. My childhood wasn't great, but there are those who've had far worse childhoods.

The basics

I was born on October 30, 1980 at 9:16pm in Fairview hospital in Cleveland. The first year of my life, we lived in North Olmsted before moving to Brunswick. My first year I experienced Niagra Falls and other such wonders, but that would eventually go down as the only trip worth remembering about.

Daddy has issues

For starters, let's get the basics out of the way. Yes, my dad did drugs and drink too much. Yes, that made an-already unstable temper worse. And yes, that was the primary reason why we were so well-known among the Brunswick Police. When you're at a residence once a month on the minimum, you tend to become familiar with the people there.

I was already a shy child at that point, so all the turbulence only encouraged me to be even quieter. I was also afraid of my dad, who'd yell if I said something when he thought I should be quiet. Nevermind that you never knew when it was right or wrong to speak; when you get yelled at so much, you become reluctant to say a thing.

I developed an early fear of people based upon how I felt about my dad. He scared me, and I must have thought if you were scared of your own parent, then everyone else must be worse.

This coupled with some rather poor fashion judgements immediately made me stick out, much to my chagrin. I just was a lazy dresser. I didn't like jeans. I wore my socks high. I in a sense emulated the very person that I was petrified of. The reason? Despite being scared of my dad, I also looked up to him. He was, after all, my dad. He must know something good. That was the rationalization.

In any case, I was becoming more and more shy. To top it all off, I didn't really have the phase where I didn't like girls. Even in kindergarten, I was attracted to girls. Figure that one out because I have never been able to. I can even remember liking a girl back then. I always had a girl that I had a crush on, straight on through the sixth grade.

Early on, I was allied with my dad against my mom. He managed to convince me for a while that she was the problem in the family, not him. Nevermind it was him who blew vacation money on drinking and drugs. Nevermind that on the one real vacation we took he was drunk so much that it was almost like being at home. He was my dad. He was the one I was supposed to look up to.

That changed very quickly. I don't even remember what changed my opinion anymore. I just know I suddenly became very aware of what he was doing wrong and knew that he was the cause of our problems. This was before I knew he had used my social security number along with his date of birth to open up credit card accounts, screwing up my credit before I had a chance to do so myself.

Back then, I was only aware of the drinking problem. It was a regular occurrence for him to come home at 3, 4 in the morning, completely gone, and completely irrational. It was during these moments that my mom showed the only signs of weakness that I'd ever see in her, consistently refusing to press charges even though he had been verbally, and in some cases, physically abusive towards her. Even to this day, my mom wonders why it took her so long to do what she had to do.

Things were so bad, the stress level so high, that for a period of over two years I had a constant stomach ache. I had become so accustomed to it that I was almost in shock when one day I woke up and my stomach didn't hurt. The stress, the lack of sleep, and the way I was treated at school made getting up for school hard some days. How do you get up for something that is supposed to be a refuge from the things going at home, yet is instead just as bad?

What are friends for anyway

I was the classic definition of a nerd. The kind of kid who got abused by everyone because there was no way they were going to stand up for themselves. Instead of just one or two bullies, it seemed like whole classes were against me, trying to make things worse.

Even those claiming to be friends treated me bad. People would take things from me and threaten to keep them if I didn't do what they wanted me to do. I was pushed around, made fun of, and treated like I wasn't worth occupying the space I was living in. The worse the treatment was, the more removed I became. The more removed I became, the worse I was treated. It was a never-ending cycle that would last past middle school.

I had no one to turn to during those years. I didn't have anyone I could talk to, no one to share with the way I was feeling. I learned how to keep it in, and when I needed to vent, I picked up a controller, played a video game, and pretended that the enemies were everyone I knew that was mean to me. My stress release was the same thing that's been accused of causing kids to be violent.

Escapes from reality

My favorite games were (and to an extent, still are) the Super Mario games, The Legend of Zelda, Bubble Bobble, Sonic, Tecmo Super Bowl, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the original 1980's version), and many others.

In fact, I was a fanatic of TMNT. I watched the show, the movies, had all the toys, played the games, and even drew the turtles. I was also obsessed with "Ghostbusters." I didn't hide these obsessions either, and I'm sure that was a contributing factor to the abuse. I guess it wasn't cool to show that your love for some things back then.

The funny thing about all of it was when I was in elementary school and middle school, I was a good student. In elementary school, I was a straight-A student, catching onto things quickly and absorbing it all. My ultimate fascination was, and still is, weather. In middle school, my grades went down a bit, but that was partly due to the abuse I was taking. I didn't think it was possible, but it was worse then than any other time of my life.

It was actually right before middle school that I did one of the stupidest things I've ever done.

My Wynnona Ryder imitation

At the time, I was friends with people who, well, weren't very good kids. Getting in trouble was a popular past time and they were professionals it seemed. A favorite was riding our bikes to K-Mart, where we'd proceed to steal anything we could get our hands on, stuff it down our shirts, walk out (this was before the security tags became popular), and eventually leave with the goods. If we could fit it in our shirts, it was fair game. Walkmans, movies, sports cards, you name it, we stole it.

We never would've been caught either if it hadn't been for one very large misstep. One of the kids saw that the back door was open to a convenience store that we always rode by. The way we rode by it took us on a road that went from behind the store to the main road out in front. We stopped, and I walked towards the front of the store, unaware of what was going on behind.

All of a sudden, all of my friends came running out and yelled something out that I didn't understand. I later found out it was "run, someone's coming." I didn't hear that at the time and was the only one caught out of five people.

One other person turned himself in, my best friend, and we both named the three others. However, I was the one labeled as a narc. I didn't care. I wasn't going down by myself because they were stupid. I had been stupid enough on my own anyway. I didn't care about keeping my mouth shut.

It would be over a year before the three that I ratted out would talk to me again without threatening me. I think my best friend had something to do with it, but I never knew for sure what caused them to "forgive" me. I just knew that things were okay for the time being with them.

Jokes aren't always funny

It was a good thing too. Everyone else in middle school was treating me like I was a worthless pile of crap. I was made fun of in every imaginable way, occasionally someone would "pretend" to hit me, and the jokes played on me were some of the cruelest things I've ever endured.

The worst ones involved my sexuality. It was becoming popular to make fun of someone by calling them gay. With me, it was to such an extreme that I would break down and cry. I really think this time of my life dried up my tears because after I toughened up mentally, I only cried one time in a span of 10 years.

However, the worst joke ever played on me was a joke that involved several people, guys and girls combined. One girl would write a note claiming to like me and ask if the person getting the note thought if I liked the girl back. The note would somehow manage to land in front of my eyes and me being naive as I was, believed it to be legit. I would say that I did like the girl. It would eventually evolve to the point where I was convinced that the girl did really like me and that I should ask her out.

Ah, but the joke would reach its end when everyone would laugh and say "we're just playing around with you. She doesn't really like you that way."

When you're 13, have never even come close to dating anyone, and it feels like everyone hates you, to have that happen to you is about as close to being stabbed in the heart as you're going to find. I was crushed, so much so that the girl involved in the joke apologized for what happened.

Bad luck

Things weren't much better on the home front. My dad had left us after I entered middle school to live with his parents. My mom and dad had divorced just two years earlier, and thus began the cycle of him reappearing, then disappearing back out of our lives.

My mom managed to get into an accident one winter when her car wouldn't stop because of ice on our driveway, pelting a car going by. I'll never forget the husband of the woman she hit coming to our house and accusing my mom of being reckless and that he hoped that she was never allowed to drive again.

He almost got his wish. Her license was suspended. This was really bad too. It was fortunate that she worked close to home, so she didn't have to go far, but it hurt me because I definitely had to walk to school now since at the time they didn't provided buses if you lived less than 2 miles away. We live a mile and a half away. It was a long walk.

It was made even longer when I managed to break three toes while over my friend's house one day. Walking to school wasn't bad. Walking to school with crutches in the middle of winter was. It was a test of my character and who I was. There was an upshot though. No one dared pick on me while I had those crutches.

Things weren't all bad though. For a while, I volunteered in a haunted house, Bloodview, as an actor. More often than not, I was just simply yelling random gibberish at people, but it was a chance to just let it all fly out. All the stress, anger, and resentment was released as I took it out on unwilling customers of the haunted house.

When all else failed, I still had basketball and Mystery Science Theater 3000 to keep me sane. There were few who could match me in foul shooting during lunch. It wasn't much, but I at least had something to latch onto.

Changes on the horizon

The summer after middle school saw the beginning of what has been a massive transformation of who I was and what I was perceived to be. It started with the hip-hop influence that I was feeling. I had been listening to rap for a little while now, but it was starting to become the music of choice for me and it was starting to reflect in my choices of clothes. I went out and bought baggier jeans, khakis, polo shirts, and t-shirts. It wasn't trensetting material, but it was a stark improvement from people were used to seeing from me.

I also had decided to let my hair grow out. This initially started as an attempt to let it get long enough so that I could put it up in a pony tail, a look that had become popular among a lot of guys I was friends with. It never did get that long, but it was still quite long at times, often going well past my ears in length, except on the sides where it was cut short. It was a look that I'd hold onto in one form or another for the next 8 years.

My personality was also evolving. I had discovered a concept called not taking yourself too seriously and began to apply it to myself. Suddenly, people making fun of me didn't bother me, taking the fun out of the practice. It also didn't hurt that my best friend had gone and threatened anyone with violence if they dared to make fun of me again. I didn't become aware of this for a few years though.

High school began and it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. There were more people, more teachers, more things going on than I could possibly handle. The uncertainty at home was back as my dad had come back home, but still, it was probably the most stable things had been in a long time. I didn't do very well in a lot of my classes, and to this day I know it was just a lack of effort.

The most surprising things happen

Other things happened in high school that were surprising to me. For one, girls showed interest in me. One girl, a very popular girl (partly because she had developed much quicker than other girls), showed a lot of interest in me and tried to get me to open up, to little success. I know she liked me and it's one of those things that I still kick myself about to this day. It wouldn't be the last time she'd show interest though. Our senior year, she gave it another try.

Other girls showed interest too. I even briefly "dated" a couple of girls, although looking back, there was no dating, there was just a lot of talking about how we were going to go on dates. It was all a learning experience for me, and it became clear to me that I was no longer the social outcast that I had once been. People seemed to like me, respect me, and even want to hang out with me. I had no idea what to do because I had never been treated this way much. I really was lost with girls because there had never been a case where a girl showed legitimate interest in me.

I was breaking out, but I was still holding back, the memories of what had happened to me before lingering. I didn't really trust that girls liked me. I had been burned before and was intent on not being burned again. In doing this though, I really blew a lot of chances to become a more outgoing, more prominent person.

There were some memorable people during my high school years. My sophomore year saw me meet a girl in my french class that showed tremendous interest in me, at least until someone else caught her fancy. I was becoming accepted by people without question. People took time out to talk to me, become cool with me, and make me feel like I was worth something. Girls like Sarah Sicking and Crystal Graley showed me attention that I probably didn't deserve. A memorable moment from my sophomore year occured in speech class.

In a skit that we had to write a develop, I was with a group that included Sarah and one other person, who I don't remember anymore. The skit was memorable because no one had ever seen me angry. Hell, most people had barely heard me talk. The skit involved Sarah playing the younger sister to another girl who was playing my girlfriend. Sarah's character had a crush on mine. I was cast as a football player (and no, the irony was not lost on me) whose team had just lost a big game.

The skit played out perfectly. Sarah, who obviously was good at harrassing people, harrassed the hell out of me. I finally turned around and said a line that would become memorable to those in the class.

"WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING! GEEZ!"

It doesn't look like much, but the way I said it and how loudly I said it surprised everyone in the room. Even Sarah was caught off-guard by it all. I remember everyone looking at me afterwards and remarking they didn't know I was capable of yelling. A new level of respect had been earned.

High school all in all wasn't a bad experience for me. If anything, it was a lost opportunity for me. I had the chance to become a special person then and didn't do it. The reality is I didn't realize what a chance I had to be something until years later. When you're in high school, it seems like the worst thing ever when the truth is, it's the best time of your life.

In the next part of the series, I'll cover graduation, the first semester at Tri-C, and the eventual breakdown of my dad that forced us to move from our home in Brunswick to the house in Cleveland as I continue to chronicle my past, present, and future.