| I wrote this for my english class, and I was told to sum up my life story in two pages; instead, I used ten, and I didn't even cover that much or go a great depth in detail. I figured I'd post it to posterity/for whom it may concern. Autobiography How can one cram eighteen years of brimming life in a mere two pages? I don’t think I could describe one minute of my thoughts in two pages, let alone my entire life story. So many important things have happened in my life, but I guess I’ll just hit the highlights. My full name is Monica * *, born February 2, 1990 in Atlanta. I am the youngest daughter to my family of four; my sister, Emily, is two years older than I. When I was born, my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck and I almost died. So I guess when I took those first few breaths free from that chokehold is where it all started. We’ll fast forward through first words, first fall, etc, and just hit things that affect me today. When I was four, I started randomly choosing food to stop eating. A vegetable here, a meat there, I continued on this trend for two months, give or take, until I was left with very few foods that I would tolerate eating. My parents tried to force me to eat all of the foods I used to, but I’ve always been strong-willed I guess, so I stuck to it. For about a year or so, I stole lunches, ate extra at breakfast, and was forced to sit at the dinner table until I ate what was given to me—so I spent most of my time after dinner counting the minutes before my parents let me go get ready for bed. Eventually, my parents felt bad for starving me and they figured their efforts were futile, and I’ve stuck with the habit until this day. I don’t eat much more than breakfast foods now, and carrots are about the only vegetable I’ll tolerate, which is unfortunate considering I’m mildly allergic to them. I hate when people try to talk to me about my picky eating, and since I was always made fun of what I ate when I was a kid, I avoid any and all public eating other than stuff like fast food because I at least eat the fries. It’s not that I care what people think of me, but it makes me uncomfortable when people constantly ask me questions about it, and frankly I’ve heard enough of it to last me a lifetime. I get so sick of people asking me constantly, as if I haven’t heard it since I was in second grade. Yes, I know it’s weird. Yes, I’ve always been this way. No, I haven’t died yet. My close friends even say to me sometimes, “You’re gonna die of malnutrition!”. I’m pretty sure if I were to die of malnutrition, it would have happened by now, and I’m pretty sure I know a little bit more about my nutrition than you. It’s not like I’m eating rocks or something; I take a vitamin in the morning just like the typical American, and then I choose not to eat things like meat and vegetables. I’m pretty sure that not many kids eat their vegetables anyway, and vegetarians aren’t extinct because it’s not fatal to not eat meat; I know, it’s shocking. I don’t like complex foods like casserole and vegetarian lasagna. I mostly eat popcorn, fruit, cereal, waffles, French toast, stuff like that. And the “Not even (insert random food here)?!” comments get really old, really fast, especially when one person lists off like nine different foods that they ‘couldn’t live without’. Name it, and I probably don’t eat it. Other than that I had a pretty normal childhood. My parents both made sure I had the happiest childhood I could ever ask for. I really liked playing outside with my neighbor, Danny McGrew, and he was my best friend until he moved away to Newnan. I started to go to CKS in the first grade, where I met most of the good friends I have today. After that, I went to Woodward, and my freshman year was the hardest year of my life, not only because I was starting a different school where I knew no one: in just the month of August, one of my best friends died and the other moved away, my parents decided to get divorced, and I learned that I had to get back surgery. Of the other things that happened to me that year, I consider these events to be where I shaped my life most significantly. Not having friends at school is hard, and losing people close to you to death and distance is never easy, but time heals those scars—unfortunately, time will never mend the scars those put in place by my parent’s divorce and my back surgery. My first year at Woodward was terrible. It was the first time I had to make a transition that big to a place where I only knew a friend of a friend. I decided to hang out with her to try and figure out my identity (because I had never not had a friend there to be my crutch in new situations), but she stabbed me in the back without me knowing for a month or so. After that, I just convinced myself that I wasn’t going to have any friends at Woodward; I figured that instead of having friends, I could just study really hard, cure cancer, and make everyone sorry that they didn’t befriend me back in the day. Luckily I found my niche—but it was with the “bad crowd” at my school. They weren’t really the “bad crowd”, they were just the “unpopular” kids (by whatever today’s standards are anyways). They were more like a hippie group than anything, but with fewer extremes. Everyone was really unique, and I liked that. However, because of the druggies, who also found their niche in this mix, most of the kids I hung out constantly harassed me about smoking pot with them; I guess that was my first real instance of peer pressure. I dated one of the guys in the group, and he would ditch me to go smoke pot because I wouldn’t smoke with him. Naturally, I broke up with him, and that was the end of my trek with the druggies. Within that circle of people, I found real friends, who didn’t do stuff I wasn’t comfortable with, and even if they did they wouldn’t pressure me to do it if I said I wasn’t interested. These people became my group of friends, and we’re all good friends to this day. This whole transition, though seemingly brief, took the entirety of my freshman year to accomplish, thus making life hell at Woodward my first year there. Halfway through my social transition at Woodward, my parents decided to get a divorce. My parents were always good at hiding that they fought. So, until August 2004, if you had asked me, “Do your parents get along?”, I would have said yes. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My parents had fought since their second year of marriage, and only my sister found out about it. This news came as a shock to me; I didn’t even know they were fighting, and now they’re getting divorced? I came to understand it though, and I realized how I overlooked much of my parents’ bickering. The actual divorce didn’t really bother me much, I didn’t like my dad at all anyway, but it was all of the resulting events that really affected me: I had to move out of the house I had lived in since I was two, my sister and I were getting separated, and seeing everyone get so emotional about it really had an effect on me. I don’t wish it hadn’t happened; I just wish it hadn’t happened like that, but divorces are always messy, so I accept that. Since then, my dad has been harassing my mom about petty things, refusing to pay for my education, constantly insulting her in front of me, and he never talks about anything else. My relationship with my dad had gone sour when I was about 11 and gaining independence and identity, and I needed more from him than a push on the swing. By a counselor analyzing my father’s actions towards me, my family, and others, I have come to realize that my dad has a type of very mild, highly functional autism called Asberger’s syndrome. People with this mental imbalance have a brain deformation that causes them to be very bright at things like math and science, but the part of the brain that controls social communication is not allowed to fully develop because of the oversized technical side of the brain. My dad cannot grasp emotions or fully understand them, but he can copy social norms and to anyone that doesn’t know him well, he seems perfectly normal. This has been hard for me since then, so I deal with it by cutting off most communication with him entirely. As you can see, the divorce itself was necessary, and all of the drama was, too, so I could finally understand why my father and I couldn’t have a good relationship. It has helped me grow and learn like many other hardships that I have encountered. Two months before my parents decided to divorce, in May of 2004, my doctor performed my first “back exam” at my yearly physical. I’m not quite sure what the real name for this exam is, but technically that’s all it really is. After making me do random positions with my arms and back, my mom was asked to come into the room. My doctor said that I probably had scoliosis, and told us it was necessary for us to make an appointment at some special pediatric back center to have it checked out. For two months after this appointment, the pediatric office continually put my appointments off; they cancelled on us twice, and made the date later and later—I was supposed to have my appointment in late May, and they finally saw me in late August. After this diagnosis, and while the pediatric office fumbled around for months, my mom finally allowed me to go to a chiropractor; I had back pain for many years before this, but my mom always figured it was because my backpack was too heavy. At that appointment, the chiropractor took actual x-rays and assessed that I had what he said was “mild scoliosis in an ‘s’ like formation”. He assured us that all I would need was light chiropractic care and maybe a new mattress or a lighter backpack. While I was shocked that I had an actual disease or something, I was relieved to hear that it wasn’t serious and it just meant I got new stuff and to carry a lighter backpack. I went to this chiropractor every week or so, and it actually helped my back pain, so I thought I was getting better. However, when I went to the pediatric office, they told me something much different than what Dr. Gibson, the chiropractor, had said. When I finally went into the appointment on a windy day in August, they took much better and more accurate x-rays than the chiropractor’s office because they had access to better equipment. While I listened to this doctor decide my fate for me, I was in utter shock and disbelief the whole time. “Unfortunately, because that chiropractor primarily deals with sports injuries and not serious cases like your own…” What? My case wasn’t serious. I had mild scoliosis. So what, my back was curvy. That’s not serious. I just need a new bed and a light backpack. “…he was unable to detect the severity of the deformity in your spine.” Deformity? Come on doc, isn’t that a little harsh. I’m not disfigured or something, I just have severe back pain. “You have severe scoliosis, and by that I mean the angles by which your spine bends is at a 60 degree angle, both ways, and it is up and down your entire back.” I looked at him blankly as he wrote notes on my x-rays. “You should really be about 3 or 4 inches taller than you already are.” Eh, it’s not a big deal that I’m not tall. I’ve never said to myself, “Man, if only I were taller!” ever in my life, so why should it matter now? “It’s good that we found this out now; if we had found out after puberty, the damage would probably be irreversible. Since we caught it during puberty, however, we can prevent more irreversible damage from happening…” Did he just say more irreversible damage? It’s a spine deformation, not ‘irreversible damage’. And even if it’s more severe than the chiropractor thought, it’s not like that changes anything. This guy is an idiot. When is this appointment going to be over, anyway? “…and the only way to do that is with surgery. Schedule something as soon as you possibly can, and I suggest you research about your surgeon to figure out if he is right for you.” I hated that man that day. He certainly didn’t deserve it, he was ‘just doing his job’, but to me he was ‘just shattering everything I had known’. I cried as I left the center, and swore that the damage already caused was because they put my appointment off for months. Obviously, I didn’t want to go through with it, I was still in total denial of the severity of what had just been said to me. However, as I came to find later, if I didn’t get the surgery, my spine would fall onto itself, probably during the final stages of puberty or early in life. As my spine collapsed, it would slowly destroy my nervous system and crush most of my vital organs. In not as many words, if I didn’t get this surgery, I would die, and it would happen before I was 25. That surgery was the single most painful experience of my life. Because no amount of words can describe the pain of this experience, I’ll try to keep it brief. I found out I was allergic to morphine so I had to get off the meds cold turkey (I couldn’t keep any other medicine down if you catch my drift) and feel the full experience of the pain. I had to have 6 IV’s in me, and I’m terrified of needles. I couldn’t breathe normally so the oxygen flow in my blood had to be checked and they would wake me up from the 30 minute intervals where I could overcome the pain enough to even sleep to make me breathe into this big tube so that I would breathe enough and get proper oxygen levels. I couldn’t move, roll onto my side, bathe, or eat anything. I didn’t want to eat; nothing tasted good anymore. As I floated in and out of consciousness, I saw my friends cry for me, and noticed how the people who I thought were my friends didn’t even bother to visit. Among the people that didn’t visit me, my dad’s refusal to do so hurt the most. Total strangers whom I hadn’t seen since I was two years old came to visit, and they are the ones who saw me at my weakest moments, not my family or friends. It was humiliating, and only made my friends’ and dad’s absence hurt more. To top it all off, my surgery was on December 21, 2004, and I spent that week in the hospital, so I was in the hospital over Christmas. Trust me; nothing is more depressing than getting bath soaps as your Christmas presents when all you can do is stare at them. If I couldn’t even put on chapstick for myself, how was I going to hop in a shower? When I got home, I was on narcotics, which improved the way I felt physically, but they made me irritable and moody. I couldn’t sleep because of the pain, so I did what my doctor suggested to do for rehabilitation: do laps around my dining room. Even when my friends came over for New Year’s I couldn’t join into the fun, really, and when everyone went to bed, I was up, doing my laps. I missed a lot of school, and since I didn’t really have any friends at the time, no one really cared to know about my surgery anyway. I didn’t tell anyone at school about my surgery, and rumors soon spread about the ‘real reason’ why I wasn’t there. Some ignorant fool made up things like crack addiction, cancer, and pregnancy, which I now find humorous, but as the awkward freshman I was, these rumors were plaguing my name to people who I had yet to meet. It was hard catching back up on my schoolwork, but the surgery gave me something to talk about to make new friends; I was almost relieved to not have to be in my little shell anymore. The aftermath and pain I feel daily because of the surgery are hard to deal with (nerve loss, constant pain, restrictions on my daily and lifetime activities), but are worth it to me even though I hate it. Had I not gone through with it all, I wouldn’t have lived passed the age of 30, and it would be a slow, painful death. I also wouldn’t have realized many things about myself in the process. It was a trial that was set before me and my way of handling it led me to be the person who I am today. Fast forward through a lot of senseless high school drama and parental arguments and you’ll find yourself one more significant change, which is actually what brought me to this school. Starting second semester junior year, I caught some sort of illness (to this day the doctors have no idea what it was) that was very severe and caused me to be bedridden for quite some time. I took blood tests, shots, visited the hospital daily, but doctors today are too reluctant to give antibiotics because they are worried about a virus that will one day overcome the doses. For weeks, I couldn’t move, breathe without strain, and I had strange sores on my arms and legs; my hands and feet were swollen. I honestly thought I was going to die. This took me out of school for a long period of time, and I missed a lot of work and class. I got better after about a month, but I had to recover because I was very weak afterwards, which made catching up a nightmare. Because of this mystery illness, my immune system was weakened, so if something was ‘going around’, I was guaranteed to get it. It is true to this day, and I may have to get surgery (again) to fix it. Because of my outstanding absences due to medical reasons, I was asked to withdraw from Woodward Academy . Though I didn’t think it was fair, I don’t regret it happening. That experience, too, has helped me become who I am and has furthered my knowledge of the flawed system of Georgia education. I’m not trying to discredit the school by saying it, but the standards are very low in public education; I scored more on the SAT in seventh grade than most of these people have scored as seniors here. The GHSGT is ridden with simple math that I find to be easy but somehow no one else around me understands. I find it shocking the way things are handled in public school (well, alternative school, really) and I may try to seek out change someday because I feel so strongly about this. It is a flawed system, and the people that are trying to get an education should get a good one even if it’s essentially free in comparison to private school costs. So, though I only hit certain highlights, most of them being tragic, it’s not like my life was terrible up to this point. Life isn’t all about the low points; those are just simply the things that, in my opinion, shape people the most. Being able to see the positive, even in the worst of situations, is a trait that I picked up (or at least attempted to) along the way. The hard times make you stronger, and the trials you face and how you deal with them make up who you are even after the storm passes. |
