CHAPTER 1
I was going to start my first book with a long, detailed autobiography. I have decided to keep it short, since that is not the primary reason I wanted to write a book. I ran across this quote a while back: "To be inspired is great. To inspire is incredible!" THAT is why I want to write a book. I want to inspire others to greatness, to strive to carry on and be better than our circumstances may seemingly dictate us to be. I have read books by, and watched videos of, great motivators/inspirational speakers such as Brendon Burchard, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, and Tony Robbins. There are probably more I could list, but my point is that I have been inspired by these people to keep moving forward, and now it is my turn to do the inspiring.
Life has tried to put me down (and keep me there) so many times but I just keep getting back up and moving forward. Sometimes, it was a downfall brought about by my own bad decision-making about how to play the hand I was dealt. Other times, I was simply dealt a bad hand. After all I have been through, it is obvious to me that God has a plan for me. At forty years old, I still have no clue exactly what the precise plan is. I may never know the full details of it, but I am just going to keep moving forward in a positive direction and maybe I will discover the full itinerary of what I was born to do.
When I have shared bits and pieces of my story with people through the years, I have been told I am inspiring. I have thought a few times about putting my story in print, but haven't done so yet. A couple of years ago, a young woman began working as a server at the restaurant where I was washing dishes. Regardless of the positive facade I was showing the world at the time, I was in one of my "Eeyore" states of mind and had been for a while ("Woe is me. I am never going to amount to amount to anything. Life sucks and then you die."). The new server had this positive vibe/aura about her that I latched onto. I awoke one morning and thought, "Why am I in such a dark state of negativity? Screw that noise! I have so very much to be grateful for! Negativity, exit stage left. Let the good times roll!" I made a gratitude list and once again came to the realization that while my life may not be what I'd like it to be at any particular point in time, I am still alive and not "six feet under" as of yet. So why not be grateful and positive? Some days, my mind seems to be all about negative thinking but I simply need to think about the things I am grateful for and the negative thinking melts away.
I still wash dishes at the same restaurant and I'm sitting at home on my day off, not wanting to give in to negative thinking and limited beliefs. Instead, I am going to focus on POSITIVE thinking and UNLIMITED beliefs! I may have limitations, between having multiple sclerosis and the residual effects of a traumatic brain injury I suffered at the age of 11, but I can choose to sit here and focus on what I CAN'T do or I can focus on that which I CAN do! FOCUS is where it's at for me. Today, I choose to focus on being positive and productive!
I have never written a book before. I only know that I have been inspired to inspire and since I have been told that I am inspirational, I have decided to put in print what people say is inspiring so that I can inspire more people. If you followed that and you're still with me, kudos to you! I thank you for opening this book, and my hope is that when you finish reading, you thank YOURSELF!
I do want to give you an overview of what my life has been like up to this point so you have a general idea of who I am, quite possibly why I am the way that I am. So here's a glimpse, a little bit of an overview, of my life:
I was born at 6:52 AM on the Eighth of July, 1975, in Enumclaw, Washington. Enumclaw is a small suburb which sits on a plateau, right at the base of the Cascade Mountains, with Mount Rainier about an hour's drive away. The name of the city is a Pacific Northwest Native American word which was a mythological spirit of thunder. Some say that the name of the town means, "home of evil spirits," referring to either thunder and storms in the mountains to the east, or high winds blowing through the foothills of the Cascades. (I have always been interested in the history of places.) At any rate, now that I've started giving a history lesson instead of telling a bit about my own life, you get a glimpse of how my brain seems to be wired differently at times. Oh well. Consider the history lesson a bonus.
My parents dropped out of high school when I was conceived, as Mom could not be pregnant and go to school (they were really picky about that back then) and Dad had a son to support so he began working full-time. A few months later, my parents having been married for a few months and finding it not working out too well, I was dropped off at my grandparents' house to live, as that was the best place for me at the time. I lived with them, my grandparents on my dad's side, until I was three. At that time, I was moved back in at my dad's house as he and my mom were divorced a short time after I began living with my grandparents, and dad now had a girlfriend living with him and she could care for me while he was away at work. They got married when I was four, at which wedding I was the ring bearer, and we moved to the neighboring town of Black Diamond shortly after. I went to kindergarten there in Black Diamond. When the school tested me before the school year started, they said they thought I should have started in first grade but my parents thought I should stick with kids my own age. (On a side-note, I was fluently reading the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the age of three.). My dad was, and still is, in the powerline-construction trade so his job moves around a lot. The union he belongs to is the I.B.E.W., which abbreviation its members explain as "I've Been Every Where," when it actually stands for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He was transferred to a job up north, so we moved to Everett after the school year and I attended first grade at Madison Elementary. I don't recall why, but we moved to a duplex a few blocks away the next summer. There was a huge weeping willow tree in the back yard and I began my interest in tree-forts. My dad even built me a "log-tent" fort on the side of the duplex, which I named Fort Comanche. We lived there for about three-and-a-half years, during which time I was in the gifted program at View Ridge Elementary for second through the middle of fifth grade. I do believe I was in the fourth grade when my little brother, Travis, was born on January Seventh, 1985. I was so happy to have a baby brother. At any rate, we moved back to Enumclaw and stayed with some family members for the remainder of fifth grade. I finished out fifth grade at Southwood Elementary there in "The 'Claw." As soon as the school year ended, we moved again, for what would hopefully be the last time, since my parents decided to buy a house over by Lake Tapps. Everything was going great in the new house, figuring I had made three new friends as soon as we moved into the neighborhood. We even had a little party on my birthday. My new friends and I were together all of the time, riding our bikes in the streets, playing video games or climbing trees in the greenbelt between our houses.
Six days later, the good times came to an end. On July 14, 1986, my step-mom was trying to clean the house and was still working on getting everything unpacked. I was being your average 11-year-old boy, being rambunctious and causing her to not be able to focus her attention on what she was trying to do and take care of Travis, too. She gave me the last piece of my birthday cake and told me that when I was done eating it, to go outside and play. I went straight to the greenbelt and started climbing trees with my buddies, as we were searching for the perfect spot to build a tree fort. The next thing I knew, I was coming to, lying in a bed at Orchard Park Nursing Home in Tacoma, on September 9, nearly two months later. I asked my nurse where my parents were. She called them and they rushed right down to see me. I forget who told me, but I found out that I had fallen from a tree and had been comatose. I am not sure how hard it was to hear what I was saying at that time, since a tracheotomy had been performed on me right after the fall and I still had the tube in my throat, but I was somehow being understood. My stepmom had worked as a secretary and knew that I had also worked with typewriters and computers, so she drew up a keyboard and printed out a few basic words on a piece of paper and put a clear plastic cover on it. This enabled me to communicate by pointing at a piece of paper rather than straining my throat so bad. I had to do all of my pointing with my right hand, as my left was almost non-functioning at the time, due to the fact that my entire left side had been paralyzed while I was in the coma. Over the next couple of weeks, I attended physical therapy to try and regain my ability to walk, as I was confined to my wheelchair when I was allowed to get out of my bed. Also somewhere toward the end of the first couple of weeks after I awoke, the tube was removed from my throat. What a relief that was! I still had the feeding tube in my gut, as the doctor had advised that my throat required more time to heal properly.
When I was being transferred to Good Samaritan hospital in Puyallup, for rehab, my parents opted to drive me there rather than pay another bill for a simple transport that was just a few miles away. I still remember thinking, while riding alone in the back seat of our 1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, that I was on my way home. Even though I had been told I was in fact going to a hospital, I thought I was going home so I proceeded to pull the feeding tube out of my gut, stitches and all. Fortunately, there was always a fat stack of napkins in the car, and some were pressed against the spot where the tube had been ripped from, as a precaution, until we got to Good Sam and the tube was reattached. It was pretty cool that the hospital was right across the street from the Puyallup Fair, since my parents got me out a couple of times, on day passes, to go to the fair. I was a patient there at the hospital for over a month, being immersed in intense physical, occupational and speech therapies.
I do remember my speech therapist, but not much about her, other than the fact that she was helping me to make sure my speech was good, after having a tube stuffed down my throat for a couple of months. I will never forget my occupational and physical therapists. They never gave up on me, no matter how much I wanted to throw in the towel at times, always there supporting me to keep making progress. Still to this day, I hear my physical therapist telling me, "I don't want to hear you say, 'I can't.' Instead, say, 'Yes, I will try harder, Master Yoda'" He knew that I was a Star Wars fan and would understand his paraphrasing the words of Yoda. It worked because I was out of the wheelchair in about a month, except when I had to go to therapy, since I was not cleared to be out of the chair ALL of the time.
I was discharged from Good Sam on October 31, 1986. I was still in my wheelchair when I first got home and it was nearly impossible, not having my full strength back in my arms as of yet, to get around the house by myself. Wheelchairs and thick shag carpet do not mix. It did help me to gain some strength back in my arms, but more so, it strengthened my resolve to walk again and get rid of that God-forsaken chair. After I had been home for about two or three weeks, a tutor started coming to my house three or four times each week, preparing me for my return to school. I started back to school in January, 1987, right where I should have been, in the middle of sixth grade (at the school my step-mom had enrolled me in a few days before my accident). Apparently, the traumatic brain injury was not as traumatic as it could have been, since I passed sixth grade in one semester.
The next year, at the junior high, I was in all standard seventh grade classes except for social studies. I was in the remedial social studies class and I did well in it. It is strange how a brain injury affects the way it works. I ended up taking first place in the seventh-grade level of the Spelling Bee for both Lakeridge Junior High and Sumner School District, yet my skill was lacking when it came to social studies. After I won the Spelling Bee at the district level, I was the subject of an article in the Tacoma News Tribune, which highlighted my spelling-bee win, along with the facts of all I had been through in the previous year. That newspaper article spurred another local paper to run the article and an elderly woman called the house from Retsil Veterans Home in Port Orchard, saying she had something to give me. My step-mom had said, when she was being interviewed for the article in the paper, that if she could give me anything after all I had been through, she would give me a Purple Heart. The lady from the veteran's home bestowed upon me her belated husband's Purple Heart that he was awarded posthumously. The article in the Tacoma News Tribune was read by a guy who was working for KIRO 7 News, as they were in Puyallup that afternoon, working on an article for the local news on TV that evening. Consequently, they came to my school and did an article on me, even shooting some footage of me playing softball, as I was in P.E. when they got to the school. I even got to go home early that day, as the reporter wanted to do a clip of my home and the greenbelt where my accident occurred. This attention from the local news spurred newspaper coverage across the country, even garnering the attention of nationally renowned news radio personality. I was a celebrity! Ha-ha!
What goes up must come down, and after the positive comes the negative. That same year, I started smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and doing drugs. Experts say that after a person suffers a brain injury, they will most likely lose their inhibitions. That was definitely true for me, between the brain injury and ever-increasing moments of intoxication. About a month after the Spelling Bee, I got a bright idea after taking notice of the electrical outlet on the floor directly below my desk in Reading class. During SSR (Silent Sustained Reading) one day, I attempted to short-circuit the school, lowering a large paper clip (which I had straightened out and folded over a pencil) into the outlet. Everyone was staring at books on their desks, the students reading and the teacher correcting their prior work. The way I had it figured, if it indeed worked out the way it went in my mind, the school would be without power for at least a couple of days and it would be closed until they figured out the problem figured out and got the power back on. As soon as the two ends of the paper clip touched the inside of the outlet, sparks came up a few inches (as opposed to the teacher's insistence that the sparks rose halfway to the ceiling) and immediately caught the attention of the teacher while the lights flickered in the same instant. I saw sparks and reflexes pulled my arm back up, lifting the pencil which pulled the paper clip out of the outlet. The teacher wrote up a slip that kicked me out of school for ninety days and sent me to the office to get the vice principal's signature on the slip as well. I went to the office and talked with the vice principal for a while and after he called and spoke with my step-mom for a bit, I walked out of his office with a slip warranting me to one day of in-school suspension. One day of in-house in place of ninety days in the outhouse? Of course I willingly spent one day in a portable, doing schoolwork along with a few other trouble-makers. Trust me when I tell you that it was better than being stuck at home for ninety days, unable to go anywhere because I would've been grounded the entire time.
I made it through the remainder of seventh grade and started eighth in the fall. My grade point average was 3.012 at the end of the first quarter of eighth grade. That would be the highest it would get to until the last couple years of high school. Most of my junior high and high school days were spent doing just enough schoolwork to get by, sneaking out with buddies to smoke cigarettes and/or get drunk/high/tripping/ pretty much anything to get to Utopia. I started stealing cigarettes to support my habit, from stores and from my parents' packs lying around the house. I ran away from home too many times to count. A couple of times, I ran away with friends, but most of the time I would go by myself. I had my fair share of encounters with trouble, at home, at school, and with the law.
