What have I got to lose?
What have I still to gain?
I was born in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. My father had two sons before me, and the same for my mother. An only child with four half-brothers who share genes with me has been an experience. Shortly after my birth, my father and mother decided it would be best to move us to Florida. My father's parents followed suit shortly after, and paradise was ripe for the picking.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. Unbeknownst to my father, or perhaps known but deemed in his mind irrelevant, my mother was going through a spiritual crises and had developed mental issues in her brain which caused her to act out in a cycle of manic-depression every two to three years. Now diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, she is acting in a more positive light towards her situation. But back then... Confusion and the internalization of anger within my mother caused a split in their marriage, eventually causing them to get divorced. My father carried on doing what he does best, working, and my mother sought a new direction in life as well as a new, female life partner. Most of these decisions were hastily made, and I was thrown between the two and forced to see counselors and move schools constantly as a young child as the court system tried their best to understand the situation and find out which parent was most suited to take care of me.
Meanwhile, to escape from the chaos for a small period of time, my grandparents became the main pillar in all of my and my brothers' lives. I was to take a flight from Tampa International Airport every summer since the age of two years old to Chicago O'Hare Airport and spend the summer break spending time in a stable household, being taken care of by a loving grandmother and a caring grandfather. I interacted with my aunts and uncles and their children, and had some semblance of fun. To keep us busy we would participate in a dance program, as well as being present for Sunday church and many family gatherings where we would stuff our faces and then go swim until dark.
I went into a program at a public school for the intellectually gifted in first grade, and got to relax a little bit and disconnect from the other students. I enjoyed it, as we were given peculiar tasks such as critical thinking and creative studies to develop less focused on areas of study, ones that weren't as touched on in a standard public classroom setting. This was short lived, as I moved again to a different area in Florida and started the whole process of friend-building and learning my surroundings over again.
It wasn't until the fifth grade that I settled into an area with my father. I had been bouncing back and forth between my mother and my father, sometimes for a year, sometimes half a year, and now it was decided that I was to spend the school years with him and see my mother on regular basis, starting out at once a week and then moving back to once every two weeks for two days at a time. I had lacked the social skills to verbally express myself fully and this basically meant that I got locked inside of my own shell with no self-esteem to fully express myself in the world.
The one form of expression that I latched onto and made my first friend with was skateboarding. The other was video games. I started playing video games at the very young age of three years old, with the PC and Nintendo 64 being my main sources. When I was staying with my mother, my father would get me video games from the Blockbuster to play on Playstation 2 or original Xbox and that would be my weekend. I got very good at enduring long hours in front of a screen and learned absolutely nothing about myself in the process. I had a lot of fun though.
I skateboarded for ten years! I made some great friends in the sixth grade who were five to eight years older than I and I learned all about "culture". Which meant partying, smoking, and generally being a little mischievous twat to everyone else. Skateboarding in places that you didn't belong in and running away from the cops was a pretty normal afternoon for us. I had a lot of fun with my first friend who became best of buddies with me. We skateboarded nearly every day together.
I'll continue this in another post, it's getting a little long.
Read on, dear reader.
Peace, Love, and Harmony.
~Faaabs
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