Gratitude

I learned to share, with three other brothers, I had to. At one point, my three brothers and I all shared one bedroom. I learned to take care of what little I had: only a single pair of shoes, a selection of about four different toys, and not a lot of clothes. I remember at one point I had to share two or three pairs of pants with my brother. Holidays weren’t about getting presents, because we usually didn’t get much, although my mom tried her hardest to get us gifts; they were about family and spending time together. Birthdays were the worst days, everyone asking what I got, when I was just happy to get a cake.

With not a whole lot of tangible things I had to learn to use my imagination. Out of our brothers, it was a unanimous decision that our trampoline was our most prized possession.  We could do anything we wanted on it: Be our favorite WWE Superstars and act out matches just as they would, play a game of football, get flat basketballs from around the neighborhood and jump around with them while trying not to get touched by them, or just have a good old fashioned brawl and throwing people off or kicking them in the face and busting their noses open. Whatever it was that we were doing, that trampoline was our lives. We could spend four or five hours on it at a time.

I learned to compromise and work together. Constant bickering and fighting was what our home was constantly, including with my father, who was more of a child then me and brothers. When you live in a little space you need to work as a group. There’s not much of you do this and leave me alone because I’m done kind of stuff. When one of us was cleaning the room, all of us were, some a little harder than the others, but we definitely had to work together.

Growing up in a poor household is not what people who didn’t experience it think it is. You don’t truly realize how that life is until you’ve been through it. Yeah, it is harder than they think, but it is also more rewarding, this is what growing up in poverty and being raised by a single mother has taught me.

Gratitude is a perfect balance of satisfaction when you no longer want any more or less despite what is going on around us. I learned gratitude is not what you have, but rather what you don’t have. You don't have to possess a lot to know you have enough. I learned never to take what i have for granted.  I find myself thinking back on my childhood and the things I’ve already been through. In my eyes, I was lucky. Yes, things are greatly improved and we are very much more well off than we were, however, my childhood is very fresh in my mind and these "unfortunate events" taught me what true happiness is.

Lock Down

Just this week our school district initiated a lockdown. It wasn’t a drill; it was the real deal, well kind of. Some whack job decided to go to the junior high and try to checkout kids, offering free haircuts. Well okay, that’s not weird at all. It happened at approximately 2:29. All schools were locked down, baseball was to get released at 2:30 and it lasted around fifteen minutes. I was pissed to say the least, but I kept my cool and treated it as if it were real, although at the time I had no idea it was, I still treated it as such. Every year our schools perform numerous lockdown procedures to make sure we are ready when something really happens; the only problem is that the majority of the students don’t take it seriously. They should, and here’s why:

            It was a new experience for me, living here and going to school with new kids, trying to make new friends again, I really didn’t like relocating. But San Antonio was such a beautiful place. I walked about fifteen minutes to school every morning, not being used to a big city you could imagine this wasn’t the easiest of things, especially when you didn’t know the names of like any of the streets! There was no breakfast program like Holbrook, but oh boy was the lunch amazing but everyone had to pay. It had grades six through eight just like Holbrook Junior High, except this one had nine hundred students in it. This way of life was way different than what I had been accustomed to, to say the least.

            I didn’t have many friends; I was pretty lousy at making them. My best friend had to have been a guy named Mauricio. Mauricio was a blood, and not a fake one either. I guess you could say I was a recruit, because I hung out with his crew, who were even more intimidating than him and he was like six foot and a solid two hundred pounds. He had a wound from a bullet that went through his right abdomen and punctured his kidney. He was shot at during a drive by while he was at his homies house. He had the scar to match on the front and the back. I knew these guys were legit pretty quick, the first thing Mauricio asked me when he saw me was: “what you reppin’?”  A little caught off guard I just said “nothing man.” Later I realized he was trying to figure out what gang I was repping; Crip or blood, rival or bud.

            The people here were serious. Everything was serious, gangs were serious and they weren’t afraid to let their guns rip on a rival gang at any time, including school time. Yeah, it happened. I had been attending Zachary Middle School for a short few weeks. It was in the morning, we were all out in the quad hanging out, waiting for the morning bell to ring, and a kid was making fun of my socks because they were really faded. Next thing you know there was just a deafening blat! blat! Followed by brrrrrrrrrrrap!! Everyone was screaming and everything was just complete chaos. No bullets hit their target, but that wasn’t the end of it. The school was in lock down all day long. Police all around the school, everything was like a dream.

There was another shooting supposed to happen after school got out, and I had to walk home. Luckily they didn’t let us go right after school. No one was allowed to walk home, so my mom had to get me. She would have anyway, but the point is there was a planned shooting after school and we were all still here! What if I got shot? It could happen, it could have happened that morning. Anything seemed possible during that time. That’s the thing, everything seemed possible.

During these lock down drills people act like nothing is possible. They don’t act like anything could happen to them. It could, and it might, or it might not. I’ve been through it, I know what it’s like to be in lock down and be genuinely scared. Maybe that’s what people need to make them take these drills seriously instead of being annoyed by it. We all need to take these drills seriously, it could happen.

           

Misophonia

Chomp, chomp, chomp, the crunching of food with a wide open mouth; the sound of it can drive some people absolutely insane. Are you one of these people? It doesn’t just drive you insane, it fills you with anger! Here's some news for every one of you who feel this, what you're feeling is really a medical condition.  

                Those determined to have a recently recognized condition called misophonia are driven to frenzy and rage by certain little noises such as chewing, slurping and swallowing. These sounds are more than simply irritating to misophonia sufferers. Starting when they are youngsters, the condition causes outrage, uneasiness and dread when a trigger sound like smacking gum is heard. Obviously, there is not a cure for it; it is only a part of life that these individuals need to manage.

 I had no clue that these simple noises, that people hear regularly, could bring about such a ruckus in their brains. However, experiencing a couple of personal stories of individuals feeling these emotions, it truly seems like they need to rip a few heads off when a trigger noise is heard.

I've never had this issue, I never minded at all, really. I am almost certain that my brother experiences misophonia, however. Growing up I’ve shown signs of improvement at it, yet I’ve generally been the one chewing with their mouth open or slurping their beverage down loud and heedlessly. My brother used to get mad and frustrated at me when I did this. In light of different sufferer’s encounters, I can unquestionably say that my brother suffers from the same "illness," if you will, as them.  

This is what my brother, who I mentioned before, had to say about the subject, when I informed him that he was a part of the group of newly recognized sufferers:

I'm not sure that I experience this or not, but ever since I was a kid, I've generally been very irritated by certain sounds that people make (he made sure to let me know that I was the biggest contributor of these people). I used to try and eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever it was, as quick as possible. I couldn’t look at people when we were eating or it would drive me even more insane. I have to admit, I really did want to punch him (me) in the face plenty of times due to his noisy eating.

As you can see, he wasn’t very fond of me doing these actions around him. But, the truth is, I tried so hard to not eat like this. For as far back as I can remember, I would always try to focus on keeping my mouth closed while eating, and I’ve definitely gotten better at it, but I still lapse sometimes, and even the love of my life reminds me to chew with my mouth closed.

This has always been my reaction; you don’t chew with your mouth open do you? You don’t know what it’s like to have your nose so stuffed that you can’t breathe out of it at all, hence chewing with my mouth open. I have to get air somehow when I am eating. You just don’t even know.

I’m not being negative when I share this; I am doing it in hopes that for anyone who reads this, that they will think about what others are going through before they say something. No one knew how hard it was for me to chew with my mouth closed, I really couldn’t sometimes. And I never thought about how much it bothered my brother, it’s now an actual illness, and you can’t get mad at someone for that. Just remember, you don’t know what they’re going through. Think before you judge.