I have had a hard time in my life developing my self-worth. Until the age of 28 I thought of myself as useless. Almost as if I was a waste of space. Fortunately through my twenties I developed a sense of being that made me feel important and loved. The first was my love of writing, and the second was my family.
My writing developed out of a need to express myself when I had no other way to do so. It is always hardest on the middle child. You hear that saying a lot, especially when you are a middle child. My older brother received a huge amount of attention because he was always the star. My younger brother was given even more attention. My mother felt that he needed to be protected from his horrible older brothers, being the baby and all of five years younger than us. So for a long time I felt I had no voice in which to speak.
In high school I had an English teacher that made me keep a journal. I had to write in it three times a week. Suddenly everything I want to say was coming out on paper. The three times a week became four times, the four became five, and so on until I became writing something every day. After high school I found it hard to find a place to display my writing. This was a few years before blogs became common place on the internet. I began entering contests for poems and short stories. There was little success to be found. A few poems, and one short story, got published. However, none of them were placed high enough to land me in the money.
I spent the last few years writing short films for local indie film makers. It was a revelation to have people laugh at the things I wrote. Listening to audiences applauds a film I have written gave me more confidence and self-worth then I have known. Now at the age of 31 I decided that I was going to go to college. I wanted to do this to strengthen my biggest flaw grammar, and to find better ways to have my voice be heard.
In my younger days family was a thing to dread. As I mention before I was a middle child, and as such ignored most of the time. Things became much worse before my 11th birthday when my father fell off a tree he was working on. He suffered minor brain damages. The savings my parents had dried up fast due to the cost of hospitals. Life at home became bad after that, and a few years later my parents were divorced.
My mother wanted to have something that was us, just her and her three boys. So on every Christmas Eve we would start with a candle light service at the First Baptist Church of Pleasanton. Then we would have pizza at a restaurant called Pizza Inn. And last we would drink apple cider and open the presents we would give to each other. All this I thought was a chore, something I was being made to do when I rather have been left alone. Looking back I guess I thought that about everything I did. I was not what anyone would have called a happy child. Nevertheless, I did it all anyway, because it made my mother happy.
This last year I went up to my older brother’s house for Christmas Eve like I do every year. The apple cider has been replaced by beer and whiskey, and my brother makes homemade pizza now. Instead of the candle light service my brother does a pray before the meal. This year he mention how we have been doing this since our mother gave us this tradition, and it was her that kept us a family. That pray made me realize that I belong to something bigger than myself, I was part of a family. I thank them for being there for me and I am thankful for having an opportunity to write about it.
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