Draw My Life - My High School Journey

I'm not the person I was when I was in

high

school

. I'm about to share some very intimate stories about how I was held back, how I fought so much with my father that he almost stopped talking to me. We are talking about everything. High

school

stories now starting to say I wasn't very popular from 1st to 8th grade is an understatement, I was a dumb, nerdy, geeky guy and I wanted to change that going into

high

school, I'll be the strong silent guy . I attracted the attention of some girls and I thought: oh wow, look, girls are interested in me.

I would go see them by taking the bus or skating to them. I don't know what my obsession with skating was. I would literally go to their houses and I liked to sit on the stairs while I showed them my skating tricks. I was a complete loser even though I was trying to look cool, I got some attention and then it started to fade because I really wasn't the person I was. Paint myself to be like I remember bringing girls to my house for the first time and showing them around my house. It was the first house I ever lived in because before that we had a little welfare type apartment that I lived in growing up and the way my dad gave the tour he would highlight all these little details because he was so proud of it, it was his first property in the United States.

I ended up doing the same thing with girls who grew up on Staten Island and always had homes that looked exactly like that, they were like oh cool so you have a nice room like you weirdo so again it was starting to not be cool and I realized that maybe I could buy my way to being great and had some money saved from some jobs I used to do. I used to do odd jobs all the time during the first Christmas break my freshman year of high school. I said I'm going to make a list of everyone in my class.

I will write everyone's names on a slip of paper. and I allow them to write whatever they want me to buy them for Christmas. I ended up buying people jets, souvenirs, pencils, school supplies. People were like, "You're weird, Mike, why are you doing this?" Just because I'm very rich. not at all rich poor my family barely has any money we spent all our money on this house and my dad told me how much we have to save and here I was going to model sporting goods and buy people hats and all these things Go back to thinking that this is the way that I thought you needed to hit people up is really weird and depressing, so even though I wanted to improve my reputation in terms of meeting a potential girlfriend in high school, I was crossing out a lot in In that department there were some girls who liked me , but I also had very low self-esteem and confidence and that didn't help anyone in the third year.

I started getting more attention. I was starting to gain a little muscle, exercising more. getting a little more attention, I think I went on a few dates in movie theaters and kissed some girls and then immediately got cute, so that was very disappointing. There were some bad moments that I remember in one of the sat classes. a girl, I thought she was very pretty, her name was Sophie, I went to satellite classes there on Saturdays, I actually took the train home with her and I walked her home, we kissed a couple of times and I thought I was dating her After a few weeks.

That's what happened and he told my best friend, Slash's brother Alex, he was in that same sat class on a different day of the week and he met someone who went to his high school, he was talking to them and they said, Oh, I know this. person from your school in brooklyn he's like oh i know some people from toddville they said who he's going to oh i know sophie he's going oh you know sophia how do you know sophia is like oh i'm her boyfriend's best friend and they're like mark and him he's like Mike and they're like Mark, he's like Mike, they're like Sophie, maybe different, and they agreed to disagree and he immediately called me and told me that was happening and what ended up happening was that she was coming out. a guy at her high school and he kind of saw me on the side that she was heartbroken about, so it was pretty sad that you had tammy sophie because she always skated everywhere or took the bus everywhere, she couldn't skate to school, so I would take the bus to school or the train to school and what I quickly realized was that the kids who were causing some trouble would sit in the back of the bus and harass the people who sat in the front of the bus , they threw papers at them.

They called them names, they yelled at them anything. I knew I had to resolve this situation very quickly, so I was like a person who was like a chameleon and I was proud of that. I remember her raising her head back. I'm a chameleon, if that was my spirit animal, I needed to fit in, so I remember early on I recognized this pattern of who was sitting, where I put on very baggy clothes and I thought this is my new style and when I walked in. to sit on the bus instead of sitting in the front, I sat in the middle towards the back and I would like to put them on my bike, what's up, what's up, like I know some of them, no one bothered me, anyway done, later.

Sitting there for so long, I started to get credibility from the other kids who sat in the back, so much so that when they picked on someone in the front and I knew them and they were like in my nerd class with me, I was like oh. Don't mess with them because they're too small to beat up, but I always had to discover this unique way of dealing with different personalities, a story I probably only told my close friends when I was around. The captain of the third or fourth year football team constantly saw the other kids on the team skipping class or hanging out in the hallways and knew that if they got caught, they would potentially be banned from missing a game or something. so if he saw them in the hallway, go to class, what are you doing?

I walked up to him and joked like pushing him, you know, like being all macho and saying, yeah, you're coming to class. He says I won't go to class right now. I'm relaxing and I tell him, come on, he goes to class. He pushed him as a joke and then he grabbed me and put me against the wall and we did things like that all the time as a joke and I was like no, no, seriously, go to class, he pulls out like one of those little guns, literally. . a gun and it's like you really want to waste your time, he wasn't actually threatening me like this is our move, but he has a gun pointed at me and all I can do is again, chameleon Mike came out and I was like, Put that away. , you're going to get in trouble, forget about Socrates, they'll kick you out of school.

Put that away, he says you're right and put it in his pocket and left and went back to class thinking about the past now as an adult. Neither a 15 nor a 16 year old probably should have reported that to anyone, but there were instances of knives and guns being brandished throughout the school quite frequently, as if you were in school and saw what was happening around you. It was a difficult environment to navigate and luckily I had the skills to figure out how to do it, but that really bit me in the butt one time, I remember during high school, towards the end of high school, I was walking with my brother, best friend , Alex. and we were walking with a couple of girls late at night, around midnight, on Highland Boulevard, which is one of the main streets on Staten Island, and we were walking back home, I think from a bowling alley, as cheesy as that sounds. , and I remember one of the The girls had a phone, it was a flip phone and it had a battery and the battery was one of those batteries that lit up like you probably don't even know what I'm talking about, but it was like this battery that lit up and all.

Suddenly we see a car slowly following us and it was strange because that's the area where cars go by quite fast and I didn't even notice because I was walking in front of one of the girls, the other girls behind with the Alex boys. He jumped out of the car and walked up to Alex, I think it was like Alex's birthday and his grandparents gave him a bunch of cash, 150,200 dollars or something, he had it in his back pocket and I thought Mr. Chameleon can solve it. all with his conversational skills and whatnot. he's cool at his high school that i can get close to these kids, he's like, yeah, you know, cold, cold, cold, like everything was fine and they were like, cold, cold, so they dropped alex and now they're going to me and they tell me to empty my pockets and I thought I was calm again.

I knew that my cell phone that I had like a Samsung, a little flip phone, was in my pocket in my jeans. He was wearing a big spider jacket. I don't know if it's like a North Face jacket with pockets here and here and I was like I don't have anything, check my pockets and they checked my jacket pockets and they actually saw I didn't have anything and then one of the guys, like If the three of them were in front of me, he reaches into my pocket and starts taking I take out my phone, I push it, another guy reaches into his pocket, grabs something, I think it's a knife, they get in the car, they run away, so overall we just lost like a cheap Samsung cell phone, it could have been much worse.

I learned the lesson. like it wasn't necessary to intervene in every situation, maybe ask for help sometimes, so although defending my friends was something I liked to do, I needed to be more selective in what I did in high school and it was also where I started to become in a man, in quotes. my father when I was a child was very strict with education, whatever you wanted to do, you want to go with your friends, you want to stay outside, really two rules, do good in school and make your cell phone beep if You follow those two rules.

You can do whatever you want, like if you like school, stay late with your friends once and the first time we really clashed was over my first romance, my first girlfriend, who was very serious in high school, when I was going to the University. because I was against sleeping in someone's house like I was allowed to sleep in my neighbor's house or my best friend's brother's house, but like a girl's house was a no-no, I don't know. What was on your mind if you thought about pregnancy? It was a risk, he thought I would get married and run away, I don't know what his fear was, he never established it with me, but he had a firm rule, no overnight stays and I remember it was like Valentine's Day, I remember what year, probably , elderly. year of high school and he says you're not going to sleep there and I say no, I'll be home every time I'm home, he says no, no, you're going to come home, you're not going to sleep there and we get into an argument and we were sitting there arguing and I never hung up on my dad, that was like a no no and after arguing with him for about 10 or 15 minutes I thought he was a man and I hung up on my dad. and I was so scared I thought, oh my god, I just hung up on my dad for the first time in my

life

he calls me back I ignore him he calls me again I ignore him and this has never happened I've never been a rebellious kid I was always like yeah dad like sorry like please don't yell at me don't hit me and at that moment I said no like there shouldn't be any reason this is unfair unfair I deserve to be able to do well in school I want to sleep at my girlfriend's house.

He got so angry that I hung up on him. He told me, "You're really going to destroy our relationship over this and I said no, you're destroying it. I turned my back on him and he." like you can come home whenever you want but you can't sleep there. Are you saying I can come home at 6:00 a.m.? m. And that's okay with you as long as I don't sleep here? He says yes and I don't know if he is the one who is saved with dignity by saying that he won, what do we do? We were there until 12 a.m. m., we slept three hours and then I had to wake up at 5 a.m. m. to come home, I have no idea why.

My dad needed to die on that hill, but he definitely died on it. The entire high school pre-med

journey

right here, click to find out how I got into medical school.