Alright here's the skinny on me.

I am 18 almost 19, my whole life I have been confronted with issues that I wouldn't wish upon anyone else. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the ripe age of 4, since then I have been taking medication after medication and none have stood the test of time nore the challenges of life. I don't make my life any easier by swimming competitively since before I could remember and losing my focus of school and life with my training and the things I liked doing instead of the things I should be doing.

Fast forwarding to present day, here I sit… in my college dorm room, feeling like nothing. Nothing is not something a person should feel like, I just don't know. My issues currently are swimming, being lost emotionally and socially, drugs, alcohol and this girl. We will get to her soon enough.
The swimming comes first, I have been driven by the sport since I was young. All my coaches were so supportive and so awesome. They were probably the best role models I could have wished for. The best and one of the most influencial was Eric Namesnik… his words of Desire, Determination, and Dedication have rang in my ears since his untimely passing. I was still very young when we lost Eric, it was almost like losing myself. I lost touch with my real person after that, I had changed medication to Straterayears before and had lost two others… Stratera was later to be found in causing depression in children. A year before Eric, I lost someone. This one wasn't close to me, it was my father's father. I never met the man and to my surprise he lived the life of someone no one should ever meet. He was very strict on my father and played favorite of my fathers sister. He smoked and drank his way to an early death and pissed a lot of my family off in the process. However, for some odd reason, I still mourned his passing.

Years before my grandfather and Eric though my grandmother passed. She was the nicest woman I had ever met, one of those old time gals that knew how to make you smile. A pro card player no matter what the game was and she always let me win. Yahtzee was one of her favorite games and to this day if I smell coffee and newspaper and get that gentle breeze I always want to ask my Grandmother to play a quick game of yahtzee. She was easily the only person I would have talked to about my life issues and it is too bad she couldn't prevent the guy I have become from being brought into this world.

The relationship I have with my parents is more of a friend type deal, we talk and they love me and I love them but I do not talk to them about personal issues. I let those go with my best instinct and pray that it all works out. I suppose thats how I got this way. But when you go home when your 7 you expect to have your parents there, mine both worked full time and I know that was best for our family.

Upon the end of high school, my depression from my youth was gone, I was as normal as I can remember. I had a great group of friends, a great girlfriend and not a care in the world. Swimming was going great, I made the all american board and had one of the top times in the state for my event. Finally all my grades seemed good, the ADHD was in slumber and I was superman for a few brief months.

Before too long, the good turned bad. the grades went bad and the social aspects started to lose touch, the world revolved around nothing but training or my thoughts. By the summer I was so lost in the darkness that my whole lifestyle changed. I was telling my father from a young age, I would never ever smoke or abuse drugs because he smoked cigs and it was the most disgusting thing ever. Little did I know that they would soon be part of me.

I began with weed, the feeling was so great, I wasn't feeling empty and the friends I still had by my side were in the same boat of experimentation as me. Together we smoked and toked our ways through the summer. Even though weed is not a gateway drug, the feeling was more than enough to get me hooked.

The alcohol didn't begin until college, when I could ask a friend for a handle of the strongest thing a small sum of money could buy, it wasn't hard to fall into the pit a bit deeper. I was drinking a 12 pack first week and graduated to attempting a case by 4th week. I was brutalising my body in practice…yes still swimming, the weightroom and with the alcohol. I would wake up early, swim and lift past my limits for the day and pick and choose which class I showed up to then practice again and a long run to clear my head, then right back to the bottle that took away the pain I was feeling.

I'll write more about everything else and the Girl who is my current obsession soon, this was just the start..