my own hero

I just realized I've been away for over a year, and for nearly a year I've been back in Los Angeles...living and working harder than I've ever worked in my wildest days. I wrote a tv show about my life ... and some big things are happening right now. 

I just wanted to share something very personal... about myself. Per usual, but this time I'm taking you and myself back to where it all began - to the day I died so that the hero in me... could be conceived. 

I went to 17 schools as a kid, and that’s not counting community college. I failed the first grade because I was unable to focus past the gnarly curveballs that life had already started throwing at me. I sat alone at the lunch table in 5th grade every single day while resisting a strong urge to cry just long enough to get home, where I could sob in the privacy of my own bedroom, where I spent most of my time writing to escape the loneliness that was my actual life. In 9th grade, I sat outside with a paraplegic girl named Bianca. She was my only friend at lunch. In my senior year, I either sat with foreign exchange students during lunch, because I thought they were the only interesting people in school, or I sat in my car. Sometimes I just drove off. I was never the popular girl. I was the very unpopular girl who only a few (super rad) people acknowledged, in twelve years. 

I basically had no one because I was so transient. My life was unstable from the day I was born, and in a way, I felt like I was born over and over again because big parts of me were dying - the parts of me that needed validation, approval, attention, recognition... a mother, a father. What I didn’t know then, is that I was actually becoming my own (unsung) hero. I was looking up to... myself. I didn’t even realize it at the time but... I was all I had... and for that, I wouldn’t change a thing. My dream was born because parts of me died. 

I am my own hero. Hopefully you are yours.