This is a post about perseverance. I thought I’d start opening up about some things instead of staying quiet like I’ve been told to do for many years.
When I was little, I became really sick. I only recall having to stay in the hospital for a few days to have tubes put in my ears. The upside was that I could have all the ice cream I could possibly want.
Shortly after that hospitalization, I began to perform poorly in kindergarten. Additionally, I’d blast the tv at full volume when watching a show. We found out that I’d lost most of my hearing, about 70% loss. For a kid who loved to sing and listen to music, it was devastating, but I had other interests, such as reading, that kept me entertained.
Unfortunately, when you’re a little boy wearing massive devices in your ears in school, you become a target for many. You’re held back in school because you can’t keep up with your teacher. You’re put in remedial programs designed for kids with learning and neurological disabilities. You’re ignored by the people who are supposed to help you, believing that you’re slow. You’re ignored by your peer groups because you don’t quite fit in. Your social skills suffer. And combine that with abject poverty, food and home instability, and generational trauma and abuse, you’re told repeatedly over and over that, you’ll never be what you aspire to be.
And yet you’re deadset on proving everyone wrong. You’re in third grade, in a new school, and given a math book and told to try to catch up. You completed the book activities in about two weeks, moving far ahead, far quicker than the rest of your class. You’re spending enormous amounts of your childhood time at https://amse.org/, fascinated by their science experiments, or reading in the library close by. Suddenly you’re put in a gifted program, but that was short-lived as you must move with your single mother to another location in order to find work.
In a turn of events, you and your mother find yourselves homeless and you are forced to call your father, someone you hadn’t known for more than half your life, to please give you a place to live. You’re 12 and have to make some very adult decisions. But you’re accustomed to them. There were many days/nights you spent alone from the age of 7 as your single mother worked multiple jobs for you to survive. Now you have to leave your mom, the only adult you’d ever known, to live with someone you had almost no relationship with. And you move into a new environment where you’re unwanted.
So you’re in a new school, in an entirely new state and town, being bullied and ridiculed for your hearing loss. Having knives flashed at you, having kids punch you in the ears and literally breaking your hearing aids. Having teachers scream at you because you didn’t hear them. And you have guidance counselors who tell you, despite you being third in your class, that there was no way you were getting into college.
Your entire life, all you’ve ever known was people telling you what you could not be and do, mainly because of your financial status and your disability. And yet, you got into college, on a full scholarship, despite not knowing how to navigate that world at all and landing a degree that wasn’t a good fit for you because the people who were supposed to help you refused.
But you found your fit, in tech, gaming, and the web, and mobile, and creating interactive entertainment experiences that delight users. And you proceed to create some of the very first gaming websites for major brands like Sony, Disney, Namco, Midway, and others. You begin to design prototype products for mobile devices that wouldn’t be a reality for at least another 5–10 years. You build and design games that win awards from gaming magazines you would spend hours reading. You continue to do this while people continue to tell you what you can’t do. Telling you how you think about problems is wrong. They’re assuming you’re stupid or incapable or inconsistent or inferior and make it known in no uncertain terms to you. You ask them to use tools that will help you do your job better but refuse as it’s an inconvenience for them. People who perceive you to be some way because you’re a cis-white male, not knowing the incredible amounts of stress and trauma it’s causing you over time living as a queer person with a disability. That, in itself, produces other challenges that you yourself must overcome, alone, because you’ve learned for many years there is no one to help you.
But through all of this, regardless of the pain and challenges I’ve experienced over the years, and believe me they’re numerous as my friends would attest, I still focus on the things that make me happy, which are working with kind people, building great experiences that improve people’s lives. Leveraging the empathy you’ve developed through many many years of adversity, the resourcefulness you’ve developed because you had to learn to depend on yourself, and the hard work toward learning, and growing and healing from all of this. For me, I’d say I was a massive success, far and away anywhere I could have possibly thought as that 6-year-old with massive hearing aids being mocked in a school class, with no one to stick up for him. And while I, like many others, am struggling through these trying times, I can still look back and remind myself that I did things in this world to excite and uplift. And that’s what I was put on this earth to do.
