Before Summer 1995, my entire life was very challenging. I know everyone in their own way goes through a lot of tough challenges that they will have to face during their lives, whether they learn and grow from them or not, but try having very little to no friends at all, getting bullied a lot (not just at school but almost everywhere you went your whole life) and your birth mother dying in a car crash a year after you was born among them. Although I still had my dad and I always loved him very deeply and I always knew he meant well and he did a very good job to raise me all by himself and I always appreciated that he always worked whatever job he could get to provide for me and himself, he could be very clumsy and embarrassing most of the time and I didn't always feel very good being around him, even though I knew deep down that it was more about people laughing at him when he did those antics that made me feel that way more than him doing them himself.
Despite all these struggles I had to go through, I always did my very best not let them get to me, but as I kept getting older and kept passing through grades, the tougher it got for me. The worse year of my life was my first year at Spoonerville High School. At that point, the only friends I had in my life was PJ, who had been my very best friend ever since I moved to Spoonerville with my dad when I was eleven and a half and also my very first friend ever as I had no friends at all before him, and Bobby, whom we both met in high school. Apart from those two dudes, I had no other friends. All the other students looked down on me because I was clumsy myself, despite the fact I tried very hard not to be, or because I looked very weird compared to the other kids or sometimes I had different interests or skills that weren't what they deemed popular or awesome and they didn't even want to give me a chance to prove that I could have had some mutual interests with them, not even to let them know that I was one of the biggest Powerline fans ever, if not the biggest fan ever.
But despite all the tough times, I did all I could to the very best of my ability not to become a bully myself because I never ever forget about what my dad taught me that violence and sinking to bullies' levels would never solve anything at all.
As if not being popular with the other students was tough enough, I wasn't any teacher's pet either. Despite putting in my very best efforts in my studies and homework, I only managed to become a C student. If the law that every kid had to go to school didn't exist, I would have avoided it like the plague.
But in Summer 1995, that was when my social life changed for the better. After I did a Powerline dance at the assembly on the last day of the Ninth Grade, not only did the girl of my dreams Roxanne finally notice me and liked the dance but so did the whole school. They loved it and I became popular like I had never ever been in my entire life before and it was an incredible feeling. As if that wasn't awesome enough, I became even more popular in the tenth grade after the whole school at the party hosted by Stacey, Spoonerville High School's student body president from 1994 – 1998 and Roxanne's best friend, saw me and my dad dance with the real Powerline in Los Angeles at his most famous concert ever on TV!
Even though my grades and my teachers' points of view about me didn't really improve, my social life did. I mainly did these Powerline businesses that summer to impress the girl of my dreams Roxanne, when in fact she liked me immediately after she helped me up after I fell down those stairs and landed on the running track. But doing those dances wasn't a complete waste of time because they made me more popular with the school's students. I still wasn't the most popular guy, but I was popular enough for me to no longer be the most bullied guy I was in the Ninth Grade. That was good enough for me because I never intended to be the most popular guy in school ever; just enough for me to no longer be bullied for being different or weird or unique or just being myself. And my new popularity gave me more confidence to try harder at things. For example, during the Ninth Grade, I tried to join all the sports teams, but none of them accepted me. That all changed in the Tenth Grade because I successfully managed to join the football team. Also, last year, I starred in the school production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific as an US Marine extra and now this year, the school was doing Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Stephen Sondheim. For this year's production, I was an extra again, but what was different this year was that I auditioned for the role of Sweeney Todd himself and, though I wasn't offered the role, the drama teacher Mrs. Backdrop was impressed with me enough to make me the understudy for Sweeney Todd himself and I was never given anything like that before ever in my life, so I viewed that as an achievement.
So, yes, there were many things that changed my life for the better, but what made me the happiest I've even been in my life was my amazing girlfriend, Roxanne. Ever since my dad and I came back to Spoonerville from LA after Powerline's concert, Roxanne and I started a relationship and we went on many dates and the more time we spent together, the more we found out that we liked each other and the more we had more in common. And I was very happy that I was making her happy in our relationship just as much as she was making me happy.