Too quiet.
Too anxious.
Too sensitive.
Too observant.
Too emotional.
Too interested in old things.
I spent years comparing myself to people who seemed more normal than me.
My brothers were outside socializing while I often stayed in my room reading, writing, collecting old photographs, or listening to family stories from my grandma. While other people threw things away, I saved them.
Letters.
Cards.
Old newspaper clippings.
Hospital paperwork.
Photographs.
At one point when I was a teenager at National Jewish Hospital in Denver, some of the staff even encouraged me to throw away old letters I had saved from home.
I refused.
At the time, maybe that seemed strange.
Now I’m grateful I kept every one of them.
Because years later, those same letters helped me reconstruct huge portions of my life and eventually helped me write my memoir.
The older I get, the more I realize something important:
A lot of people who create things were “weird” kids.
The kid who notices everything.
The kid who stays inside reading.
The kid who watches instead of joins.
The kid who remembers details nobody else remembers.
The kid who talks to grandparents instead of going to parties.
The kid who saves things everybody else throws away.
That was me.
My childhood honestly was a little weird.
I was often the kid sitting alone on the bench while everybody else played.
Sometimes the playground monitors even tried involving me because they felt bad for me. But most of the time I was honestly fine just sitting there watching everything.
Part of that was asthma.
Part of it was anxiety.
Part of it was simply my personality.
And honestly, asthma probably shaped some of that.
I was quiet.
Introverted.
Short.
Sensitive.
Always sniffling or congested from allergies.
And kids noticed.
So I got picked on sometimes too.
Honestly, that only made isolating myself even easier.
Back then, even I thought something about me was probably different in a bad way.
But the older I got, the more I slowly accepted something important:
This is just who I am.
And honestly, “weird” now looks a lot like this:
Sitting by myself late at night writing stories, preserving memories, researching family history, saving old letters, and trying to understand a life that once confused me.
When you spend a huge part of childhood sick, short of breath, anxious, or left out, you develop differently.
You spend more time inside your own head.
You observe people.
You listen carefully.
You notice details other people ignore.
At times in my life I hated that about myself.
Now I don’t.
Because the truth is, if I had been completely normal, I probably would not have a story worth telling.
I would not have saved the letters.
I would not have preserved the memories.
I would not have become a writer.
I would not have spent years researching family history.
I would not have created Respiratory Therapy Cave.
And I definitely would not be sitting here writing this today.
Weird is not always bad.
Sometimes weird simply means you grew in a different direction than everybody else.
And sometimes that difference becomes the very thing that gives your life meaning later on.
When I first started writing my memoir, part of me wanted to normalize myself.
Make myself cooler.
More social.
More confident.
Maybe give myself a girlfriend.
Make myself one of the kids sneaking off campus.
Make myself the tough funny guy always saying the smart thing at exactly the right moment.
But that was never really me.
Instead, I finally let the real story come out.
The awkward skinny kid.
The anxious kid.
The socially uncomfortable kid who often sat quietly watching instead of participating.
And honestly, once I stopped trying to rewrite myself, the story became much easier to tell.
Probably because it finally became true.
The truth is, I probably did have some strengths because I was different.
I noticed things.
Remembered things.
Saved things other people threw away.
But what finally made the memoir work was realizing I did not need to rewrite myself into some cooler version of a teenager.
The awkwardness mattered too.
The anxiety mattered too.
The loneliness mattered too.
Because that was the real story.
And honestly, if I had turned myself into the confident tough guy with a girlfriend sneaking off campus every night, the memoir probably would have become far less interesting anyway.
Not because my struggles made me special.
But because the things that made me different also shaped the way I experienced the world.
And maybe that difference is exactly what made the story worth telling in the first place.
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