Everything started when I was nine years old. I attended a private christian school with the hopes and dreams that I will always be a good christian child and serve the lord in everything that I do. Then I started to lie here and there. Small ones, nothing to cause any real harm. Just little ones that most children makeup to impress their friends. I knew it was wrong, but everyone called them "white lies". Something that Jesus could even forgive me for. I would attend friday chapel service during school and pray for forgiveness and everything was fine again until the cycle continued again.
I basically lead a normal childhood around this time, but then things changed. I began to gain weight. I wasn't chunky as a baby or in preschool but as the years went on so did the weight. The family doctor wasn't really concerned that something might actually be wrong, rather I was lazy and just needed to pick up a sport like all the other young boys. I was practically shoveled into baseball for a gruesome four years of hell. Then karate which was really of no interest for me. Then soccer which I liked, but I was not built for speed. The weight continued to pack on even though I was exercising. I just never really had the energy. I continued to pack on the pound all through elementary school. And as we all know the fat kid is usually picked on first before the kid with glasses.
Even in a christian school children can be cruel. I remember being picked on quite a few times by kids in higher grades than me. One such instance was my birthday in the first grade. I brought in some cookies and after sharing them with my classmates and teacher normally we are allowed to take some to other teachers in the building. It's a very small school so it was okay so long as I took another classmate with me and we would knock on teachers' doors and give them a treat. As I was walking down the hallway from giving a teacher a cookie I slipped and fell on the wet floor and flipped all the cookies all over the hallway. All the sixth graders in the teachers room looked out the door and started to laugh at me in a thunder of jeers of remarks about the chubby kid. I hurt my foot when I fell and couldn't get up and to make matters worse there was a water stain on my bum. I couldn't get up and the classmate I took with me was laughing as well. Of course I felt like shit. I didn't cry however, I wasn't going to give them that pleasure. I picked them all up threw them in the trash and went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up, went back to class and never told anyone else.
When I was home my mother asked me how my birthday went and I told her it was the best day of my life and thanked her for the cookies. I lied. From this day onward I began to keep things deep inside of me. Inside I was crying my eyes out, while on the outside I looked content.
As elementary school progressed I began to put on more and more weight until the doctor really started to berate me with health info. "You need to lose weight now or it will be harder when you are older. You need to start exercising, you need to blah blah blah" I was never happy with myself and my self image. I looked effeminate and chunky. Cute is what they would call me, never really saying handsome which is the more masculine term for a young boy. I never really had a chance to develop an image of self-confidence about myself. The kids in my class treated my like an outsider by fourth grade. As all the other boys began to play football or basketball with each other during recess I usually sat by myself or shot hoops with my own basket ball.
In the fifth grade I was gaining weight steadily and something needed to be done. I had a cold at the time and went to the doctor for a checkup. As he checked my glands around my neck he noticed that something wasn't right and ordered a sonar scan of my neck. Sure enough the results came back and he phone my house. My mother picked up the phone and looked at me with a tear in her eye and I started to bawl. I had already gone 11 years of my life with an undiagnosed thryoid disorder which accounted for my unusual weight gains as a child. Not to mention the fact that I had other signs of abnormal development with mental functions such as math. What could I do? I was already a mess because of things outside of my control. We switched doctors and went to a endocrenologist who was the worst human being I've encountered so far in my life.
The first time I ever met him in the office he told me I was obese and the stretchmarks on my stomach region were like that of a pregnant woman. I cried. He told me boys should not cry. Not once ever in my life did any of my doctors ask me how I felt about my situation. They all said the same thing over and over again. However, he told me bluntly and without tact. I don't know if he felt he was doing me a favor for saying it so concisely but his bed side manor was shit. I must have left his office crying about a million times. It was a terrible place and by the time I was in the seventh grade I told my mother I never wanted to see his face again.
And I didn't.
