Categories > Original > Drama
Road Of Memories
2 ReviewsThe key events in my life that made me who I am, from birth to present.
My name is Elizabeth Grace Diamond (that’s Liz to you), and this is what I like to call my "Chain Of Memories". (Or "Road Of Memories", if you really don't understand the Kingdom Hearts reference.)
On July 4th 1998, I was born in a small town in Minnesota. I wasn’t actually due until late August, making me nearly two months premature, and to this day everyone still wonders how the hell I survived with no abnormalities, minus having trouble gaining weight. My parents were young and weren’t married at the time, making me (technically speaking) an illegitimate child.
My life was pretty simple up until I moved to Australia just before I turned four. A couple of days after that, I met Axel, and BOOM! You know that story. I will have been friends with the guy for eleven years in June. How he’s put up with me for this long, I’ll never know.
I started school in 2004. From the start, I was bullied. It was always a different reason. Because I had an American accent and spoke ‘weird’. Because I loved hockey. Because I was smarter than most kids. Because my best friend was a boy. And here’s the one that hurt the most: Because my dad was hardly ever around.
My dad. It still pains me to think about what happened the night of Christmas Eve, 2004. 24/12/04. That’s the date my father never made it home for Christmas. The date someone last said his name and smiled.
I guess you could call Christmas Eve 2004 the day my life went downhill. When I returned to school in the new year, people gave me sympathy for a while. And then the bullying started again, but it was worse.
On Father’s Day in 2005, children in my school got to bring their fathers to school if they could, kind of like those “Bring Your Kid To Work” days. I ended up having to get up in front of class and explain that I no longer had a father.
Skip to 2007. It was school athletics’ day, and if you were turning 9 that year, you had to compete in all events. I was fine for the first few events, but then there was the last event: A 200m sprint. I made it about halfway to the finish line, and then I started feeling faint. Most people would’ve stopped right there, but when I was younger, I was always determined to finish everything, so I kept going. Bad idea.
Next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital, hooked up to life support and several other machines. As it turns out, I had had a heart attack. I was about three months away from turning nine at the time, and I was one of the youngest heart attack sufferers the doctors in the hospital had ever seen. As it turns out, I have a disorder where my heart works harder than it should, thus making me prone to heart attacks. Since then, I’ve had to meditate for two hour-long rounds every day-once before school, once after school-to keep my heart rate relatively normal.
In 2008, just after I turned ten, I got a severe stomach infection, and I couldn’t keep anything down. I lost a lot of weight, so I was basically a walking stick. The worse part about it was I was severely underweight, and I’ve always had trouble gaining weight due to my two month premature birth. I spent months in the hospital. Eventually after nearly a whole year, the infection went away for good, I got back to a relatively healthy weight, and on my 11th birthday, I got to go home for good.
When I started high school about a year and a half later, I started to feel empty. Maybe it was because high school was exhausting me due to having to get up earlier, maybe it was because I had no classes with my friends, I don’t know. I just felt like there was something missing.
In October 2011, I planned to take my life. I had started taking drugs for my heart problems, and I had planned to overdose. Just as I was about to though, I panicked. One thing I had always hated the idea of was death, and I realized I didn’t want to end my life that way.
Today, I’m glad I panicked that night. I’m very optimistic about the future. I plan to go back to my birth place one day, and hopefully live in LA or Queensland. To other people, my plans for the future sound unrealistic, and they tell me that. You know what I tell them?
“If you can dream it, it can come true.”
On July 4th 1998, I was born in a small town in Minnesota. I wasn’t actually due until late August, making me nearly two months premature, and to this day everyone still wonders how the hell I survived with no abnormalities, minus having trouble gaining weight. My parents were young and weren’t married at the time, making me (technically speaking) an illegitimate child.
My life was pretty simple up until I moved to Australia just before I turned four. A couple of days after that, I met Axel, and BOOM! You know that story. I will have been friends with the guy for eleven years in June. How he’s put up with me for this long, I’ll never know.
I started school in 2004. From the start, I was bullied. It was always a different reason. Because I had an American accent and spoke ‘weird’. Because I loved hockey. Because I was smarter than most kids. Because my best friend was a boy. And here’s the one that hurt the most: Because my dad was hardly ever around.
My dad. It still pains me to think about what happened the night of Christmas Eve, 2004. 24/12/04. That’s the date my father never made it home for Christmas. The date someone last said his name and smiled.
I guess you could call Christmas Eve 2004 the day my life went downhill. When I returned to school in the new year, people gave me sympathy for a while. And then the bullying started again, but it was worse.
On Father’s Day in 2005, children in my school got to bring their fathers to school if they could, kind of like those “Bring Your Kid To Work” days. I ended up having to get up in front of class and explain that I no longer had a father.
Skip to 2007. It was school athletics’ day, and if you were turning 9 that year, you had to compete in all events. I was fine for the first few events, but then there was the last event: A 200m sprint. I made it about halfway to the finish line, and then I started feeling faint. Most people would’ve stopped right there, but when I was younger, I was always determined to finish everything, so I kept going. Bad idea.
Next thing I remember, I woke up in the hospital, hooked up to life support and several other machines. As it turns out, I had had a heart attack. I was about three months away from turning nine at the time, and I was one of the youngest heart attack sufferers the doctors in the hospital had ever seen. As it turns out, I have a disorder where my heart works harder than it should, thus making me prone to heart attacks. Since then, I’ve had to meditate for two hour-long rounds every day-once before school, once after school-to keep my heart rate relatively normal.
In 2008, just after I turned ten, I got a severe stomach infection, and I couldn’t keep anything down. I lost a lot of weight, so I was basically a walking stick. The worse part about it was I was severely underweight, and I’ve always had trouble gaining weight due to my two month premature birth. I spent months in the hospital. Eventually after nearly a whole year, the infection went away for good, I got back to a relatively healthy weight, and on my 11th birthday, I got to go home for good.
When I started high school about a year and a half later, I started to feel empty. Maybe it was because high school was exhausting me due to having to get up earlier, maybe it was because I had no classes with my friends, I don’t know. I just felt like there was something missing.
In October 2011, I planned to take my life. I had started taking drugs for my heart problems, and I had planned to overdose. Just as I was about to though, I panicked. One thing I had always hated the idea of was death, and I realized I didn’t want to end my life that way.
Today, I’m glad I panicked that night. I’m very optimistic about the future. I plan to go back to my birth place one day, and hopefully live in LA or Queensland. To other people, my plans for the future sound unrealistic, and they tell me that. You know what I tell them?
“If you can dream it, it can come true.”
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