Fade in. A lunch table.

Typical lunch item in 1989.

Do you have a moment in your life when you realized who you really were?  Your entire DNA makeup, your purpose, your fate, your destiny?  The thing you were doing was you, without pretense or doubt?  You were where you wanted to be and doing want you wanted to do?  I do.  The strange thing was, I had two.  The first one I misjudged.  The second, I got it right.

They both happened in 1989.

The first one, the false flag, happened on a day of fun.  I was with my high school girlfriend at Wet n’ Wild, the only Orlando area water park at the time.  We were enjoying a day of chlorinated water slides and searing hot concrete.  We did all the regular stuff, and then she wanted to go on the Kamikaze, the big slide of the park. Riders would kick back and gain speed as the approached the bottom and when they hit the pool, they skipped like stones.  I like speed, but I was afraid of heights.  Still am.  But I wanted to show some backbone.  We waited in line until we reached the top, and I could feel the gentle breeze of the day swaying the structure back and forth.  I was already feeling anxiety.

The park employee at the top actually had to tell everyone that they are to remain in a sitting position on the way down, but nobody does it.  The only way to get moving was to lean back and haul ass.  My girlfriend went first.  She sat, she was pushed off, and she leaned back.  She soared to the bottom and skipped into the pool.  My turn came and I was already breathing heavily from the view.  I sat as instructed, but instead of leaning back, I sat up.  The entire way down.  I plopped like a turd in the pool in front of my girlfriend.             

 I thought that was me.  Nervous, anxious, shy, cowardly, lame, weak, and about as un-manly as one could get.  For years, I thought I was doomed to a life of loserdom.  Coming in last, being afraid, being overlooked, being invisible.  Those thoughts informed so many decisions.  That slide down the Kamikaze was just an example of my limp dick approach to life and there was nothing I could do about it. 

That’s what I used to think.  Actually, my moment of definition came a lot earlier. 

I was listening to a podcast with Bill Hader a few months ago, and he was asked what he thinks about when it’s time to be funny or write funny stuff.  He explained that he’ll never be as funny as he was at his high school lunch table, and everything he does is an attempt to get those guys to laugh.  I can safely say, that goes for me as well.

Most of high school was an absolute shitshow of disappointment and missed opportunities for me.  But at our lunch table, I felt at home.  I just started writing every day for a creative writing class and I began to write extra just for me.  And the table.  I shared what I had with my friends and tried to get them to laugh.  We unloaded all the SNL quotes for the previous weekend and cycled through thousands of jokes from a million sources.  I didn’t know about any other tables that were like this in high school, but I also didn’t look.  I didn’t care.  I actually got to be me, be funny, be creative. The rest of the school didn’t exist outside of that table.  That girlfriend I got?  One hundred percent got her attention because of that table.  I was funny and charming and at the very least interesting at that table.  Outside of it…I felt like the size of a walnut and just as cool and attractive.

It was because of that I wanted to try comedy and write all the time.  I wanted to sort out my thoughts and use writing as entertainment and therapy.  I gathered tiny pebble after tiny pebble to eventually create a decent-sized pile of confidence.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get moving.  I know how to read an audience, disseminate information, and use timing to illustrate a point because of that table. 

I write this because we are all obsessed with stories.  We want our lives to have a narrative that makes sense, even though that is nearly impossible.  But we have to understand ourselves, and the structure of a story is one way that we explain the events of our lives to others.  We should just take extra care to understand what the actual pivotal moments are that shaped us, and not ones influence by pop culture, depression, or someone else’s story. My life didn’t begin with the failure at the water slide, it began with my victories at the lunch table.

That’s my story.