Now i'm not usually one to beg for attention or talk much about my personal life to strangers, but I am feeling pretty lonely at the moment and i just want to vent for a minute. I don't know how many people will read this or care to read this but bear with me. Well, to start off, i played football since i moved to public school in 4th grade. At the time I wasn't good of course because i was young and my first year playing, however throughout middle school i got good. I mean very good at the position i played,which was strong safety. over that time i was gaining a lot of muscle weight and got up to 160 pounds at the end of 8th grade. Then, when i got to the highschool i obviously wanted to play football and was at the field every day in the summer practicing and lifting with older students. By the time practice officially started the coach had asked me to play for varsity rather than the freshman team. I was very excited because the last person to start varsity their freshman year was Rushel Shell who now is a running back for WVU. I started to think things like "Hey if im playing varsity this early, maybe i'll become a D1 football player!" Then 2 days before our first game, i felt a searing pain in my ankle during practice. I sat out for a little then went back to work because i thought i felt fine and finished practice in a lot of pain. When i got home and took off my cleat, my foot had hurt so bad i couldn't put a pound of pressure on it. Later we found that my foot and ankle looked very deformed and went to the hospital for some answers. They took x-rays, CT scans, and MRIs and found nothing. They did not know what was wrong with me but said it didn't look good. They told me the worst news i never thought i would hear, "Your football career might be over." I didnt want to believe it and started to cry. I was not going to be the great football player i was going to be. Maybe next year i would be fine and playing like normal i thought. Doctors were putting me on different medications that wouldnt take the pain away. By the middle of 9th grade i took my first opiate which did take the pain away. Next thing i know im taking them everyday so the pain would be gone, but because they made me so drowsy, i never wanted to do anything but lay down and i started to loose much of my weight. At the end of 9th grade i was under 140 pounds. It was so rough to see my life not go the way i wanted it to and i was not taking it well, getting very angry and upset so easily. Soon i went to a therapist who gave me antidepressants. a few days of taking the antidepressants i started to get the shakes from it and i made a trip to the ER. (Note i was still on the opiates at this time) i was given valium to stop the shaking but it intensified it and i had a seizure and spent 8 days in a hospital bed without moving. After i woke up (i blacked out from the seizure) i had a very hard time speaking and to this day i still have trouble speaking, slurring my words most of the time. oddly enough it never affected me mentally that i came close to death and had permanent "scar" from it. By the start of tenth grade i had three different diagnosis for my foot and still on painkillers. i wasnt allowed to play football which crushed me so much watching from the bleachers. Surely next year will be different. then on December 21, 2013 i believe this was my worst night ever. It was the school christmas dance that i was at with my girlfriend of about 18 months when my friend asked me at dinner if i was high. i said no and that i stopped taking my pills because i did not want to be addicted. my girlfriend hated drugs and got very mad at me and thought i was on drugs. this set off a very bad mood swing for me and i ended up flipping out and punching my friend for "ruining" my relationship. I punched him so hard that i broke my hand and really hurt him. I was handcuffed by police and i was freaking out screaming and crying begging for everything to be ok but i was kicked out, fined, suspended from school, single, and lost many friends. It put a lot of stress on me and i got very depressed so i started using my pills again, but this time for recreational use. Within a few months i was completely addicted to painkillers and i didnt care because it got rid of the physical and emotional pain. Then in March i got an official diagnosis for my foot. It was a comlpetely torn postterior tibal tendon and an almost torn peroneus logus tendon. On April 22, 2014 I had a surgery that last nearly 3 hours and was said to fix my ankle and reduce pain by up to 80%. after my surgery i was sitting on my couch for three straight months, only getting up to go to the bathroom. Although my foot was 'fixed' i was still addicted to pain pills throughout the summer and up to about mid December i was using several times a day. I decided to get clean, so i tried and was for a month then relapsed for a weeks then was clean again. i used several times here and there but never fully addicted again since December. However, it still isnt good at all for me because im now looking for answers for my back pain that started with my foot in 9th grade. At the beginning of February, a doctor thought i might have cancer in my spine with the pain i was describing and, thank god, my scan showed that i was clean. As of my most recent doctor visit, we think i may have a compressed spine, but dont know for sure because i havent had any trauma to my back. I dont know how my life got so f***ed up in the recent years. I mean it really sucks to know that i am a drug addict and im not even out of highschool yet. I thought i would be able to play football next year but my career is over as my first doctor had said and it hurts me deeply to watch football and think i could be one of those players on the screen. It hurts me a lot knowing how much different my life could have been right now if i never injured my foot.

I do have to say though, joining FA has been one of the greatest things that happened to me in that time period and im glad i can know so many different people of different ages and ethnicities, so thank you guys and gals so much for that.

P.s. sorry that is so long and thank you if you read it all. I dont usually tell people my story but i feel so alone at the moment and i often have trouble explaining how i feel..so ya.. /awkward