The Maturation of J Reed: Vol. 2

I first want to say thank you to all of you who took time out to read my first post of this series. I didn't expect very many people to read it, but I'm glad you all enjoyed it. I was just scratching the surface with that post so be prepared for me to get deeper because I think it's very necessary for me to expose myself totally (well almost totally lol).

I'm sure most of you read yesterday's post and were like "I thought him and Fatz (my sister) were close?" Yes we are close now. It took a lot for me to realize that my anger shouldn't have been towards her. She wasn't the blame for my lack of attention. So I was able to let that go years ago. But the residue from my lack of attention still lingered.

When I was in middle school I was the ultimate outcast. Imagine a kid that's almost the size of his teachers...Add that with the fact that he had to wear hand me down clothes that were either a lil loose or a lil snug, he was on a different side of town, and you have a social moth on your hands. I still think about those times and laugh. I felt like everybody was against me when I got to Takoma. It took a few months for me to even find somebody to be friends with. And don't let me mention the girls. I think this excerpt from "Song Cry" from Jay-Z sums it up, "Use to tell their friends I was ugly and wouldn't touch me..." I would try to be nice to whatever girl I liked but they would run the other way like I had the plague or something lol. So once again sports became my way to cope. By this time I had become pretty good in football, so playing that was equally for enjoyment as it was for notariety. But when basketball season rolled around, I knew I had to sign up when I was told how big it was at Takoma. Almost instantly I could see some peoples view of me change. Don't get me wrong, I was still made fun of, but I was starting to be treated a lil different. Instead of girls running when they saw me, they would just tell me I was ugly to my face lol. I remember having a crush on this girl named Tikea Via. And I can vividly remember the look she had on her face when somebody told her that I liked her. It was a look of disgust mixed with pity. I'll never forget that look. That crush slowly faded, and more crushes soon followed, but the sting of that particular account is probably one of the memories that has driven my teenage and adult years. It was pretty much more of the same through out Middle School but something happened at the end of 8th grade that gave me a bit of confidence...

I'm pretty sure that you want me to continue right now, but in the interest of the next post, I must stop (got to have insurance that you're gonna read the next jount lol)