Things You Might Not Know About Me

It occurred to me that there are certain things about me that you might not be able to tell just by the way I talk, look like, and based on what I have decided to share on the internet. It's fine, obviously. Snap judgments are incredibly easy to make and sometimes things just don't make good blog posts topics or aren't good content for the 'gram. It's taken a few different conversations about things I used to do in the past that made me realize that there are parts of me that people have no idea about and I can't tell whether that's comforting or sad. So, I've decided to lay it all out there and spill all of the tea about myself.

Just kidding.

I'm just going to share useless things about myself to give you a little more insight on who I am or who I was as a person (it's all kind of the same, right?)

I used to be (still am?) really athletic. 

This one really throws people for a loop. Is it my personality? My body type? Most people laugh or don't believe that I not only played sports, but played a lot of sports and was also good at said sports. I was a speedy (well, am) little sprinter and took my sports really seriously. I started playing soccer when I was around five or six and played through my senior year of high school. I started playing softball in the fifth grade and played on both my school leagues, local leagues, and travel teams through senior year of high school as well. I played basketball from third grade until ninth grade and even played a couple of years of volleyball in middle school because why not, right? I spent every summer on some kind of field, whether it was a soccer field or softball diamond.

I was a softball pitcher and used to practice anywhere between six to seven days a week including doubles if my clinics overlapped. It's actually funny, my pitching coach in high school instilled a lot of great knowledge and self-confidence into myself so like, huge shoutout to Coach C who is the only man other than my father whom I love and adore. I played defense in soccer but was afraid of physical contact so I relied on my speed to get to the ball first and clear that shit out so I didn't have to elbow anybody (unless necessary, of course).

The act of working out in a gym seriously stresses me out and makes me really uncomfortable, probably because for eighteen years of my life I didn't need the gym, I just like needed to be on some sort of team to keep my entertained. Gone are the days of playing sports all year round, but at least I still have the legs and arm muscles without the extra work and sweat.

I taught myself how to play the guitar in eighth grade.

It started because of two things: Taylor Swift and Ally Heman. I saw this girl's covers on YouTube and wanted to play her cover of "Hot N Cold" by Katy Perry but (a) didn't have a guitar and (b) had zero idea how to play. My dad is a musician, born and raised, so asking him for a guitar as a twelve-year-old was his dream come true. I think we literally went that day, if not a few days later to Guitar Center and picked up my first guitar, some shitty Epiphone under the impression that if I learned how to play and enjoyed it, I could get a nicer one with time (which I did and then subsequently stopped playing like, two years after I got my new Fender acoustic).

My dad taught me the first few chords and then I took off in an attempt to try to be the new Taylor Swift. Except I couldn't sing or write songs and couldn't really play more than just open chords (I learned barre chords later, but it hurt my fingers too much so I avoided them when I could). I didn't' get like, really good or anything, but I could carry a tune and occasionally tried to test myself with finger-picking and stuff. The closest I got to anything besides open chords was the first like, ten seconds of "Stop This Train" by John Mayer which hurt like a bitch to play so I didn't push myself to try to get any further into the song.

I took piano lessons randomly during my sophomore year of high school.

I don't know what possessed me to finally dive into the piano. We had a piano in my house since I was a baby but other than just randomly banging on it to be annoying, my dad was the only one in the house to regularly use it, besides my uncle's boyfriend from time to time when they visited. I took lessons from my dad's longtime friend for a year and loved it, but I felt like I started too late and also didn't have enough time to properly practice. I don't know though, I thought I was fairly good for somebody who picked it up for one year when she was like, fifteen years old.

I come from a huge family.

This one might not be something totally unknown, but you'd have to pay pretty close attention to know that my mom is number 11 out of 12 and I have like over 20 aunts and uncles and like 25+ cousins and the list of extended family goes on and on. Holidays are a huge ordeal. We had to rent a hall out once for Thanksgiving because it was going to be too crowded to host at my parents' house like we usually do. I'm somewhere smack dab in the middle of my cousins and am happy to call most, if not all (kidding, kidding), of them family. I didn't realize it wasn't normal for people to have extended family in the 70-100 range but hey, you learn something new every day.