Illinois:
Book One: Chicago
Where do I begin? I must only ask for the strength to tell my story so far, and to continue on. Thinking about it, there is actually a very obvious place to begin. Chicago, the largest city in Illinois, the third largest in America and my birthplace. My parents lived in Chicago at the time, and so did I. I’m not going to explain my life story to you, just how this part of it started. I had a fairly typical childhood. Single income household, stay-at-home mom, a younger brother, a dog, and a medium sized house in a nice part of town. That was all good and fine. Until I got to high school. Then it was fine, but less fine, significantly less fine. The interesting thing about high school is that for all of my life I have heard things like this: “Your fourth grader reads at a 9th grade level!” “Your sixth grader reads at a tenth grade level!” “Your eighth grader
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The issue with this is, all my life I was told that I was incredibly advanced, until everyone caught up. Because I was lazy, because they cared, because I didn’t, so on and so forth, they caught up. So I hit a ceiling. I was average, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I had never tried before. I had never cared before. I had never done anything before, if you think about it. And I was sad. Because everything that had been so fulfilling before became so hollow, so meaningless, because everything I took pride in and cared about lost all distinguishing qualities from anyone else’s everything. And to an extent, so did I. I just sort of melted in. I stopped caring about school, I stopped caring about fun, and I stopped caring about people. There comes a point in time when you are so hollow that