Alright after seeing everyone else's incredible posts it's time to post my story I've decided. Know that opening up like this is something I rarely do. Also know that at the current time of typing this, my life is awesome and has been for years. It wasn't always like this though.
I was always told that I was a gifted child at school, with a photographic memory. In preschool, I could remember everyones colour cup and whether they were left handed or right handed and in Kindergarten I was reading books like Goosebumps that were over 100 pages and bringing in the stock pages of the newspaper for Show and Tell (pointing out how my dad had Telstra shares and explaining that they were down, which was really bad). I was really good at Maths as well; in year two I was asked to do the Year 4 Maths Competition (as well as Science and English) and just generally grasped concepts much faster then the average student. However, I was below average with my coordination and sports. In Preschool or Kindy (I don't remember), I was told that I had low muscle tone which essentially drastically affected my handwriting, hand-eye coordination and ability to run. Apparently it is supposed to afflict you for the rest of your life, but because all my best friends were crazy into sport I ended up persevering and becoming athletically competent - making it into state for Cross Country and district for 100 and 200 m. I got teased mildly in primary school but it was nothing really concerning - it was more joking with friends then anything. I was really sensitive when I was younger though, so I guess it affected me a little bit. I experienced my first family death on November 27th 1998 as a Year One student, my grandma passing away. I have only small memories of her as of now, but I do remember she loved me with all her heart. I was too young to really understand what loss was though, so even though I really wish I got to know her as I grew up and for her to see the man I am today, I can see the silver lining in having lost her when it hurt the least (as opposed to say as a 15 year old teenager when hormones are going crazy). All in all though, I remember my primary school days very fondly. I was brought up my parents to be really nice (too nice...) and kind to everyone, and to this day I still find it hard to hold grudges for an extended period. I was very talkative and being the smartest boy in my school, I loved helping people with school work both because I genuinely liked helping people and because I liked people thinking I was smart. I picked up basketball in year 3 because I was inspired by the movie Space Jam and by my 3rd season I ended up winning the MVP and making Division 1 in my first season of graded basketball - a streak of years in division one that would last for 8 years until politics got in the way. Anyway I went to an all boys school in year 6 that goes all the way from year 4 to year 12 (with a different campus for high school - 7th grade and beyond), and whilst I was only ranked sixth in that school academically I enjoyed my year from what I remember. However, there was the odd bullying incident that took place here and whilst it wasn't too bad it helped lay a foundation for many hard years to come. To this day I still don't know exactly why I was bullied so fiercely, part of it probably came from my extreme talkativeness, another part might have come from speaking my mind (a tendency that started in year six that never really existed at my olds chool) and the formation of an ego when it came to stuff that I was good at (Basketball, Cross Country, School). Nevertheless, while there are still some very fond memories I possess at high school, there were stages where I'd just come home and cry or feel like crying. The worst part was that whilst I did have some friends there, the group that I hung out in (a group of 20 boys or so) also had some people who hated me so it was a double edged sword - I could either choose to be alone during the days or spend time with my best friends whilst having to cop shit from the bullies most days. I used to just be silent and take it, but as I got older I started to fight back with comebacks of my own - which sometimes rattled them but always made their hatred and determination more intense. I was never really physically assaulted: and the few times I was, I ended up getting out of it with my words and the friends that I did have made sure that it wouldn't happen. It's a shame that they didn't stand up for me when it came to verbal bullying though, even now they say that they were too intimidated to stand up to boys who were their friends and feel really bad about it. Meanwhile, whilst I wasn't ever a straight A's student - I was still a recipient of an Academic award the majority of semesters (that's at least 7 A's and 2 B's - no C's are allowed) with absolutely zero study/effort. I was also excelling at basketball, in year nine I ended up making the nationals squad and had a very good tournament despite my team getting belted/losing to the bigger states most games. I truly felt I belonged with the basketball boys and was never bullied there, and whilst I didn't make enough of an effort to hang out outside of school with them even now I'm still friends with a lot of them. Some of them have gone on to do bigger and better things, I still resent the fact that I'm stuck at 6'0'' with shoes and a lot of them are now 6'5'' + - I firmly believe that if I was given their height that I could have had a successful basketball career at a national level (Australia I know....but still!). We ended up winning the Under 16's state championship, with my school team being so stacked that we were actually better then the state team. In the Grand Final I ended up scoring 16 points on 8/8 shooting from the field, and to this day this is still one of the fondest memories of my entire life. I was always told I was decent looking, and whilst that didn't exactly mean shit at an all boys school it meant that I did pretty well with talking to girls - and got my first kiss in year ten and my first girlfriend in year 11. I was friends with a fuckload of girls because I got on with them really well, but I was always friend zoned because as I mentioned earlier - I was too nice. I was brought up to believe that if you just be yourself and dote on girls that they would love you for it, and it took years of fucking up and having ridiculously hot friends who ended up dating jackasses for me to learn otherwise. Looking back on me back then, the expresison "Getting lucky" was never more evident - I'd get girls who either thought I was really hot and got to know my personality later or I'd say the right things without knowing what pushed a girls buttons and end up getting their interest anyway. My extra corricular areas of life and my academic life were looking good, but my school life was still generally a miserable one. I was bullied so terribly that a few boys who were witnesses told me at a later date that they would have definitely considered suicide if they were in my position it was that bad. I never really once thought about it as a serious option, occasionally the thoughts of "I wonder if everyone would miss me/feel bad for what they've done to me" would pop into my head but that's as far as it would get. I am so thankful for the combination of my "let everything go" personality and my parents instilling in me those values, because without them who knows what would have happened. To this day, I've never even tried an illicit drug (a monumental achievement for a "Raver", although I'm not saying this will never ever change in the future) and only smoked a few times in my life. Alcohol is another story but I'll get to that haha. The bullying got so bad at the start of the year 11, that between that and my parents wanting me to do the HSC I ended up getting moved to a different all boys school. A highlight of the move initially was that in my very last basketball game for my old school, with 5 players available for the game as opposed to the other teams 10, I ended up scoring 12 fourth quarter points and a game winning floater with 2 seconds left against our biggest rival. At the time my teammates had no idea I was moving but I knew I was so I really wanted to win that more then anything at that stage. There were positives and negatives to the move. One major positive is that only then did the boys from my old school realise what they'd done to me (especially the ones in my friend group) and they all felt extremely guilty and vowed to make amends. After a few years apart I am actually good friends with the vast majority of them, and for this I am extremely thankful. This didn't actually happen though until some stage in Year 12, so it took some time. Also, there are still a couple of boys that dislike me but on the whole it turned out well. On the downside, it turns out that my school I moved to is one of the big rival schools of my old school. Even though I toned down the characteristics that I believe that I got bullied for at my old school, a combination of them coupled with the fact that I went to the aforementioned rival school led to the bullying eventually being worse then ever. The difference was that at my new school, my friends that I made there actually actively stood up for me and I had more of them. Both academically and sporting wise I started to slip badly though. The former because the formula of putting in no effort and succeeding in a predominantly assignment based system didn't exactly fly all too well at an exam based system-school. The latter was because I wasn't in the division one coach's circle of trust he built up over years, which meant I was subject to the terrible coaching of division two; hereby leading to a relative slip in my overall game. Part of the blame for allowing that slip is definitely on me but I feel that coaching has a lot more of an impact on you then people think. Year 11 was when I started going to parties more too, although at this stage they were only occasional they opened up a whole new world of fun and underage drinking for me. I also had one of the main roles in an adaptation of Shakespeares "A Midsummer Night's Dream", playing Lysander. There was actually a lot of star power in this play, one of the girls in the production has actually gone on to have a main role in the Australian soap Home and Away and to this day I still occasionally keep in touch with her and see her. We ended up getting nominated for an ACT actors award but ultimately fell short. I had a passion for drama throughout high school and am still very good at improv but in the end, my self-awareness and self-consciousness that came about from being bullied prevented me from being on the same level as the other actors in my opinion so I decided to stop. Year 12 was a very mixed bag for me, I ended up making a lot more friends but the enemies were also more vocal. I started going to a lot of parties and started drinking underage at them (I turned 18 the year after). I had consumed alcohol before this, but this was the first time that it happened on a semi-regular basis. I am not an alcoholic because I don't ever drink when I'm not partying, even at dinners and functions when it's readily available and free. However, I love getting tipsy because it makes you lose enough self awareness to be able to enjoy yourself but you aren't inebriated enough to look like a total idiot. My parents weren't really happy with this but mum especially understood why I felt this way and permitted me to have one or two over the duration of a night (although of course I always had a few more; one or two didn't even get me tipsy). I went to underage dance parties even though I absolutely hated dancing just for the social aspect, and I was first given the self confidence to dance by a girl called Megan who went to our sister school. She was smoking hot and randomly came up and got me to dirty dance with her. I probably would have gone for the kiss if my mate didn't warn me that she had a boyfriend, and a massive one at that
. This was also the year I lost my virginity and started hooking up with girls at said parties occasionally. The bullies were never far away though, and I can't even imagine the number of girls and people they managed to turn against me (just my luck to make enemies with the "popular jocks"). As for grades, well I studied less and less as the work got more important. I didn't even study for some of my big final HSC exams. How I ended up getting an ATAR of 84 is fucking beyond me, I probably deserved one in the 50's or 60's with the amount of work I put in. I wish I learnt how to study from a young age, as I am writing this now I am putting off study for my uni exams because I literally don't know how to focus unless its a few nights before. As for my personality, this is when I started being less nice/pathetic to girls in general. Of course if I was really attracted to them I'd end up resorting to my old ways, which is why I could occasionally hook up at parties but I didn't have a girlfriend. This post is already tl;dr so I'll cut my final year of high school short and move on to university. I enrolled in IT at the ANU and my last year and a half of my life have had a huge impact in shaping the current me. During O week (pretty much the week before uni where there are a lot of parties/pissups) of my first year I wasn't 18 yet for a few weeks, which meant that I was technically unable to get into official events. Note how I said technically, I ended up elaborate tricking the security guards without a fake ID during EuroTrash night to let me in to the closed off area. That night signified the start of many things. For starters, I hooked up with a 6'2'' 22 year old model (who a few weeks later found out my age and was horrified haha), which ended up initializing a big change in the way I was with women. I finally knew the game, I knew how to flirt and I knew how to pick up. I learnt tricks from my years of striking out with the girls I wanted most to make sure that if I ever did end up in the friend zone, it was on my own terms. I still get a bit flustered when it comes to picking up girls who remember me as a tool when I was younger (not so much friends from the past), or girls in large bitchy groups but I am working on that. The other thing it changed, which was even more important was all due to a Canberra based DJ duo called the Aston Shuffle. These guys were number one in Australia and world famous, and seeing them rip up the decks in front of a monstrous crowd inspired me to by my own for fun (which I will come back to later). When I became 18 a few weeks later, my whole world changed. I went clubbing regularly, had the confidence to dance a lot (with the help from a little alcohol) and better still, people at uni were devoid of that school yard pettiness that is present in high school, so I was making friends at a rapid rate. At this stage, friends from my first high school started reappearing for the better in my life, with some of them being bullies from the past even. As a social person, I am a very good networker and so when I got an opportunity to run the guest list at the biggest nightclub in the city due to a friend's absence; I had to take it with both hands. At this stage my popularity really took off. The guest list was non exclusive, so it wasn't like people who asked me to be on it just sucked up and were nice to me so they could do it. It just meant that I ended up talking to a lot of people, and made even more friends and even more networks. As of this post, I am now a permanent promoter for the night club and various organisations and I have over 1620 facebook friends - having met about 95 % in real life at least. Meanwhile, back on the topic of my Djing, I was practising a little at home after purchasing my decks and even though I was struggling a lot I still had a lot of fun doing it. For my 18th, I hired one of the most famous DJ's in Canberra and didn't hesitate in picking his brains whenever I could. After an awesome night (where I made out with and potentially fucked a really hot blonde girl who happened to have a boyfriend in the toilets, without actually remembering anything beyond the first kiss) where I passed out by 9 pm in the first and second last time I have been ridiculously drunk, the DJ saw the potential and the passion I had for music and asked me to form a duo with him. I had barely played at this stage, but my intention was to learn from someone already firmly entrenched in the club scene and make good contacts along the way. I ended up getting to play at a few clubs with him and even though I didn't do much at all, the learning experience was awesome for me. I am also friends with a few famous and semi famous DJ's as a result and because of this I am in a much better position to succeed with my own career. My results for uni have been a mixed bag, I was offered to do honours in Philosophy because of outstanding results in my course but I also failed a unit for the first time in my life (top level Maths). I then realised that I am still smart regardless of how pedestrian my school marks ended up (for me anyway), and that with effort I can one day become elite academically again. I just need to find motivation for studying as I said earlier, because if I hate a subject I won't study for it. Fast forward to this year now. I had a relationship but I broke it off after a few months because she was too clingy and didn't give me enough space. I was already bad with committment as it was but now as a result I am a full fledged commitaphone. I have been getting laid like crazy, and hooking up pretty much any weekend I have decided to. I can't yet hook up with EVERY girl I desire, and I still get nervous sometimes but I am getting better and better all the time. I did get hurt badly by a girl last year, and that experience has made me more cynical and blunt for the better. I am still nice, but I have this edge about me now that makes me less of a pushover and much more attractive to girls. I now get to choose whether I want to date a girl or not as opposed to sweating on her decision and opinion of me, waiting on their approval. It has gotten to the stage where even the girl who hurt me is flirting with me again without me having talked to her first!
My DJing has gotten to the point where I'm getting solo gigs, and I've even entered a mix in an Australia wide competition that I had an interview for called YourShot (which can be found here http://soundcloud.com/3verest/3verest-yourshot-trance-mix). I still have a fuckload to learn but my improvement over the space of a year has been remarkable, and this is off only basic software. I still need to learn to transition dubstep and hip-hop more smoothly, as well as be confident on other people's equipment for occasions where I can't bring mine but I'm happy with my progress thus far. I'm enrolled in the Ministry of Sound DJ Academy in July, and one of the guys who helps run it (Chris Fraser, who I befriended at the DJing comp) told me how it can be a fast track to getting discovered so fingers crossed - and at the very least I hope that it gives me the necessary skills that I am deficient in to further excel in my future endeavours. Whilst I've never reached my dizzying heights of basketball again, I did make the firsts team for uni games as the youngest player in the squad and ended up having a mixed bag at the Games - having a few terrible games but also one game where I was downright dominant against the 3rd best university in Eastern Australia! I got invited to the National Uni Games in perth but I couldn't afford the ridiculous cost so I had to decline. This year I got into the seconds team for the Eastern games but I declined due to a lack of funds and because I wanted to work on my shot so that it was good enough to make firsts at Nationals. I'm captain of the seconds team at the uni and while we aren't in an elite competition, it is competitive and I'm going to do everything in my power to get up to the level I used to be at again. It means that I can't play AFL or American Football because I'm too busy but I have to sacrifice something. I've also been going to the gym for the last seven months and have gone from dumbell bench pressing 10 kg's or so in each arm on a flat bench to nearly 30. I have a long way to go with my body but once again, the improvement from doey and untoned to near six pack and relatively buff is awesome! Aside from DJing and promoting for the night club, I also work at David Jones in retail and for the IT department of the Research School of Economics at the ANU. The retail job fucking sucks but it has secure hours and ok money. The IT job is relatively new, and I acquired it because of a contact in my basketball team (life is about who you know just as much as it's about what you know). I loathed my degree until then but this job has been really enjoyable surprisingly. I found that I like doing HTML, CSS, MySQL and Systems Analysis but fucking hate hardcore coding like Java etc (which are the strengths of my work partner thank fuck). This gives me hope that if my DJing falls through that I'll still be happy! I could never have seen myself in an office job because I am too much of a free spirit but I'm now actually excited for what life after uni holds for me. The bullying feels like it was another life time away now. My past experiences have taught me to always treat others with respect and to hold a great deal of empathy for those who are being treated poorly - standing up for them if I feel injustice is being served. In a way I am also thankful for having been bullied, it has made me a ridiculously resilient individual who (contrary to my online persona after I am haxed or my persona on the basketball court where I show a lot of emotion) is often level headed and unphazed by anything. I wish I didn't have to go through the pain that I did to achieve this, but I feel that it has made me able to cope with rejection, failure and disappointment much better then I otherwise would have. I wouldn't trade anything in the world for those skills. There is so much I could have said, but this was already a mammoth post anyway so if you managed to read it all somehow I really appreciate it. Life is fucking awesome for me now
and even though I haven't had to go through half the shit that some of you have faced (and still are facing) in your lives, I hope it shows you that with a positive attitude, a smile on your face and seizing the opportunities that are thrown to you and learning from your fuckups and hardships that we can all strive for greater things. I'm not on my high horse or anything because I know I haven't achieved anything amazing yet, but I do know I am well on the path, always making progress wherever I go and living life to the fullest :).
I was always told that I was a gifted child at school, with a photographic memory. In preschool, I could remember everyones colour cup and whether they were left handed or right handed and in Kindergarten I was reading books like Goosebumps that were over 100 pages and bringing in the stock pages of the newspaper for Show and Tell (pointing out how my dad had Telstra shares and explaining that they were down, which was really bad). I was really good at Maths as well; in year two I was asked to do the Year 4 Maths Competition (as well as Science and English) and just generally grasped concepts much faster then the average student. However, I was below average with my coordination and sports. In Preschool or Kindy (I don't remember), I was told that I had low muscle tone which essentially drastically affected my handwriting, hand-eye coordination and ability to run. Apparently it is supposed to afflict you for the rest of your life, but because all my best friends were crazy into sport I ended up persevering and becoming athletically competent - making it into state for Cross Country and district for 100 and 200 m. I got teased mildly in primary school but it was nothing really concerning - it was more joking with friends then anything. I was really sensitive when I was younger though, so I guess it affected me a little bit. I experienced my first family death on November 27th 1998 as a Year One student, my grandma passing away. I have only small memories of her as of now, but I do remember she loved me with all her heart. I was too young to really understand what loss was though, so even though I really wish I got to know her as I grew up and for her to see the man I am today, I can see the silver lining in having lost her when it hurt the least (as opposed to say as a 15 year old teenager when hormones are going crazy). All in all though, I remember my primary school days very fondly. I was brought up my parents to be really nice (too nice...) and kind to everyone, and to this day I still find it hard to hold grudges for an extended period. I was very talkative and being the smartest boy in my school, I loved helping people with school work both because I genuinely liked helping people and because I liked people thinking I was smart. I picked up basketball in year 3 because I was inspired by the movie Space Jam and by my 3rd season I ended up winning the MVP and making Division 1 in my first season of graded basketball - a streak of years in division one that would last for 8 years until politics got in the way. Anyway I went to an all boys school in year 6 that goes all the way from year 4 to year 12 (with a different campus for high school - 7th grade and beyond), and whilst I was only ranked sixth in that school academically I enjoyed my year from what I remember. However, there was the odd bullying incident that took place here and whilst it wasn't too bad it helped lay a foundation for many hard years to come. To this day I still don't know exactly why I was bullied so fiercely, part of it probably came from my extreme talkativeness, another part might have come from speaking my mind (a tendency that started in year six that never really existed at my olds chool) and the formation of an ego when it came to stuff that I was good at (Basketball, Cross Country, School). Nevertheless, while there are still some very fond memories I possess at high school, there were stages where I'd just come home and cry or feel like crying. The worst part was that whilst I did have some friends there, the group that I hung out in (a group of 20 boys or so) also had some people who hated me so it was a double edged sword - I could either choose to be alone during the days or spend time with my best friends whilst having to cop shit from the bullies most days. I used to just be silent and take it, but as I got older I started to fight back with comebacks of my own - which sometimes rattled them but always made their hatred and determination more intense. I was never really physically assaulted: and the few times I was, I ended up getting out of it with my words and the friends that I did have made sure that it wouldn't happen. It's a shame that they didn't stand up for me when it came to verbal bullying though, even now they say that they were too intimidated to stand up to boys who were their friends and feel really bad about it. Meanwhile, whilst I wasn't ever a straight A's student - I was still a recipient of an Academic award the majority of semesters (that's at least 7 A's and 2 B's - no C's are allowed) with absolutely zero study/effort. I was also excelling at basketball, in year nine I ended up making the nationals squad and had a very good tournament despite my team getting belted/losing to the bigger states most games. I truly felt I belonged with the basketball boys and was never bullied there, and whilst I didn't make enough of an effort to hang out outside of school with them even now I'm still friends with a lot of them. Some of them have gone on to do bigger and better things, I still resent the fact that I'm stuck at 6'0'' with shoes and a lot of them are now 6'5'' + - I firmly believe that if I was given their height that I could have had a successful basketball career at a national level (Australia I know....but still!). We ended up winning the Under 16's state championship, with my school team being so stacked that we were actually better then the state team. In the Grand Final I ended up scoring 16 points on 8/8 shooting from the field, and to this day this is still one of the fondest memories of my entire life. I was always told I was decent looking, and whilst that didn't exactly mean shit at an all boys school it meant that I did pretty well with talking to girls - and got my first kiss in year ten and my first girlfriend in year 11. I was friends with a fuckload of girls because I got on with them really well, but I was always friend zoned because as I mentioned earlier - I was too nice. I was brought up to believe that if you just be yourself and dote on girls that they would love you for it, and it took years of fucking up and having ridiculously hot friends who ended up dating jackasses for me to learn otherwise. Looking back on me back then, the expresison "Getting lucky" was never more evident - I'd get girls who either thought I was really hot and got to know my personality later or I'd say the right things without knowing what pushed a girls buttons and end up getting their interest anyway. My extra corricular areas of life and my academic life were looking good, but my school life was still generally a miserable one. I was bullied so terribly that a few boys who were witnesses told me at a later date that they would have definitely considered suicide if they were in my position it was that bad. I never really once thought about it as a serious option, occasionally the thoughts of "I wonder if everyone would miss me/feel bad for what they've done to me" would pop into my head but that's as far as it would get. I am so thankful for the combination of my "let everything go" personality and my parents instilling in me those values, because without them who knows what would have happened. To this day, I've never even tried an illicit drug (a monumental achievement for a "Raver", although I'm not saying this will never ever change in the future) and only smoked a few times in my life. Alcohol is another story but I'll get to that haha. The bullying got so bad at the start of the year 11, that between that and my parents wanting me to do the HSC I ended up getting moved to a different all boys school. A highlight of the move initially was that in my very last basketball game for my old school, with 5 players available for the game as opposed to the other teams 10, I ended up scoring 12 fourth quarter points and a game winning floater with 2 seconds left against our biggest rival. At the time my teammates had no idea I was moving but I knew I was so I really wanted to win that more then anything at that stage. There were positives and negatives to the move. One major positive is that only then did the boys from my old school realise what they'd done to me (especially the ones in my friend group) and they all felt extremely guilty and vowed to make amends. After a few years apart I am actually good friends with the vast majority of them, and for this I am extremely thankful. This didn't actually happen though until some stage in Year 12, so it took some time. Also, there are still a couple of boys that dislike me but on the whole it turned out well. On the downside, it turns out that my school I moved to is one of the big rival schools of my old school. Even though I toned down the characteristics that I believe that I got bullied for at my old school, a combination of them coupled with the fact that I went to the aforementioned rival school led to the bullying eventually being worse then ever. The difference was that at my new school, my friends that I made there actually actively stood up for me and I had more of them. Both academically and sporting wise I started to slip badly though. The former because the formula of putting in no effort and succeeding in a predominantly assignment based system didn't exactly fly all too well at an exam based system-school. The latter was because I wasn't in the division one coach's circle of trust he built up over years, which meant I was subject to the terrible coaching of division two; hereby leading to a relative slip in my overall game. Part of the blame for allowing that slip is definitely on me but I feel that coaching has a lot more of an impact on you then people think. Year 11 was when I started going to parties more too, although at this stage they were only occasional they opened up a whole new world of fun and underage drinking for me. I also had one of the main roles in an adaptation of Shakespeares "A Midsummer Night's Dream", playing Lysander. There was actually a lot of star power in this play, one of the girls in the production has actually gone on to have a main role in the Australian soap Home and Away and to this day I still occasionally keep in touch with her and see her. We ended up getting nominated for an ACT actors award but ultimately fell short. I had a passion for drama throughout high school and am still very good at improv but in the end, my self-awareness and self-consciousness that came about from being bullied prevented me from being on the same level as the other actors in my opinion so I decided to stop. Year 12 was a very mixed bag for me, I ended up making a lot more friends but the enemies were also more vocal. I started going to a lot of parties and started drinking underage at them (I turned 18 the year after). I had consumed alcohol before this, but this was the first time that it happened on a semi-regular basis. I am not an alcoholic because I don't ever drink when I'm not partying, even at dinners and functions when it's readily available and free. However, I love getting tipsy because it makes you lose enough self awareness to be able to enjoy yourself but you aren't inebriated enough to look like a total idiot. My parents weren't really happy with this but mum especially understood why I felt this way and permitted me to have one or two over the duration of a night (although of course I always had a few more; one or two didn't even get me tipsy). I went to underage dance parties even though I absolutely hated dancing just for the social aspect, and I was first given the self confidence to dance by a girl called Megan who went to our sister school. She was smoking hot and randomly came up and got me to dirty dance with her. I probably would have gone for the kiss if my mate didn't warn me that she had a boyfriend, and a massive one at that
. This was also the year I lost my virginity and started hooking up with girls at said parties occasionally. The bullies were never far away though, and I can't even imagine the number of girls and people they managed to turn against me (just my luck to make enemies with the "popular jocks"). As for grades, well I studied less and less as the work got more important. I didn't even study for some of my big final HSC exams. How I ended up getting an ATAR of 84 is fucking beyond me, I probably deserved one in the 50's or 60's with the amount of work I put in. I wish I learnt how to study from a young age, as I am writing this now I am putting off study for my uni exams because I literally don't know how to focus unless its a few nights before. As for my personality, this is when I started being less nice/pathetic to girls in general. Of course if I was really attracted to them I'd end up resorting to my old ways, which is why I could occasionally hook up at parties but I didn't have a girlfriend. This post is already tl;dr so I'll cut my final year of high school short and move on to university. I enrolled in IT at the ANU and my last year and a half of my life have had a huge impact in shaping the current me. During O week (pretty much the week before uni where there are a lot of parties/pissups) of my first year I wasn't 18 yet for a few weeks, which meant that I was technically unable to get into official events. Note how I said technically, I ended up elaborate tricking the security guards without a fake ID during EuroTrash night to let me in to the closed off area. That night signified the start of many things. For starters, I hooked up with a 6'2'' 22 year old model (who a few weeks later found out my age and was horrified haha), which ended up initializing a big change in the way I was with women. I finally knew the game, I knew how to flirt and I knew how to pick up. I learnt tricks from my years of striking out with the girls I wanted most to make sure that if I ever did end up in the friend zone, it was on my own terms. I still get a bit flustered when it comes to picking up girls who remember me as a tool when I was younger (not so much friends from the past), or girls in large bitchy groups but I am working on that. The other thing it changed, which was even more important was all due to a Canberra based DJ duo called the Aston Shuffle. These guys were number one in Australia and world famous, and seeing them rip up the decks in front of a monstrous crowd inspired me to by my own for fun (which I will come back to later). When I became 18 a few weeks later, my whole world changed. I went clubbing regularly, had the confidence to dance a lot (with the help from a little alcohol) and better still, people at uni were devoid of that school yard pettiness that is present in high school, so I was making friends at a rapid rate. At this stage, friends from my first high school started reappearing for the better in my life, with some of them being bullies from the past even. As a social person, I am a very good networker and so when I got an opportunity to run the guest list at the biggest nightclub in the city due to a friend's absence; I had to take it with both hands. At this stage my popularity really took off. The guest list was non exclusive, so it wasn't like people who asked me to be on it just sucked up and were nice to me so they could do it. It just meant that I ended up talking to a lot of people, and made even more friends and even more networks. As of this post, I am now a permanent promoter for the night club and various organisations and I have over 1620 facebook friends - having met about 95 % in real life at least. Meanwhile, back on the topic of my Djing, I was practising a little at home after purchasing my decks and even though I was struggling a lot I still had a lot of fun doing it. For my 18th, I hired one of the most famous DJ's in Canberra and didn't hesitate in picking his brains whenever I could. After an awesome night (where I made out with and potentially fucked a really hot blonde girl who happened to have a boyfriend in the toilets, without actually remembering anything beyond the first kiss) where I passed out by 9 pm in the first and second last time I have been ridiculously drunk, the DJ saw the potential and the passion I had for music and asked me to form a duo with him. I had barely played at this stage, but my intention was to learn from someone already firmly entrenched in the club scene and make good contacts along the way. I ended up getting to play at a few clubs with him and even though I didn't do much at all, the learning experience was awesome for me. I am also friends with a few famous and semi famous DJ's as a result and because of this I am in a much better position to succeed with my own career. My results for uni have been a mixed bag, I was offered to do honours in Philosophy because of outstanding results in my course but I also failed a unit for the first time in my life (top level Maths). I then realised that I am still smart regardless of how pedestrian my school marks ended up (for me anyway), and that with effort I can one day become elite academically again. I just need to find motivation for studying as I said earlier, because if I hate a subject I won't study for it. Fast forward to this year now. I had a relationship but I broke it off after a few months because she was too clingy and didn't give me enough space. I was already bad with committment as it was but now as a result I am a full fledged commitaphone. I have been getting laid like crazy, and hooking up pretty much any weekend I have decided to. I can't yet hook up with EVERY girl I desire, and I still get nervous sometimes but I am getting better and better all the time. I did get hurt badly by a girl last year, and that experience has made me more cynical and blunt for the better. I am still nice, but I have this edge about me now that makes me less of a pushover and much more attractive to girls. I now get to choose whether I want to date a girl or not as opposed to sweating on her decision and opinion of me, waiting on their approval. It has gotten to the stage where even the girl who hurt me is flirting with me again without me having talked to her first! ....random chat beforehand showing her my Music
11:00 am - Me
lol really? send a photo of the New Years photo to my phone so I can see it!
11:00am - Liz
naww love it luca
haha i will i will
it such a cute pic of us but
you look so hot in it
11:00 am - Me
lol really? send a photo of the New Years photo to my phone so I can see it!
11:00am - Liz
naww love it luca
haha i will i will
it such a cute pic of us but
you look so hot in it
My DJing has gotten to the point where I'm getting solo gigs, and I've even entered a mix in an Australia wide competition that I had an interview for called YourShot (which can be found here http://soundcloud.com/3verest/3verest-yourshot-trance-mix). I still have a fuckload to learn but my improvement over the space of a year has been remarkable, and this is off only basic software. I still need to learn to transition dubstep and hip-hop more smoothly, as well as be confident on other people's equipment for occasions where I can't bring mine but I'm happy with my progress thus far. I'm enrolled in the Ministry of Sound DJ Academy in July, and one of the guys who helps run it (Chris Fraser, who I befriended at the DJing comp) told me how it can be a fast track to getting discovered so fingers crossed - and at the very least I hope that it gives me the necessary skills that I am deficient in to further excel in my future endeavours. Whilst I've never reached my dizzying heights of basketball again, I did make the firsts team for uni games as the youngest player in the squad and ended up having a mixed bag at the Games - having a few terrible games but also one game where I was downright dominant against the 3rd best university in Eastern Australia! I got invited to the National Uni Games in perth but I couldn't afford the ridiculous cost so I had to decline. This year I got into the seconds team for the Eastern games but I declined due to a lack of funds and because I wanted to work on my shot so that it was good enough to make firsts at Nationals. I'm captain of the seconds team at the uni and while we aren't in an elite competition, it is competitive and I'm going to do everything in my power to get up to the level I used to be at again. It means that I can't play AFL or American Football because I'm too busy but I have to sacrifice something. I've also been going to the gym for the last seven months and have gone from dumbell bench pressing 10 kg's or so in each arm on a flat bench to nearly 30. I have a long way to go with my body but once again, the improvement from doey and untoned to near six pack and relatively buff is awesome! Aside from DJing and promoting for the night club, I also work at David Jones in retail and for the IT department of the Research School of Economics at the ANU. The retail job fucking sucks but it has secure hours and ok money. The IT job is relatively new, and I acquired it because of a contact in my basketball team (life is about who you know just as much as it's about what you know). I loathed my degree until then but this job has been really enjoyable surprisingly. I found that I like doing HTML, CSS, MySQL and Systems Analysis but fucking hate hardcore coding like Java etc (which are the strengths of my work partner thank fuck). This gives me hope that if my DJing falls through that I'll still be happy! I could never have seen myself in an office job because I am too much of a free spirit but I'm now actually excited for what life after uni holds for me. The bullying feels like it was another life time away now. My past experiences have taught me to always treat others with respect and to hold a great deal of empathy for those who are being treated poorly - standing up for them if I feel injustice is being served. In a way I am also thankful for having been bullied, it has made me a ridiculously resilient individual who (contrary to my online persona after I am haxed or my persona on the basketball court where I show a lot of emotion) is often level headed and unphazed by anything. I wish I didn't have to go through the pain that I did to achieve this, but I feel that it has made me able to cope with rejection, failure and disappointment much better then I otherwise would have. I wouldn't trade anything in the world for those skills. There is so much I could have said, but this was already a mammoth post anyway so if you managed to read it all somehow I really appreciate it. Life is fucking awesome for me now
and even though I haven't had to go through half the shit that some of you have faced (and still are facing) in your lives, I hope it shows you that with a positive attitude, a smile on your face and seizing the opportunities that are thrown to you and learning from your fuckups and hardships that we can all strive for greater things. I'm not on my high horse or anything because I know I haven't achieved anything amazing yet, but I do know I am well on the path, always making progress wherever I go and living life to the fullest :).
