Note: I'm really bad at names. 

I was never very good at school sports. I couldn't compete against my peers most of the time. In school, except for maybe the first few grades of elementary school, I was the runt of the litter thanks to my disease. I was always the last to be picked when a peer was asked to sort out teams. I was often bullied and jeered at during PE, so I quickly learned to hate it. 

The only PE sport I could compete against my peers in was dodgeball. It's not very surprising. I didn't have to race my teammates or do anything with a ball except pick it up and throw it. I'd stand back and wait for most of my teammates to get out of the game, then come in with one hell of an aim and an arm to execute it. For some reason, I just knew when to back up, back down, come back in, throw, etc. which made me a pretty valuable teammate for dodgeball. Of course, the fun police just had to come in one day and ruin PE for me, but it was great while it lasted. Against the stereotype, I wasn't picked on in dodgeball, only in everything else. 

Everything else in PE sucked, and by the time I was actually strong and big enough to compete fairly against my peers, I had almost no interest in it. Throughout 8th and 9th grade, I was only good at PE when I wanted to be good. I had peers who cheered me on and did their best to induce adrenaline in me, but it only worked during games like tag, where I got to chase down something or someone.

In 8th and 9th grade, most of my friends in PE were just like me; aggressive adrenaline junkies. Only they could catch, kick, and dribble a ball, and I couldn't. In fact, I was often in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was hit so hard in the hand by a soccer ball that it went numb and limp for a few minutes. I almost went to the ER. Another time I was at the bottom of an accidental dog-pile during basketball, which I surprisingly walked away from without even getting winded. Both of those incidents had me literally rolling on the floor laughing. Instead of crying, I laugh whenever I get hurt, and only start to freak out if it's really, really painful. 

Back in elementary school, I enjoyed tag, but I was usually too slow to actually play it. But in 8th and 9th grade, I actually had some muscles in my legs, and my legs were about as long as they are now, give or take a few inches, before my torso finally grew up too. 8th grade was the year I stopped wearing shorts. I often got so focused on tagging a person or ripping one of the flags off my opponent's belt, that I'd forget where my feet were. I was never a quitter though. I'd always get right back up and keep chasing. Even when my socks were bloodied by my skinned knees, I wouldn't actually go to the nurse's office. Turned out, cold water from the drinking fountain and a few napkins from the lunchroom were enough to clean up the damage. I stopped wearing white socks, so the blood didn't show so much. Thanks to all of the falls I took while wearing shorts, my knees are rough and bare due to the scarring, and all I wear now is jeans. I haven't had bloody, skinned knees since. 

The only time I'd go to the nurse's office was when my nose bled, or the one time I had food poisoning in the middle of science class during an important lecture and puked my guts out in the class recycling bin, which became the recycling bin. Even then, my peers weren't actually mean about it. Because that school's curriculum revolved around athletics, injuries and illnesses were often. There were plenty of those recycling bins, trash cans, and buckets, I was just the first to come up with that term. There were plenty of incidents where the hospital (which was just a block away) would send EMTs on foot, because it would take longer for an ambulance to navigate the downtown city streets, and it was much louder. Pretty much every student in my PE friend group was carried away by the silent ambulance at least once, except for me. I was the invincible one.