joeblow

ummm...i wrote this pretty quick and i have a casual style of writing, so i do realize that sometimes i ramble on because that is how i speak...just let me know which parts of the story need more explanation or if im clear on my point im trying to get across...and yeah i think thats it...

Cheerleaders: Idiots or Geniuses

When my spine hit the ground it split in half. But not lengthwise of course; if that were the case, this story would be fitted appropriately in the obituary section of The Stafford Sun. No, when my back crunched against the dry summer grass my fifth lumbar vertebra separated into two pieces, like a cheerio smashed into two crescent moons. I can’t say that I heard my bones crack or that the immediate experience was all that traumatic, but I can say that my life was forever changed by that event. I told them I didn’t want to do the stunt. Being catapulted twelve feet into the air by four orange-tinted bimbos in negative-sized athletic shorts was not on my list of things to do that day. It was a hot August evening and as I teetered on the edge of despair I attempted to occupy my thoughts with comforting memories of my air-conditioned bedroom, my books, and the overall comfort of being alone. Oh man, when I got back I was going to tear my mom a new one for convincing me to join the cheer team. “It’ll be fun!” she says, “You’ll make new friends!” she says…Yeah well three weeks away from home in an overheated and underappreciated atmosphere can kind of put a damper on having “fun” and making “friends”. I was sick of cheer camp and I was sick of cheerleading. I hated all of it, the cheap smiles and the elementary level verbal cadences that were creatively dubbed “cheers”. But most of all I hated stunting. Being only five-foot-one, it was obvious to me that should an instance arise where one of the team need be lifted into the air (God forbid) it would undoubtedly be I. Thus I found myself, on that hot August evening, staring at the back of a blonde ponytail with my toes balancing on the base of four sets of interlaced fingers trying to reach a mental “happy place” before being released into the air. Now, before I get to the spine-crushing center of this piece, may I first say that the stunt was not supposed to end as it did. A simple pop from my bases’ wrists and a ride approximately eight feet into the sky was the first part of the stunt (on top of the four feet that I currently hovered above the ground). I had no problem going up, in fact, that part was pretty easy. All I had to do was ride the impulse and hit a middle split in the air. It was cake, seeing as how I had been in dance classes since I was two. It was coming down that was the problem. “Set! One, two…” my back-spot ordered the stunt into motion. My mind snapped back to the present, I bent my knees and pressed me heels up, my next conscious second I was up in the air and hitting my split. My last conscious second was the moment I realized I was coming down, and I was coming down hard. Good old gravity bested me again, and my worst fears had been realized all in a matter of milliseconds. It’s like a trust fall, eyes closed I fell backwards, and no one was there. A flashlight burned into my retinas but I couldn’t seem to find my eyes inside of my head. I tried to ease myself up of the ground but found that to be too challenging, as I could not feel my legs. With sight and feeling out of the picture, I turned to my other senses, the smell of my situation is now not so pleasant to me. To this day I cannot stand the smell of freshly cut grass, hairspray, and sweat, it revisits this memory that is sometimes far easier to ignore. Other than the smells of summer, the sounds around me were of panic. Rough authoritative voices called for medics and ice, other more frantic voices danced around the commands “Is she okay?” “What happened?” and lastly, familiar voices made desperate excuses, “She was going too fast…we couldn’t catch her in time…” When I arrived home from camp looking zombie-like in my newly purchased back brace, everyone assumed I hated the girls responsible for my fall, and to be honest I did for a long time. Because of my cheer camp injury I couldn’t dance anymore, and up until that point in my life I had wrapped up my entire sense of self-worth in my work as a dancer. I kept track of how valuable I was through the amount of trophies I won and scholarships I received at competitions. I was a star. With my spine fractured, everything I used to define myself was no longer relevant. In my mind, the inability to move made me worthless as a human being. I could go on all day about the many changes to my appearance and the sleepless nights I spent contemplating my purpose in life, but I won’t because it doesn’t factor into my conclusion. Because ultimately, after my lengthy period of depression, I had to come to terms with how I chose to deal with my situation. Living the reclusive life as a has been just didn’t suit me anymore. I wanted to feel happiness again, I wanted to feel valuable and not just in a superficial way. People don’t have a monetary value and neither should I. I wasn’t only as good as what I could physically accomplish; life is so much more three-dimensional than that. I broke out of my introverted self-pitying lifestyle and reached out to people I wouldn’t have spoken to before the accident. I found a deeper quality of living, one based off of relationships and helping other people. I wasn’t the center of my universe anymore. Breaking my spine forced me to experience a way of living that I would’ve never experienced if I had kept on living for myself, and for that, I thank the orange-tinted bimbos in negative-sized athletic shorts.

i liked this story alot, the opening sentence really drew me in and made me want to read more. great story. You could try to start your paper with "It was a hot August..." sentence then take your first sentence of the paper after that sentence and see if you like it. Also, you might want to give more time to your first paragraph; it feels a little disconnected. We can tell you were in a rush to write it but over all, we feel you have a good base. Just take the time out to really understand each point of each paragraph. And I know we are not supposed to write this, but keep your ending because it is WONDERFUL!