I removed my last Draw My Life because so much in my life has changed and I feel like
it’s finally time to talk about it.
So here we go.
I was an accident.
My parents had me when they were really young.
My mom was 20 and my dad was 22.
They broke up when I was only two, so I don’t really remember them being together… ever.
Growing up I was always really jealous of all the kids who got to live with both their
parents.
I lived with my mom but I’d go to my dad’s on the weekends.
When I’d get to my dad’s I’d cry to see my mom.
And when I’d get back to my mom’s I’d cry to see my dad.
I apparently loved crying.
I was a painfully shy kid - I’d cry whenever I’d get any kind of attention.
Yep that’s me crying again.
I also suffered from night terrors, which is basically being aware you’re sleep walking
but not being able to control yourself while you’re sleep walking.
And as the name indicates - they were absolutely fucking terrifying.
My mom is a stay at home mom.
Literally.
She suffers from a form of anxiety so intense she hasn’t really been able to leave for
the past 25 years.
One night when I was 13, my mom’s boyfriend said he was going to work… and he never
came back… leaving my two brothers, my mom and me behind.
Since my mom didn’t leave the house, we had no way to get food or go to the hospital…
My grandma moved in to help for a little bit, but she suddenly became very, very sick and
she died.
Now with no one left to help, it became my responsibility to get groceries for my family.
Since I was 14, I had to take a four wheeled taxi to the grocery store - not a six wheeled
taxi like I’m drawing right now, unfortunately.
It wasn’t that cool.
I’d roll up with food stamps in one hand and a shopping list in the other.
I had no idea what it said.
I was 14 years old, I could barely read english at that point - I was only 14.
But, things weren’t all bad.
I had a few friends, including one boy who shared the same immature sense of humor as
me.
He was one of the only people I felt I could truly be myself around.
His name was Ian.
There were a few girls that liked me too, by which I mean one girl poked my penis in
a movie theatre one time and ran away one time.
You know, normal stuff that all of us teens did.
I was able to coast through high school, until I was 15 when I was diagnosed with Henoch-Schönlein
purpura, or HSP for short.
It’s basically a disease that causes your immune system to attack it’s own red blood
vessels, which causes you to have extreme joint pain, intestinal pain, a really intense
rash and constant puking.
Suddenly I was bed-ridden.
I lost 30 pounds in two weeks and I was really malnourished.
I couldn’t go to school anymore so a teacher had to come once a week so I wouldn’t fail.
But being sick gave me a ton of free time.
I was able to start learning how to code on a computer - I started working on a website,
which was a forum for my closest group of friends without having to leave the house.
This was before social media so I wanted to create something useful that we could all
use.
I called it smosh.com.
After four months, I started getting better.
I’ll always technically have HSP but thankfully it’s remained dormant and I haven’t seen
any signs of it since.
I was able to return back to school and things were looking up.
The website I had created started gaining popularity outside my friend group and the
whole school was using it.
I went from 30 daily users to tens of thousands within a few months.
I sold some ad space on the site to make some money and I saved up a bunch and was finally
able to buy a really shitty car.
But at least I didn’t have to take a cab to the grocery store anymore.
One day when we were waiting for college to start, I started lip syncing to the Power
Rangers theme song.
I don’t know why I did it but for some reason we thought it was really funny and Ian joined
in and we filmed it.
We posted it on smosh.com.
Our friends loved it so much, they convinced us to make another one.
So we did.
That video blew up.
People re-posted the video file all over their own MySpaces which was super exciting but
also super expensive.
I was paying for the bandwidth on smosh.com, so basically every time someone watched the
video, I had to pay a small amount for the server load.
At the height of it, I was paying 300 dollars a month for people to watch our videos.
One day I googled ourselves and found that someone had uploaded our newest video onto
a new site called YouTube.
It had about a dozen comments, which was really amazing because it was the first time I was
able to see what people directly thought about our videos.
I was getting pretty tired of paying for people to stream our videos, so we made a smosh YouTube
channel and started uploading our videos there.
I remember when our first video got 100,000 views.
We were so excited.
We celebrated by going to Taco Bell and getting six tacos.
I loved tacos more than probably anything.
We turned my bedroom into a little merch factory so we were able to make money selling shirts
while we stayed in college.
After two years, Youtube contacted us to be part of their first wave of their ad program.
So we were finally able to make money on our videos.
After about six months, we dropped out of college so we could do YouTube full-time.
It seemed while we could always go back to college, we couldn’t always come back this
amazing opportunity.
Spoiler alert: we never had to go back to college.
Somehow I had ended up in front of the camera — the shy kid who just loved to sit in his
bedroom coding was now starring in comedy sketches being viewed by millions of people.
Things were really good until suddenly they weren’t.
When I was 21, I was sitting around with a couple friends when out of nowhere I became
overcome with fear — my entire body went numb.
I could only hear the deafening sound of my thoughts and the beating of my heart, like
the world around me was no longer real.
I remember going to sleep full clothed that night because my hands felt too numb to take
them off.
It was my first of many panic attacks.
It unlocked a door in my brain I couldn’t shut again.
I was terrified my mom’s agoraphobia was genetic and I’d never be able to leave the
house again.
I even had a few panic attacks while shooting videos, which caused me to have even more
anxiety, because what if my anxiety ruined this career I had just started.
For five years it more or less controlled me.
But one day when I was completely overcome with the fear of having a panic attack, I
decided I was going to try to give myself one, just to see if I could control it.
I wasn’t able to give myself one, which just proved that, for me, the only thing that
caused me to have panic attacks was the fear f having a panic attack.
is okay too.
I’ve accepted being introverted and having anxiety - I mean, who doesn’t sometimes?
Thank you so much for all the support you’ve given me, and I can’t wait to see where
it takes us next.