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I was born as Rodney Bruce Stokes, initially my mother thought I was going to be a girl, so she preemptively named me Krystal.

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I don’t know the exact date, but what my dad tells me is that my mother left me while I was still in Nursing, for whatever reason, I always assumed that she had some mental illness she needed to take care of.

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When looking back about me reading, it reminds me of the time where I went to a library with my grandmother and read some books, then one day there was a competition on who the best reader was, on Children’s Literacy Day they had at the Library, and I read The Rainbow Fish. When I finished reading, after the competition, I got a bronze/copper colored medallion that signified that I had won 4th place. At the time I was annoyed that I hadn’t been 1st place, but I was ok that I had placed 4th, because there was a total of 20 kids in the room waiting to read and be considered for places in the competition.

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My mom had a boyfriend, and remarried. His name was Billy Dewar. He wasn’t the nicest of guys, but truly he wasn’t the worst of them either. He was my first contact with “abuse.” He wouldn’t physically harm me, but he would berate me and lock me in a bathroom where I had to clean my dirty clothes. My mom, being the “mediator,” would cook me some food and give it to me while I was still in the bathroom. Billy, when I say wasn’t the worst guy,it’s because he introduced me to various things he liked, Batman Comics, Cars, and Tennis. He would also try to teach me things, like logic and reasoning. Of course I was too young to really grasp any of the concepts.

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2009 is when I started Kindergarten at White Knoll Elementary in West Columbia, South Carolina. The year wasn’t bad, but it was my first day there. I had anxiety about going to school, and this was the first idea of that. “First Day Jitters.” Instead of jitters though, I started crying and held onto my dad’s leg because I didn’t want to go to school, I wanted to stay home. Thus influencing who I would become and my affiliation towards school.

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My dad left for Chicago, he was looking for a better place to work. While he left to settle down in Chicago and build a place for himself, ultimately he still had custody of me and decided that I would temporarily move in with my mom and her boyfriend at the time. I lived with my mom and Lee (Her then husband.) Lee was a great guy to me, but not to my brother. My brother didn’t like how I was treated because of Billy, but Lee was the opposite, not that my brother could tell. So he tried to yell at Lee to not put me in timeout or limit me from having free time if I ever did something I wasn’t supposed to. Now that I think about it, I think my brother wanted him to be less responsible, which is why he took much of the brunt of all the bad things Lee actually did. I don’t know much if at all what happened to my brother and what his relationship really was with Lee. But some of the things that I can remember was that he went out with some friends when it was really late, and they wanted me to go, for some reason, so I went with him. We didn’t get back till late, 6:00 I think. But my brother got yelled at because he should’ve been home a few minutes sooner, for dinner or something. And Lee was the one who did all the yelling.

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One of the other memories I have with my mom and living with her at the time was that I was working on a project for school, and I was supposed to read some book about Encyclopedia Brown and I broke down and started crying because I didn’t want to read it. My mom sat with me as I was doing my homework after dinner one day and I decided I didn’t want to read it, so I put it back in my bag. But she knew I had to read the book, she pulled it out and gave it back to me and told me to read it. But of course, me not wanting to read it, I pitched a fit and threw it. This made her mad enough to yell at me and force me to read it. Until I did, I wouldn’t go to bed.

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This was a different night, but still at my mom’s house. My mom knew I liked Grape juice, so she bought something new. It was, instead of Purple grape, it was White Grape juice. But because White Grapes are more sour than Purple grapes, I had an adverse reaction to it, my face puckered and my eyes shut and my teeth clenched. She of course asked me if I was ok, and I replied with. “It’s sour!” She giggled a bit and told me, “Of course it is, it’s grape!” Which confused me, because the purple grapes that I had weren’t sour, and I told her that.

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Sometime in this year, I finally moved to Chicago with my dad. In hopes that I would continue my schooling, and move in with him. Life in South Carolina wasn't as pleasant without him. Hence why I cried to my mom and asked her to call him to see when the best possible time I could live with him was. I moved to Chicago, in the middle of my 2nd Grade.

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South Carolina Low Country by Josh Turner

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One of my favorite games was made during this year. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2. One of the best, if not, THE best in the entire series. A close second would be the third Modern Warfare game, I had a lot of memories with these games.

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I personally don't remember a whole lot about this year, what I do remember, is another COD video game being released, and got unwarranted hate. I thought it was a beautiful game, revolutionary, at times. But people thought it was bad, probably because they weren't good at it. It was definitely a learning curve, but nonetheless, I loved the game. This was also the year that one of the Professional E-League teams played, the most memorable and influential teams of the decade, Team OpTic Gaming. At the time, they weren't big enough to stretch all across the platforms of games, but one of their biggest rivals, in terms of popularity, was Team FaZe. Yes, teams back then split part of the word with capitalized letters. Not sure why, but it was a theme back then. Everyone wanted to be on Team FaZe, because of their member's abilities to do what is called a "trickshot." The term trickshot is relevant to today's trickshot, in being that it has a spectacular windup, then a beautiful finish. Kind of like a Step-back shot, or Fade-away in Basketball. But this involved Snipers and circles. Snipers would be used to "Quick-scope" which means to look through the lense of a Sniper Scope really fast, then shoot the enemy for a kill. Other times trickshots would be to jump off a map once a person reached the second to last kill, then they would spin really fast in a circle and without aiming through their scope, they would pull the trigger and get a kill. Nowadays if you do that, people automatically think you're cheating and using what's called an "aimbot" which lets you shoot in any direction, sometimes without even looking at an enemy and would kill them. Which was a big problem, people would use that to bait others, and try to be like them. It was not a good look for Pro Teams at the time. But that only boosted their popularity.

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This was a rough year. This was a year in which I nearly failed a grade, and had to repeat it. Luckily, all my grades were passable. Even though my teachers and dad thought that I wasn't trying hard enough. This was the year that I gave up on school, made me lose interest in it. I was still in homeroom class, during Elementary school in 4th grade. I remember it well, and I remember my teacher well. Ms. Mette (Pronounced Metty) She got very angry, very quickly whenever I failed to turn in a project or homework for a grade. She obviously meant well, because when I finally finished a homework assignment on time, she got really excited, disrupted the class and asked me for a hug.

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Same thing with 2013, I don’t remember a whole lot that happened in 2015. What I do remember, is watching a very good movie, albeit gruesome, called Harcore Henry. This I believe, was a good year for movies. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7 (Fast and Furious movie), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, The Martian and Spectre (A James Bond movie) Just to name a few. Ultimately, Hardcore Henry was a distopian movie, set in a first person perspective of Henry, who saves his wife from a Telekinetic villain who tries to make Henry a supersoldier, and take his abilities to make future supersoldiers. All in all, it does not go well for the villain.

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This was one of the best years of my life, first year in middle school, some of the greatest teachers at Westview. But kind of an “okay” school. I think they expect too much of you.

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Emotionally, this was the worst year of my life, so far. My mom passed away in the final months of my school year. Luckily enough my dad issued me to go to a therapist at school. I didn’t have the best relationship with my mom, and certainly wanted more from her. I do wish that she got better help. Sadly we won’t know what the future holds.

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I had to find out from my grandmother that she had breast cancer, no one ever told me she had it, so I kinda freaked out a little when she wore a scarf on her head one day because of her chemo-therapy. I dedicate all my favorite sports teams to her, because I thought she was gonna die.

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2019 was another okay year. I had fun with my teachers and some classes. But the students in some classes weren’t the best. All they tried to do was get a rise out of people. And sometimes it worked. Sometimes they wouldn’t stop till the teacher told them to stop, or the kid acted out and got themselves in trouble.  COVID started in the later months in the school, and we had some time off.

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2020 was significantly worse than 2019. Everybody was stuck home, schools switched to online. It’s no secret that i’m not the best in school, but when I’m at home, I can’t focus.

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2021 is a little bit better than 2020, I switched from online school to in-person. My grades got a little better, but overall I'm still struggling.

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I’ve got a lot of time left to complete everything for a better grade, but so far in this year I have switched to another class to help me with late work. Because of how sick I've been for the last week, I've got a lot more work to do.