Читать онлайн "Sophomore Year - Box Set" - Younger Greg - RuLit

David Dawson is living the high school dream—brilliant student, captain of the football team, beautiful girlfriends—when his world is turned inside out when his best friends leave for college and a new football coach wants his son to now lead the team. Find out how David overcomes new challenges and makes new acquaintances as he strives to make it through his sophomore year.

Interlude

Uncle John

I look back and it’s hard to imagine that it’d been over a year since my nephew, David, came to spend the summer with me. When he arrived, he was a confused and angry young man. You might ask what teenager wasn’t.

I don’t know, but my sister-in-law may have been even more pissed than he was. My brother was a lucky man because he found her, and they had two wonderful children. In many ways, I was jealous of him and what he had. Then she went off the deep end and wow... just wow. It was a good thing he loved her so much.

My plan to help David was first to work him so hard he couldn’t feel sorry for himself. The reason was threefold. I wanted to get all the poisons—drugs and alcohol—out of his system. In addition, he needed to get in shape: this active kid was quickly becoming sedentary as he played video games and drank, and gained weight at an alarming rate. I was concerned that if he continued, he would become part of the statistics for obesity in our country. Finally, I needed him to regain his confidence. Building fences doesn’t sound like much, but it gave him a sense of accomplishment when he saw the fruits of his hard labor.

Before I talk about David, I want to make it clear his parents did nothing wrong with him. They made sure he had good values. He didn’t come from a poor family, but they didn’t have a lot of extras. David was loved and they paid attention to him. His mother made sure he got to church. He also had friends that were all good kids.

What happened to David was he met a girl. It’s probably one of the oldest stories in the book. A young boy has a girl pay attention to him for the first time. He wasn’t sufficiently developed emotionally to know what to do with everything going on with his body and in his head.

Compounding that was how his friends reacted. The girl who David found as his first girlfriend was the queen of his class. There always seems to be one or two girls who stand out. David’s friends thought he’d reached too high.

That reminds me of a great analogy. If you catch a bucket of crabs, you never have to put a lid on it to keep them in. That’s because if one tries to climb out, the others will grab it and pull it back down.

In the same manner, you may notice that when someone wants to make a major change in their life, there are always people who try to stop them. Not because they try to be cruel; they may do it out of love. They simply want them to be how they expect. For David, he was an awkward, nerdy teenager who’d never dated, and suddenly he was going out with the best-looking girl in school. Of course, his friends would be worried ... right? Crabs in a bucket.

There are certain life-lessons that simply aren’t taught and should be. For David, he needed to learn personal responsibility. I think this was what hurts most people. They simply don’t understand that they’re responsible for their own happiness. It’s no one else’s job to make you happy. With that comes the responsibility part. You’re responsible for your actions.

This was the biggest hurdle we had to get over. David blamed anyone and everyone for what happened to him. His girlfriend expected him to drink and smoke pot. His friends weren’t sympathetic when she dumped him. He had to find new friends that drank and smoked pot. He thought he needed to throw a party for his new friends. The girl that almost died ruined his life. His mother didn’t understand him. The pattern was obvious. If everyone would just do what he wanted, everything would be perfect. I missed being a teenager. I was surprised many of us survive the experience. The sad part is that many people never grow up and get past that stage.

The biggest breakthrough came when David finally understood that he was the conductor of his own life. Understanding that only you are responsible for your success or failure, happiness or sadness, and everything else, empowered him.

Of course, the journey there could be painful. I had to get David to grow up, so to speak, in just a few weeks. This process normally takes someone years to figure out. David was an emotional mess. For the most part, he pulled the typical Dawson response, where we go quiet. I heard him cry his eyes out most nights. I was a patient man; I outwaited him while I showed him that I cared.

What I didn’t do was back down. He thought it was terribly unfair that he was stuck on a farm and had to work ten-hour days. I think half his crying was because his body was so exhausted and sore. He threatened to turn me into child services because there were child-labor laws. I explained to him that I hadn’t hired him to work for me; he was my slave labor for the summer. I think if he could have run away, he might have.

I taught David a little saying: ‘If it is to be, it is up to me.’

Once he embraced personal responsibility, I gave him the tools to accomplish whatever he wanted out of life. It started with life goals. It took us a long time to figure out what he wanted in life. I explained to him that what he wanted now would change over time. All I had to do was look at my brother and see how his goals changed when he had his first son.

Once he had his goals, we figured out what he needed to do to achieve each of them. It was basic project planning: identify all the tasks, figure out how long they would take, and then put them into a logical order.