Absolutely!!!
Okay, so, for all my childhood stories there are some prerequisites that add to how hilarious these are in retrospect despite how normal I thought they were at the time.
1. I have always looked much younger than I am. My younger brother is like four years younger than me and we looked like twins for most of our childhoods.
2. I skipped a grade and hit growth spurts very late, so on top of looking younger than I was I was consistently one of the smallest people in any school I was in
3. I was completely, utterly, inexplicably, convinced I would win any fight I got into
Most of that isn’t really relevant to the story, but it helps with other ones and I wrote it before I decided which story to tell lol
So this is the story of how I got my second accidental self-inflicted concussion. Rest of this behind the read more
For some reason, up until the age of 20 or so, I was only coordinated when practicing kickboxing (or, eventually, Krav Maga). I’ve had more injuries than any of my siblings combined and all of them were because I was clumsy.
Picture my high school PE class. They’ve seen me punch a dude. They saw me trip while line dancing, fall sideways, and start an accidental domino line that resulted in three people falling over and one person transferring classes. A lot of them saw me the year before step backwards onto a volleyball and have my feet shoot out from under me like a cartoon character.
During finals that year, when we had like a two hour block for each class, we had a substitute teacher decide to play flag football. I used to be very competitive.
If I ran too fast, I would overbalance and fall over.
My second ever concussion was also my most impressive visually.
I was reaching to pull someone’s flags (hoping I didn’t accidentally pants someone, like had happened in middle school) when I tripped. My arms were still outstretched reaching for the flag, so my forehead hit the ground first. I did a a flip, landed sitting on the ground, and my head kept going and almost hit the ground again. My glasses were sideways on my face. I know people say this as a sarcastic thing, but my PE class did actually, literally, clap*
This was only about halfway through the two hour block, and the substitute teacher had me just sit in the field until class was over, then I called my dad and (I think?????) went to the hospital for x-rays? My dad used to be an EMT, and I definitely remember we went to urgent care for my first concussion and that he mentioned my pupils were uneven for the second too, but I have zero memory of that doctor visit
A lot of my childhood funny stories are...kind of fight-y? And idk if y’all would find those funny or worrisome, so I went with this one lol
*I ran into a girl from that PE class like six years later and asked about that and she said “TJ. Everyone remembers that”
