My Autobiography

I figure if I post this 7-page explosion of nearly every significant event of my entire life, I shouldn't have to update until at least......past finals? Yeah?

Well, this was an assignment to write an autobiography for my Psychology 101 class, with no other guidelines than "creativity." If you don't read its entirety, I certainly won't be offended. But, if you are absolutely itching with boredom/somewhat curious about how I came to be, here it is! Enjoy :)

            It all began on September 12^th, 1991. This was no ordinary 6:50 PM on a Thursday evening. Inside a room of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, California, doctors and a young family ushered in the birth of a 6 pound, 8 ounce baby girl to a chorus of angels and an aligning of planets. The world paused from its soccer practices and ballet recitals, family dinners and history assignments, eager to behold this new dawn of creation. From that point on, everyone lived in eager anticipation of this young girl’s future, consumed by her every achievement, troubled by each less than remarkable appearance, and bewildered by any slight change in her countenance. Her life was the constant preoccupation of their thoughts and decisions. As far as they knew, the existence of Masey Kole Schrader was the center of the entire universe.

            If prompted to compose an autobiography of my life, I could not conjure a more sincere perspective. It is nearly impossible for me to imagine the spheres of life prior, subsequent, and even adjacent to my own functioning independently of my particular limited span. The fact that my life has been incomprehensible to those before me and will eventually become a mere tale to those after me leaves me silenced. I must not speak so detrimentally of my own story, as if history began at the day of my birth, or that all other hopes will perish beside my death bed. Creation will continue to press on, in whose role I am a fragment: this is the reality. If I should reiterate an honest account of the last nearly twenty years, I must assume this point of view. My life, my story, is simply one of the infinite accounts to the testimony of the work of Jesus Christ in repairing the fragments of creation into the whole.

             My story begins on September 12^th, 1991. This was like any ordinary Thursday evening, but for my mother and father, it was one of significance. Inside one of the many rooms of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, California, my grandmother stood as witness to the birth of her first grandchild: a 6 pound, 8 ounce, perfectly pink baby girl. After two weeks of pacing and twelve days past my due date, I had arrived into the world. Everything about my birth had been unexpected for my parents. They had been newly married in the spring, and I arrived four months later in the fall. Doctors misread the images from just then emerging ultrasounds and told them that they were having a little boy. We were living in Malibu at the time, in the middle of remodeling our house, and both sides of our extended family remained distant in Washington and Minnesota.           

            The first year of my life, so I am told, was spent amidst this process of constant mayhem. Since my dad is a commercial and residential architect, I would tag along to his job sites, strapped in a pack on his back. Otherwise, I was under the care of my twenty-two year old stay-at-home mother. I was walking by nine months, speaking sentences by a year, and enjoyed activities such as soaking my Barbies in the plastic pool of my backyard, “riding” our two cats, and chasing “yizards” around the patio with sticks. My life was that of any ordinary attention-soaked baby, that is until the day before my first-and-a-half birthday. In the spring of my second year, my brother Kyle was born. I can’t remember ever begging for a sister, or anything other siblings for that matter; for both my parents and myself, Kyle was the completion to our little family.

            During the following years, there were several raging fires in the hills of California where we were living, requiring us to evacuate to friends’ houses for nights at a time. As a result of these events, as well as a downward turn in the economy, my family had become nearly bankrupt. There was really no other option at that point than to move somewhere new and begin again. Since my mom’s side of the family, from second cousins to great-grandparents, were all still living in Olympia, Washington, by the time I had turned three we had rented in a very modest neighborhood of my mom’s hometown. I often imagine my life without this change of location, which ushered me so rapidly into a humble existence from one of excessive wealth. We moved once more within Olympia, into a place of our own this time, before I began pre-school. This is the point at which my memories begin to suffice for the past, beyond old photographs or home videos.

            Although my dad had been raised in the Lutheran church, my mom was an agnostic and so I did not spend my youngest years in a church. However, I was enrolled in a private Catholic grade school because our living situation was very tentative at that point. Under this personalized education, I began to flourish. I loved to learn from the day I entered the classroom, and I read as obsessively as the average kindergartner played. I remember being tucked into bed every night either being read to or attempting something on my own; my parent’s preferred tool of discipline soon became restriction from books. Not unlike other youngsters, I was signed up for piano, ballet, tap dancing, swim lessons, and other sports the nearest YMCA was offering at the time. From the first time I dribbled a basketball on the carpeted floors of the gym, however, I was sold.

            Upon once again making a move to my grandparent’s old house (which was also my mother’s childhood home) on twenty-four acres of farmland, I was ecstatic. The old basketball hoop above the garage, the expanse of hidden marsh amongst rolling fields, and a tree house complete with a slide hidden in nearby tree tops left my adventurous self free to continually explore. It was within this farm house of deep-rooted family history that I was encouraged to constantly run free. And, as I found, I enjoyed my independence. The Himalayan and Siamese cats, as well as a loveable boxer, that my family had acquired as pets were more than enough for my company. While we continued to live here, we often visited my grandparents at their new residence on the waterfront of the Puget Sound. Even as the temperatures dropped to freezing, I could be found with a head lamp and goggles, exploring the bottoms of the dark waters.

            All of my childhood seemed to be an exploration of the unknown. In 1996, my mom was introduced to Jesus Christ through an invitation to Bible Study Fellowship International. At what would soon become our home church, she began taking my brother and I to AWANA, a children’s ministry that trains youths in the knowledge of the Bible. I can still barely recall sitting in the small Sunday school room off the larger sanctuary, which also functioned as our gym, telling the pastor that I wanted to “accept Jesus into my heart.” Such typical words, and yet, as I began attending church weekly and memorizing Scripture through AWANA, my faith became established for all eternity. As a result, though, my Catholic friends could not understand why I would no longer participate in the communion of mass, the reciting of Hail Mary, or confessions to the priest. Suddenly, I was the odd duck amongst my peers.

            There is one specific point at which I recall this faith being solidified. When I was around eleven years old, my mom and one of her best friends decided to take myself, my brother, and this woman’s daughter on a road trip to Minnesota. We packed up our black Dodge minivan and began the trek across the expanse of nothing that makes up eastern Washington and Idaho. After our third day of travel, we stopped for the night in Missoula, Montana at a bed and breakfast setting unlike any we had visited the previous days; we would be staying the night in authentic tee-pees. As we crawled into our sleeping bags, however, the small vent in the top of our night’s home revealed bright yellow streaks of light over eerily black skies that were being continually confirmed by loud blasts of thunder. There was no other choice but to move into the family’s small extra bedrooms for the night.

            I was fuming. My mom had been promising me this wilderness adventure ever since I began questioning why she and my dad had never taken our family camping (their only pre-nuptial agreement was that our family would not be an outdoors’ one). So, while my brother slept in the twin bed opposite us, my mom pulled my sobbing face up to the window to wonder at the storms of the night sky. I so clearly remember, even amongst my anger, the clearness of the storm against the backdrop of that dark night. Not long after I had finally drifted off to sleep, cuddled against my mom in the other small twin bed, I was awakened to screaming. In my still groggy state, I could feel the collar of my shirt being pulled towards the floor between the beds. I was quickly jolted from my dreams by the combination of my sudden hoist to the floor, squished between my mom and brother, and an unidentifiable, deafening pounding.

              Between gasping breaths and repeated prayers for my father and grandfather, my mom struggled to pull the nearest mattress over our huddled bodies. In what felt like just a few minutes, there was a knock on the door and we were ushered into the basement by the owners of the house. This young couple and, along with their year-old baby, our friends were huddled around a small television bringing news of this disaster. An unexpected hailstorm, with precipitation the size of baseballs had wiped out trees, cars, and even houses of this small Montana town. When we ventured outside at daylight to explore the damage, not one of the residence’s three cars, nor our minivan had survived—all were totaled, along with the contents of our suitcases within them. This was trivial next to the sight that left us all speechless; the thirty-foot tall, wood beams that had supported our teepees were toppled and mangled into mere splinters.

            Although I don’t necessarily believe that our lives were threatened that night as the hail broke through the glass of our bedroom windows, I knew that we had been saved from amongst the wreckage of those massive tee-pees. If it were up to me, we would have spent that night--without a doubt our last--outside, braving the storm. Had I been in control that night, I would have lost my life and sacrificed the lives of many others. But, because of God’s sovereignty, we were given life unto the morning. This whole experience taught me a powerful lesson: God was in control, not I. Not only was that the unarguable truth of the matter, it was an undeniable blessing. By myself, I would continue to choose darkness and death; with Christ in control, there was the hope of a true, eternal life. While my mortality would carry on with rather normal milestones of childhood, this one night had altered my spiritual awareness.

            As my basketball career continued to grow with competitive teams, numerous camps, and extensive individual training, I soon became aware that I was very unlike other girls my age. My dad and I would spend hours out at the basketball court, until my shirt was soaked and my hands were black, running again and again through different drills. Having a brother eighteen months younger and almost identically my size became my toughest preparation for competition. Before I even arrived at middle school, our local athletic club had become my second home; I was lifting weights alongside my cardio workouts every day after school. On the court, this work paid off. I was the core of our middle school’s small basketball program as a fifth grader and I was competitive amongst the best players at tournaments in Seattle. My parents were already heavily investing in my future with this sport, and achievement—both on the basketball court and in the classroom—became the means of my confidence.

            I wasn’t even interested in pursuing friendships at this point. Sure, I hung out with my class of twenty at recess and there were always the relationships formed from my many basketball teams. But, whenever I had a free second from my training or academics, I wanted to be alone, either reading, writing or exploring. The files of parent’s old computers are overflowing with half-finished Microsoft Word documents that narrate the lives of fictional girls; I authored their stories in an attempt to construct a "normal" lifestyle that seemed far from my own. I never desired the acceptance or affirmation of my peers throughout grade school. I was confident in my parent’s encouragement, my own abilities, and, perhaps most importantly, the young girl I was already becoming in Christ. Things were soon to change, however.

            Even though the sixth through eighth grades were offered at the school I currently attended, my parents had begun to build a house and so enrolled me for middle school in this new district. I arrived on my first day recognizing not a single face, and positively offended that my mom would not allow me to wear my high-tops and knee-length basketball shorts to class. Within this year and the next, however, the thought of such “boy” apparel would become more than a mortifying thought amongst representatives of Abercrombie, Hollister, and Aeropostale. The years I spent first experiencing the ways of public school were awful. I look back with a sour taste in my mouth at the disrespectful way in which I treated myself, my peers, and especially my family.

            I still lacked meaningful friendships, and the “best friend forever” who I poured all of my energies into had begun to introduce me to wearing makeup behind my parent’s back, “dating” every other boy over the phone, and treating those who weren’t as “cool” quite terribly. My family became the brunt of my spiteful attitude, for when I was not ignoring them I turned every encounter into an argument. I had temporarily sidelined the God in whose eyes I was eternally valuable, and I began to treat both others and especially myself in a disposable manner. Almost three years’ worth of early mornings were spent ironing my naturally curly locks into the board straight mirror of my peers, dousing myself with cheap Victoria Secret body spray, mix and matching clothes until I arrived upon the acceptably tight-fitting outfit, and completing the promotion of my appearance with layers of Clinique make-up.

            All of these attempts at perfecting my experience were a shot in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Every morning, as I got ready for the day’s events, I would do so with the lights turned off. I have had my own bathroom from the sixth grade on, so it was not hard to hide from my parents my techniques of self-hatred. I couldn’t stand the image of my own reflection, so I would prepare myself in the dark, looking into the mirror only when absolutely necessary; even then, I wouldn’t be forced to confront, what I believed to be, the ugly reality of my appearance. I ate little during those years as well, convinced that by being the skinniest I could somehow measure up to my peers against other areas where I felt I had no chance. Looking back on pictures, I can hardly believe I had the stamina or energy to do anything at all. Yet, I continued to excel in basketball, and that was where I founded a seemingly unshakable worth.

            During my seventh and eighth grade years at Washington Middle School, I was the star of the girls’ basketball team. Easily racking up at least twenty points per game, I led our team to top in the league and was often even told by my coach to “take it easy.” I didn’t understand anything but competitiveness, though. At the scouting tournaments that consumed my weekends, I was the only girl on my competitive team that wasn’t black, and very often one of the few white girls in the gym. My exterior façade was unbreakable, and I was tough as nails on the court. It was my place of escape from the looming anxieties that I faced amongst other girls my age, where I constantly felt inferior to their appearances and personas. On the brink of high school, I was invited to a clinic known as the “Adidas Phenom” where sixth through eighth graders were already beginning to be scouted  by Division I programs. I had dreams of playing for the Connecticut Huskies one day, and even visited Geno Auriemma’s camp for a week on the east coast.

            I knew I was elite. The pressures I faced to succeed, however, were greatly outweighed by my will to train as well as my sheer athletic gifts. As I entered high school, once again in a new school district and devoid of any familiar faces, the confidence I had in basketball was what I clung to. In the fall of my freshman year at Tumwater High School, while I was still attempting to find my niche and adjust to new classes, I tried out for the basketball team and was given a starting spot on the varsity squad. This was the epitome of my ambitions, the accumulation of all my efforts, and the concentration of all my priorities. I soared in my new position on this team, playing nearly all of the game and averaging up to fifteen points my first few games. We went on to win league and districts, and suffered what was an alarming loss in the state championship game to our rival school. Throughout all of this, I put pressure on myself to maintain my leading role and to live up to the expectations I had set for myself.

            High school itself, meanwhile, had produced a total change in my appearance and attitude. I joined a group of tight-knit friends that had moved up together from a Christian grade school and these women of God keep me grounded in my faith. When, in the spring of my freshman year, I suffered the devastating loss of my grandmother, they were my support amongst the brokenness of my family. My grandma had been a second mother to me, living with us almost a year of junior high and attending every single one of my events. In her mid-sixties, she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the third time and as it spread to her brain over the next months, she developed severe memory loss and disorientation. By the time the disease had completely ravaged her frail body, I was no longer fearful of her death, for she had become almost a complete stranger.

            On June 25^th, 2007, my grandma passed through the gates of heaven. I happened to be in town between ongoing weeks of traveling for basketball and so I gathered with my immediate family, my mother’s only brother, and my grandma’s best friend in the quiet living room of her home. I can recall my mom’s tears of joy over her release from suffering. My emotions, however, were stale. My mom and dad encouraged me to go into her bedroom, where she had passed away in her sleep, promising that it would offer more closure. I reluctantly obeyed. As I gazed upon her pale, lifeless face, her head that sprouted only a few fuzzy hairs, and her silent, flat chest (for she died without either of her breasts), I found nothing but unrest. The realness of my grandma’s death has never quite truly set in. Her sudden and devastating passing has left me still expectant of her attendance at every passing holiday or accomplishment. In some ways, I am still waiting.

            In the world of basketball, things were reaching a point of climax and seemed destined to fall downwards from there. Many times, after practices or games which my father would regularly attend, there would be a screaming match in the kitchen over how “I just wasn’t giving it my all” or “the old Masey has disappeared.” For days at a time, my father and I wouldn’t speak. I was exhausted and spent from maintaining a perfect grade average, finally beginning to integrate myself into a group of friends, and considering my future with basketball. My Type A personality wanted to give myself completely to every activity, but I found that it simply wasn’t possible and, so, the sport I loved became my dread. During the majority of my sophomore season of high school, I was sidelined with stress fractures in my shins and I lost my starting position on the team. After this point, the momentum of my career never regained speed and I was lost in a cloud of disappointment and uncertainty about myself.

            At the end of my junior year of high school, as my team was once again preparing for an appearance in our district’s tournament, I was teased by my friends about the also upcoming “Tolo” dance: a date for which the girls are supposed to ask guys. I had yet to attend one of these formal dances and had promised myself upon entering high school that I would not re-live the horrors of middle school dating. And, so, my typical and easy answer remained: “No thanks. And I’ll be at the tournament that Saturday anyways.” The week before the dance was scheduled, my team played in a winner-to-state, loser-out game against the rivals that had stolen our dreams of a state championship two years earlier. However, we had beaten them in both regular season games and were heavily favored to return to the state tournament. 
           The game that cold Saturday of March was an absolute blur. I had plenty of my own excuses as to why we didn’t get the win: I had lost my childhood dog to a sudden death the day before, my temperatures were running with a high fever, and every one of my free throw shots spun in and out of the hoop. Little did I know, though, this loss broke the ground for a completely new path in my life. From this point on and into my final senior season, I played with the lingering reminder that basketball was no longer my place of security. I felt no confidence in myself on the court anymore; I became an assist queen, but would never shoot, fearful for missing what had always seemed a simple target. Although I continued to play competitively and communicate with university coaches, my fire had burnt out. Without that essential flame, I knew that there was no way I could endure hours upon hours in years more of training. My dream of playing college basketball ended abruptly. In a sense, I still don’t have closure about this decision.

            Because I was no longer going to be in eastern Washington the following weekend, my friends' taunts about the upcoming dance suddenly turned into realistic persuasions to ask someone. I was not convinced, however. There was not a single desire in me to spend the night pressed closely to just any awkward high school boy, and especially not after the events of the past few days. Besides, no one had caught my attention. Well, there was one boy. But we had just recently become acquainted and our “friendship” was nothing more than surface-level conversations and some teasing. He would never see me as any more than some nerdy, blunt, basketball-obsessed gym rat (that I was). I secretly plotted my methods of popping the question of Tolo to this guy, but my nerves only took me so far as to mention the idea. My friends were overly supportive and ran with the proposals as soon as they were off my tongue, but my confidence in any area, and especially that with a relationship of the opposite sex, was nonexistent. The week rolled by into Friday, the day before the dance, and I didn’t make a move.

            If I had known how one afternoon would so drastically alter the course of my life, I still question whether I would choose to relive it similarly, should I go back. As I made my way out to the parking lot after the last bell of my sixth period class on Friday, I saw in the distance my white Jeep Grand Cherokee covered with colorful sticky notes in the shape of the letters T-O-L-O-? My dream was standing in full figure next to this display, awaiting my giddy confirmation. A month later, after a night that seemed to sparkle with fantasy (and not from Red Robin or the high school cafeteria’s DJ), I was dating dream boy. For the first sixth months of our relationship, I had to convince myself past the sound of my alarm clock that I was not dreaming; I was surely living every girl’s fairy tale. That summer, I became enraptured with love for this figure that was so sweet, so genuine, so caring, and so complementary to my odd, quirky personality. We spent nearly every moment together for the next year and half, as our hearts grew into one.

            Our relationship was not without its flaws, however. His extremely outgoing personality confronted my still secluded, independent one with jealousies and insecurities. It was my first time in a “real” relationship, where he was somewhat experienced. I had to fight for time to spend with him amongst all the activities of our senior year. Through it all, he was my best friend, constantly by my side and encouraging me; when I was with him, I had no doubts. This is the man I would marry. When I pictured my wedding day, his face was standing opposite mine. We broke up almost a year into our relationship, and it absolutely crushed me. A month later, we decided we would try again, and for the next seven months we spent precious time together, planning what life would look like as we crossed the stage of graduation together and then continued our education on at Point Loma. Even after all the time that had passed, I could not escape the feelings that I somehow did not deserve all of this. As the girl who had wanted to be single, I had gained the envied. I was still living the dream.

            The new-found confidence I gained in this relationship spurred me on to new and exciting passions. Instead of consuming every moment of my spring and summer with basketball tournaments, I decided to do the unthinkable: try out for cheerleading. To the surprise of many, not the least of which myself, I made the varsity football squad. Adjusting from the girl who had sat in the stands and mocked these performers to being willing to do the ridiculous in front of the entire school in order to promote spirit ironically humbled me entirely to the point of an unshakable confidence in myself. As I embraced a more “girly” side of myself, I realized that I could interact with all different types of people. I didn’t have to isolate myself or associate my entire being with solely other athletes. Cheerleading, for the six months that it lasted, birthed a new season of adventure and self-exploration in my life.

            About two months before we set off for college, the youth group that my boyfriend and I both attended traveled down to San Francisco for a week of homeless ministry. It was there, as I still wrestled with the insecurities and doubts that had been haunting me since the halls of middle school and the failures of my basketball career, I was hit by a wall: abruptly, he told me we weren’t going to be together any more. Numb, haunted by the pain of his eyes and suffocating on the shambles of my future, I pushed myself through the next through days of our trip. Once I got home, I ignored my gaping wounds by preparing for the nearing journey to San Diego. As I finally departed my rainy residence for the Sunshine State and settled into my home away from home, it became easier to consume myself with the distractions of meeting new people and exploring a new city. Yet, underneath it all, my heart still ached.

            And now, I am in repair. The face that stood so surely across from mine in fantasies about my "big day" is now a blank space. My journey to Point Loma and the events leading up to it were never what I would have planned or imagined in the wildest, but I’m learning that devastation can hold promise. It’s alright to feel pain, to mourn, to wonder at the significance of one small conversation. If I had not been this vulnerable entering college, I don’t know that I could have ever learned to rely on faith alone. I don’t know that I would have met the people I call my closest friends. I don’t know that God could have so clearly revealed himself within the dreams I held for my future. Because I no longer have this man in my life to rely on as my best friend, mom, and dad all in one, Christ has truly become my beginning and end. In every way, my heart break has been a testimony to him picking up the pieces of my little life, one by one, and rearranging them into a creature I could have never imagined myself becoming: one truly in His own image.

            So here my story stands, but not ends—8:55 PM on the Tuesday of April 12^th, 2011—a month out from the end of my freshman year of college. I am soaking in the bliss of my first tastes of independence and tentatively planning for the next few years, yet, I hold tightly to the fabrics of my story. I am forever intertwined with these events, a somewhat erratic mixture of the people and experiences of my past. As I continue to move forward in my life, with the hiccups and peculiarities of the unexpected that it never fails to deliver, the foundational weave of my last nineteen years will not be lost. Above all else, I believe that nothing in my later years can stand detrimental to the eternal cloth that Christ is sewing within me. This isn’t really my story, anyways. It has always been His. From the first stitch in my mother’s womb until my last breath, He will not relent in His pursuit to form me into a beautiful garment for Himself. Glory be to God forever.