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  I didn’t fully feel her loss until I started to get serious about my YouTube channel around six months after she died. No one in my family quite understood what it was all about, but I knew that she would have. She was always so attuned to the world as it changed around her, and I know that she would have embraced the new digital era with the same enthusiasm and curiosity that she did everything else. When people made fun of my videos I swear I could hear her far away in the background, cheering me on and giving me the support I needed to continue.

  When loved ones die they may be gone in body, but they never really leave you. They live on in your memories, and the closer you were to them, the more you can feel them supporting you when you need advice or comfort. Not in a creepy ghost way, but more like a guardian angel looking over you, with a little voice in the back of your head that tells you to keep going when your confidence is dwindling, or you’re hurt or sad. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the memory of Aunt Vickie’s laugh that can get me on my feet again if I’m down. This made me realize that even the smallest things you do in your life can have the power to change or help others. I know I’m not the only person in this world who was affected by Aunt Vickie’s incredible spirit. Because of her, I try to give some of those good vibes back to others in my YouTube videos.

  The other big thing I learned from Aunt Vickie’s death is to cherish every second of every moment that you get with someone you love. That last Easter we had together still haunts me. If only I hadn’t been so wrapped up in myself I would have had one more awesome memory of us hanging out together. The fact is, no one is ever too old to dye Easter eggs.

  CHALLENGE

  #CRAFTSFORRICKY

  Spend quality time with a loved one creating an arts and crafts project together. Introduce whoever your own personal Aunt Vickie is and show the finished piece!

  CHALLENGE

  #STRANGERLANGUAGEFORRICKY

  Approach a stranger and start speaking to him or her in a totally made-up language.

  SELF-EMPOWERMENT

  By the time I turned five, it was pretty clear to my parents that when I called my sister “Tawa” instead of Tara, it was the result of a speech impediment and not an attempt to hold on to my youth by speaking baby talk. I was basically Elmer Fudd with a full head of hair.

  The condition is called rhotacism (try saying that with a speech impediment). I won’t bore you with all of the physiological reasons behind it, but suffice it to say other kids my age weren’t too nice about its effect on my voice. My biggest memory from kindergarten isn’t learning how to read, it’s the other children sneering, “Why do you talk like that?” before walking away and building castles out of wooden blocks without me.

  It took most of elementary school to train my tongue to find the right spot in my mouth to form R sounds. Every other day I’d get called out of class to go to speech therapy, where I’d be given a list of about fifty words to repeat over and over. I had to memorize the muscle movement in my tongue that for whatever reason didn’t come naturally to my mouth. I’d make my way through workbooks of increasing difficulty, and spend time on my own at home practicing words like “repeater,” “radar,” and “reader.”

  The main thing that sucked about the process was my embarrassment over even having to go to speech therapy. I lied about where I was going when I got called out of a normal class, often elaborately. Why anyone believed that I got to skip out on math because I’d been asked by the principal to build a special float for a parade is beyond me. Students probably knew I was making the whole thing up, especially since neither the float nor a parade ever materialized. I don’t want to promote lying, but look, like most kids, I just wanted to fit in. I was beyond embarrassed about it so I just made up stories as an easy way out of having to explain anything. There was nothing worse than being called on to answer a question in class. The main subjects you learn in school are literally called “the Three Rs.” Or as I knew them, “the Three Ws.”

  By sixth grade, I’d worked long and hard enough to get rid of the problem. When I spoke, I knew where my tongue was supposed to land in order to make the correct sounds. I finally talked like a normal person! My classmates basically forgot that I’d ever had a problem speaking. But then disaster struck—my braces.

  My teeth had always been a little off. Nothing super rugged or anything, but my top row didn’t align with the bottom at all, and as I grew older, the divide grew bigger. So instead of just straightening my teeth out, the braces also shifted the shape of my jaw line. An unintentional side effect was that my tongue now slipped off my top teeth, creating what seemed like a lisp, but technically wasn’t a normal, natural one. My braces warped my teeth, so after years and years of fixing one speech problem, I was suddenly slapped with another, and I had to start a whole new course of speech therapy! But I was never able to quite shake this one. These days it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be, but obviously anyone who has seen one of my videos knows it’s there. In the early days of my YouTube channel, I got a lot of nasty comments about it, but years of hearing taunts in person had pretty much desensitized me to anything that some loser who is too scared to even show his real name has to say about the way I talk. Today, it’s still the main subject of any kind of hate comments I get on my videos. They don’t affect me at all, though. I don’t know if it’s because I’m just so used to them by now, but more likely it’s because I’ve learned to accept that part of myself.

  I’ve made peace with my voice. It makes me unique. The way I talk is part of who I am, and learning to love yourself is one of the most important things to do if you want to live a healthy, happy, and productive life. My voice hasn’t stopped me from shooting videos, singing, or making friends.

  I’ve got too much that I want to accomplish to let something as basic as a speech issue affect my goals. Everyone has physical traits that they can’t change, and everyone has something about themselves that they are self-conscious about. I can guarantee you that even the most seemingly perfect people you know have something that they hate about themselves. Insecurity is a natural part of life, as normal as feeling happy or sad. It sucks that we live in a culture designed to breed more physical anxiety than past generations ever had to deal with, and while I think that social media definitely plays a huge part in that, I think it can also be a major force for good. Look at campaigns like NOH8 or It Gets Better—they take the same platforms that can cause people to feel bad about themselves and turn them into safe spaces that celebrate individuality.

  If there’s even just one kid out there who has a speech issue similar to mine and is being bullied because of it, I hope that he’ll see one of my videos and realize he can move far beyond letting idiots get to him. The fact that I have a singing career should show people that a speech impediment doesn’t have to get in the way of their dreams. It’s not how it sounds that’s important when you say something, it’s the words that come out of your mouth that matter.

  CHALLENGE

  #CONFIDENTFORRICKY

  Tell a story about something you used to be insecure about and how you managed to overcome those feelings and be more confident.

  CHALLENGE

  #SPINTHEBOTTLEFORRICKY

  Play spin the bottle, but instead of kissing people, set up a circle of the nastiest foods you can find.

  SOCIAL

  In ninth grade, our high school guidance counselors told us we needed to go ahead and choose what we wanted our major to be in college. Which is just insane. You might think you know what you want to do with the rest of your life at age fourteen, but it usually changes, and often on a daily basis.

  When it finally came time for me to actually apply, I was just getting into YouTube so it hadn’t occurred to me at all that it could be a career. So I took the easy way out and decided to follow in my father’s footsteps and study pharmacy. Auburn University, which is about two hours southeast of Hoover, offered it as a major. I was good at math and science, which I knew would help, bu
t even better, a whole bunch of my friends ended up getting into the same school as well. Including Mason! I figured I’d have a built-in support system.

  Mason and I decided to be roommates, but neither of us had any desire to live in a dorm. Fortunately, the school offered campus apartments that were set up more like town houses, and we were lucky enough to be able to afford one. (I really, really didn’t want to have to share a bathroom with an entire floor of other dudes. Gross!)

  You know how everyone says that college is the time when you make the friends you will have for life? Not so much in my case. I joined band because that’s what I knew and loved, and I went to classes and got good grades, but I didn’t have much of a social life. Scratch that, I had ZERO social life.

  College marching band wasn’t the same as high school. For one thing, it was way bigger, which made it harder to connect and bond with people. I got invited to a few parties, but since I had never gone to any in high school, I couldn’t imagine how I was supposed to act at a college rager. Keg stand? Funneling? They sounded like advanced yoga poses to me. There were also always parties happening around our apartment complex, and Mason would try to get me to go out with him, but I much preferred staying in, making videos and talking with my YouTube friends. I just didn’t like being around drunken strangers—they were loud and obnoxious and every time I saw someone puking on the quad it freaked me out.

  It didn’t take long for me to drift away from my high school friends who also attended Auburn. They quickly formed new social circles and started to discover themselves. All normal stuff, and while it made me a little sad I was also happy for them because whenever I did see them around campus they looked like they were having so much fun. I didn’t hold any sort of grudge against them for moving on, mainly because I knew I was the one holding myself back.

  There was one friendship I did regret losing, though. Around the middle of the year, Mason and his girlfriend got more and more serious. As I kept declining his invitations to hang out with them, he started to spend more and more time at her apartment. On the one hand: Score! I now had the place to myself most of the time. But on the other, I was totally alone. Mason and I started to drift apart even more, especially after he quit band after our freshman year. After that, I rarely saw him at all.

  I thought maybe I could find friends at the gym since I was still making sure to work out a lot, but I quickly realized that there was a chain gym located much closer to my apartment than the one on campus, where I would have actually met other students. So that eliminated another possibility for meeting other college kids.

  I’m not that great when it comes to decorating, and our apartment always looked pretty sparse. I didn’t hang anything on the walls, so when Mason decided to unofficially permanently move in with his girlfriend, the place felt even more barren. He was still paying rent, but I suddenly had the entire town house to myself 24/7. I’d sit alone in the living room, listening to the sound of music thumping through the walls next door, and feel, well, not lonely exactly. It was more that I knew emphatically that something was missing. I wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t just my lack of friends. It was about a lack of interest in life itself, which is infinitely more depressing. It’s not like I was suicidal or anything, I just knew I had accidentally entered onto a path that wasn’t meant for me. I was doing fine in my pharmacy classes, but they bored me to tears. The idea that I might have to spend the rest of my life working behind a counter at a drugstore, counting out heart medicine pills while customers screamed at me about their health insurance issues from the other side of the counter, was totally unacceptable. And forget trying to become close to anyone within that major—everyone was so dedicated to studying that none of them seemed to be looking for new friends either. I needed to make a change.

  So I started to put a plan into action. I changed my major to film, hoping that I’d meet more people who liked the same sorts of things I did. That didn’t exactly work out either, though. The program was all about technical stuff that I already knew how to do. I realized my mistake within the first week—I wanted to be in front of the camera, not behind it. Even though it seemed almost immediately like another misstep, the important thing was that I took action. I recognized that I was sad and instead of wallowing around and eating doughnuts and closing all the blinds I made a conscious decision to change the things that were bumming me out. And even though I still didn’t make any new friends, it did start me off on the right course to find some. Without being a film major, I never would have gotten my film internship, which was what finally got me to Los Angeles. If you feel like you’ve got no friends, change things up! Put yourself out there by joining extracurricular activities. If you hate your school, look for other places in your town that will expose you to new people, such as a community theater. The most important thing to realize, though, is that if that doesn’t work, all you have to do is try something else. Life paths are rarely a straight line, and you just have to keep moving. You never know where you’ll pick up a friend along the way.

  I just realized that’s essentially the plot of The Wizard of Oz, but trust me, it’s true.

  CHALLENGE

  #ACTINGFORRICKY

  Re-create your favorite moment from your favorite film! But if you go with that “I’m the king of the world” scene from Titanic, DON’T do it on an actual boat. Play safe, people!

  CHALLENGE

  #MASSAGEFORRICKY

  Offer to give strangers a free back massage.

  RANDOM

  This next story is more mildly pathetic than sad, but it was a big part of my formative years. You know how everyone has their own way of reacting to stressful situations? Some people bite their fingernails; others fidget a lot, tug nervously at their hair, or shuffle their feet, which can look kind of endearing and cute. But my method was definitely just gross. For years, I used to spontaneously puke any time I was nervous or had anxiety about anything.

  It started on the first day of junior high. As soon as my mom pulled up in front of the school and I saw all these teenagers hanging out in front of the four giant white columns that framed the stern brick building, I panicked and felt the first waves of nausea hit me. There were so many people, all of them much older and infinitely cooler than me. Deep breaths, I told myself.

  I managed to keep it together until first period. I slid into my assigned seat next to a girl named Jasmine whom I vaguely knew from elementary school. I felt relieved to see a somewhat familiar face, since all my friends had been placed in the other class. I gave her a wobbly grin as we stood up to say the Pledge of Allegiance. She ignored me, but not for long.

  I got as far as “to the flag” before I spontaneously erupted my breakfast all over Jasmine and her obviously brand-new, first-day-of-school outfit. My own, as well, but I didn’t care so much about that. I ran from the room to the sounds of kids screaming, laughing, and making generally grossed-out noises. I tried to contain all the bile and bits of pancake dribbling off my body but left an incriminating trail down the hallway behind me, my very first walk of shame. I made it to the bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and emptied the rest of my stomach. Jasmine, if you’re reading this, I’m so sorry for ruining your first day of middle school.

  Fortunately, this one kid named David, whom I later became really good friends with, came to check on me in the bathroom and walked me back to class. I barely knew him at that point, and it meant a lot. Thank you for rescuing me, David!

  The next year, I woke up on the first day of school filled with dread and a feeling like there was a tiny boxing match going on in my stomach. I made sure not to eat breakfast so that there would be nothing for me to puke once I got to campus, but I stupidly took a big drink from the water fountain as I entered the school. The liquid soon spouted right back up, but I made it to the bathroom in time. The next year, I made sure to not even drink water, but still spewed the previous night’s dinner (spaghetti, as I was reminded) right before first period. School was literally maki
ng me gag.

  I hoped this would all be over by the time I reached high school. I had three years of middle school behind me to prepare myself for the fear of facing a new year. Nope. I didn’t even make it past the front door of Hoover High, and instead christened the building by upchucking all over the flagpole. Luckily, no one was around from the day I puked on Jasmine, so I was able to tell the kids who saw me do it that I had a stomach bug. Which made them avoid me anyway, but at least it was because they thought I was contagious, and not a loser who couldn’t handle stress.

  This continued for about another year and a half. Any time I had to do something important, like audition for band or tennis, I’d feel that old familiar seasick wave and make it to the bathroom in time to spew. It was my routine when it came to any sort of challenge. I had to puke it out before I’d duke it out.

  I can’t really remember the last time it happened, but I know it stopped around the middle of high school. By that point I’d made a bunch of friends, I had band, I was on the tennis team. Which makes me think that all of that vomiting amounted to nothing more than an extreme physical reaction to a fear of being alone and not accepted. Which are totally normal things to feel, especially during big moments like the first day of school or an audition. For some reason my body took it into overdrive, and while that wasn’t really in my control, what was in my control was steeling my nerves and putting myself out there in order to make those feelings of inadequacy go away.