You know how when you’re little and, in school, everyone has these super cool lunch boxes? Some have the latest movie character, while others just have cool designs. There’s always one, or maybe a few kids, though, with just a plain old brown paper bag. I always feel bad for those kids, because while all the other kids are talking about the cool new lunch boxes they got over the summer, these kids are kind of just there. Now maybe they join in the conversation occasionally, but they are never truly apart of it. I often wonder what the background story is of those kids. I mean everyone has a story, even the kids with the cool lunch boxes, but the ones without the fancy boxes have a “special” story. I can attest to this because I was one of those kids with the brown paper bag.

When I was little, I had a dog named Charlie. Charlie was a brown and black hound dog which means he wasn’t the cutest dog out there. No one really liked Charlie; my parents and siblings, all just kind of acted like he didn’t exist. Charlie and I had a special bond, though. I know that seems weird considering he’s a dog, but Charlie was the only one who understood what I was going through. He understood what it was like to feel invisible. When you’re a seven-year-old boy like I was, it’s not the best feeling to feel like you don’t exist. In school I was the kid who sat alone at lunch and who never had a partner for arts and crafts. I was the kid who other kids went out of their way just to avoid. So, when I went home every day from school, I went to Charlie and when I was having a bad day, I would tell him that it was a brown paper bag kind of day.

I knew what it meant to be the ONLY kid with a brown paper bag. It meant I was the kid that people would think of as poor and gross. Now they weren’t wrong about the poor part; I did grow up in poverty, and it stayed that way until I moved out. My childhood was not an easy one, but it wasn’t because of the abusive dad, the bullies for siblings, or the living in poverty; it was feeling like a brown paper bag kid. No one ever came up to talk to me before forming an opinion; they see the paper bag and right away decide I’m not good enough.

When I was about nine my mom got diagnosed with stage four melanoma. Now talk about a brown paper bag kind of day. Besides Charlie, my mom was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had and now she was leaving. This was the most pain I had ever felt. I wondered why; why should a nine-year-old have to go through all of this?

Days went on and my mom got sicker and sicker. There was no sign of her getting better at all. That’s when I knew that the one human, I considered a friend would no longer be there. The day before my mom died, she told me something that has stuck to this day. She said, “Although it may seem like you have the worst possible life, I’m sure there is someone out there in the world who has it harder.”

In that moment that was the last thing I wanted to hear, because I did honestly think I had the worst life. As life went on though, I realized that I was lucky to have that brown paper bag because some people don’t even have that. Yes, it would’ve been nice to have a fancy lunch box, but at the end of the day I was proud to realize there’s more to life than the thing that holds your lunch.