Three Wishes

Before the First Wish

I was never a person who had believed in signs but these past nine years have proven to me time and time again that I don't know shit.

It'd be good for you to get the context of my situation before I ramble on about my life. My name's Ryan Richetti and by the middle of 2009, on the cusp of starting 8th grade, I figured a couple of things out about myself.

1. I wanted to be a writer. To tell stories to people both real and fictional. Ever since elementary school, I'd write stories on Microsoft Word (yeah I'm a Windows guy) for hours on end. I'd miss quite a few meals scaring my parents but after seeing how much I wrote they relaxed about it.

2. I'm an apprehensive smartass that doesn't like to make mistakes. I'm a frequent traveler of the path of least resistance so I always listened to what my parents told me. I had an older sister Lexi who loved to learn things for herself so I'd just take internal notes of what she did right or wrong and proceeded with my life.

And my favorite:

3. I was very much gay. It took me a while longer than I guess most people to figure it out. I had crushes on girls throughout my schooling years but really it was just that I wanted to be around them not "with" them. Throughout seventh grade, I really started questioning my sexuality and if there was one thing I knew it'd be that I should be honest with myself regardless of the consequences. I didn't want to pull other people into a situation where I'd be lying to them.

I never really had a "queer" influence so this journey I was embarking on was definitely going to go against most of my tendencies but I guess that's life. You can try to pave a road and then a tornado will rip every piece out forcing you to start over again.

There was a major complication to my situation that prevented me from simply "coming out": I was in Boy Scouts. A quick history lesson to those who are just tuning into my life; this part of the story is going down in 2010, in three years BSA administration would create a law that would prevent discrimination of gay scouts. So at this point, I'm in the hot seat. I wanted to learn more about myself but I'd be damned if the work I put in thus far to get the rank of Eagle was going to get disrupted or even destroyed because of my sexuality.

If you take nothing else from learning about me just know this. I do not like to lose and I don't like not following through with personal goals. I have a mind that achingly nags at me to get things done and because of this, my sexuality was shoved deep into the closet.

Now that we've got the general gist of my personality down let's go for the physical features. At that point in time, I was just a little bit shorter than I am now so let's say I was 5'7'. Seems solid. I had messy wavy latino hair though to this day I still don't know how to properly style. Brown eyes that in just the right amount of lighting looked good. I was pretty tanned from camping every month, which I dearly miss doing. I, at the time, wore thin wire glasses but have since upgraded to glasses that are ginormous. #ZeroRegrets A lot of people say that they're classic librarian frames but it's such a relief to see more of my surroundings without effort on my part.

To be honest, the only thing I shared with my TV show counterparts was my sassy personality and my inability to control my facial expressions. I always aspired to dress nice but it never stuck right. Pants were the bane of my existence and cargo shorts were BAE. Not having to carry anything around was great.

I didn't have the full of effort twink bod. My legs, to this day, are still my killer asset and they were muscled because of all the hiking I did in Scouting. Besides that, I didn't work out and took my high metabolism for granted (you lose it sooner than you expect kids). Just like the rest of the world, I felt like all of my friends were gorgeous while I was an ugly duckling just waiting for its glow up.

Welp, that's more than enough information for now. If I figure out any other details that are important I'll just add it to the next update.