Feed your head – Writing origins and the pneumonia incident

Hello J-T readers, my name is Kyle Meddles. I know I cropped up in the paper about seven months ago and have yet to introduce myself, so here we go. I grew up in Marysville and have lived here my whole life. I attended Fairbanks Local Schools and graduated in 2019. After that, I went to college at The Ohio State University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. I drifted in a state of limbo for around a year, writing short-stories, doing odd-jobs like DoorDash and getting roped into a cruddy sales gig that I despised, until I saw an ad in the paper for a position at the Marysville Journal-Tribune.

I made up my mind early in college that I wanted to write for a living. My teachers always told me I had a knack for it, and I enjoyed it well enough. However, my decision to become a writer always felt like it was in the books.

The origins of how I got into writing can be traced back to the year 2002 when I was a two-and-a-half-year-old baby. Little did I know, most babies on average start saying their first words around 12-18 months of age, which is something my mother must have realized when little Kyle had not spoken for 30 months. However, before I get into more on the whole not-talking situation I need to expand a little bit on my family, because they play a key part in this origin story.

Mom was always the one to catch on when something was wrong with my brother and I. A great example of this is the pneumonia incident. My mom had been out of town on a work trip for the week, which left Dad as our only barrier between life and death. The good news was that everyone was alive and Mom was on her way home, the bad news was that I was about to flop down on the kitchen floor with a fever as my dad watched the Blue Jackets game in the other room. Apparently, I timed my theatrics right as Mom arrived home, scooped me up in her arms, gave Dad a piece of her mind and took me to the hospital.

I did not just bring this up to throw my dad under the bus as Mom has taken on that duty for years. On the contrary, up until I assumed the fetal position in the kitchen I was playing quietly in my room, so my dad was left a bit baffled when he realized I was sick. The important takeaway from this story is my older brother’s role well after the pneumonia incident. After the sickness had passed, I asked my brother “what gave me pneumonia?” He told me that it was because I liked the smell of gasoline, so I needed to stop smelling and breathing in gasoline. I believed him, and I was holding my breath at gas stations for longer than I care to admit. Which brings everything back to what the doctor’s said when Mom brought me in for my silent treatment. They said that I was not talking because my brother was talking for me. Then it all made sense. My confidant, my advisor and my Disney-villain henchman, no wonder I believed my brother so easily. He was planting seeds of trust as early as 2002, which would end up sprouting into a gullible younger brother that plugged his nose at gas stations.

All that to say that eventually I did start talking, but not all that much. Writing always felt preferable to me, and obviously 30-month-old me knew the benefits of silence, so who am I to judge.

-Kyle Meddles is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.