C. Jane — A brief synopsis of my life by way of introduction

Editor's note: The Deseret News has invited C. Jane Kendrick, Utah resident and creator of the popular blog cjanerun.com, to write a weekly column. Cjanerun.com and accompanying blogs C. Jane's Guide to Provo and Dear C. Jane draw readers from all over the world. For this first installment, we asked C. Jane to introduce herself to our readers.

I was born in 1977, and as my mother melodramatically tells it, I was born during one of Denver’s biggest snowstorms ever.

I was birthed by barometric pressure. It’s fitting.

It was my second attempt at coming to Earth. My first was abruptly ended when — again as my mother persuasively narrates — I decided Earth wasn’t ready for me. This resulted in my mother’s first and only miscarriage. When I did show up, I became the sixth of an eventual nine children.

Life was somewhat uneventful until I failed the hearing test in kindergarten. Doctors found I had a hole in my right eardrum. Though they took some skin from my hip to surgically patch things up, by the time I was 14 it cracked again. Two things followed: surgery made me miss trying out for the high school soccer team and I slowly began losing hearing until only 5 percent remained in that ear.

(I am one of the many success stories of bodily compensation, though. My left ear can hear the tinkling of a toe ring bell in Malaysia. I actually get to choose whether I want to hear or not by simply plugging my left ear. This ease of selective hearing is akin to a super power. I use it to save the world.)

When high school was over I decided I wanted to be a writer. Having been raised one busy intersection away from the BYU campus, I applied and was rejected. My dad decided we hadn’t tried hard enough to get accepted and crossed that intersection to see whom he could persuade.

He begged, pleaded and petitioned whoever would hear him. Finally, in parental desperation he promised them I’d “make them proud” and “be somebody someday — a real writer.”

But they rejected me again. And three more times after that.

So I went to the U. of U. You know, because it would have me.

I eventually graduated from Utah Valley University (then UVSC) in behavioral science and took an intense job with Provo School District teaching the youth of tomorrow. That was so long ago they are no longer the youth of tomorrow but the leaders of today.