“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.” (Robert Frost). For me two words sum up my life: food allergies. I was born with some and as I've gotten older more have developed. People always ask me “What do you eat,” when I tell them what I’m allergic to, and I don’t know what to say because there is so much that I can and can’t eat. It’s hard to say.

When I was born, my mom was told that I was very allergic to dairy and since then allergies just kept appearing and I was beginning to be very limited to the foods I was able to eat. I remember my mom telling me the first time she realized I was allergic to peanuts. She said that when I was about two years old, she tried to feed me peanut butter and then all of a sudden I started breaking out in hives all over my body. From there I started having anaphylactic reactions to tree nuts and eggs.

After a while my mom took both my sister (who has allergies also, but she doesn't have as many) and I to an allergist. We both had to get allergy shots for a while. The shots really only helped with our outdoor, “natural” allergies but they didn't do much to help with the food allergies that we had. The doctor told my mom “The only way to help with food allergies is to start feeding them the food little by little, a larger amount each time.” We never ended up doing that. I didn’t want to eat something that could cause me to swell up and suffocate. I have an epi-pen that I use if I eat something I can’t eat. I have to stab myself in the side of my thigh with the epi-pen. My mom has been told she should have used the epi-pen on me before but she never did.

Having allergies all these years has been one of those things where at first I felt like I missed out on a lot of things, but now I just see it as something I have to deal with in my life. I always get told "Oh, you're missing out!". I’ve just gotten used to not being able to eat anything, I don’t even care anymore about what certain culinary phenomena   taste like, I’ve just moved on. Hopefully some day I will overcome my food allergies.