When I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade, I was in a video that went viral.  It was a crazy experience.  But let’s start at the beginning.

Imagine walking into your favorite department store thinking that you are there just to go shopping. Well, I decided to try something new in Marshalls which involved taking the “high and fast” way out.

The normal way to exit Marshalls is by taking the escalator down, which seemed very boring to me. Instead of going down the escalator, I decided to slide down the ramp next to it, which had a nice hard piece of glass at the end of it. My best friend Kaylee was with me, and she decided to record me going down the ramp because she thought it might be funny. At first I wasn’t all for it, but then I thought, “hey, maybe this will be funny, but I doubt anything funny is going to happen.” It was pretty hot outside that day, too, so I only had a T-shirt and black leggings on.

So as I got up onto the ramp, I said to myself, “this will be fun!” I started sliding down the ramp, and all of a sudden I felt myself going faster. I knew this was not a good sign at all. As I was almost to the bottom, I tried to put my hands out in front of my face to protect myself from hitting the glass, but that wasn’t much help. I banged right into it, and all I heard was the glass breaking because of how hard my head hit it. I laid still for a second, not remembering what happened. I feel like I may have blacked out for a second, which was pretty crazy. Eventually I got up, with my best friend laughing hysterically at what I just did, while still recording me! I then ended up running out of the store because of how embarrassed I was, and I tried to find my way back to the car. My friend thought I was doing this all for show, but I was just really confused. In the video, you can hear me saying, “this wasn’t supposed to happen,” because it really wasn’t!

That same day Kaylee decided to post our video on Facebook, because it was hilarious. We got almost 300 likes in 24 hours. Kaylee then thought it would be funny if we sent the video into World Star, which is a website for funny videos. I wasn’t too fond of posting it anywhere, but I realized how cool it would be to actually make it onto the web. The very next day my video was on the front page of World Star, with thousands of views.

Then I went to school, and people in my classes were coming up to me asking about my video and asking why I would do something as foolish as I did. At first I thought it was cool that everybody thought I was famous, but soon more days flew by and people were still talking about my video. The security guards in my middle school and lots of kids I didn’t even know were asking me questions like, “what made you smash your face like that?,” and “did you know the glass was there?” I was constantly getting asked these questions, which kind of got me upset. Some of my high-school-aged neighbors were also talking about it, and I learned that their friends were all talking about in class. I felt like the laughingstock of Stamford, but I knew I wasn’t. I knew this video was going to follow me for the rest of my life, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Soon a couple more weeks went by, and people weren’t talking about my video as much. Then my friend got a message on her Facebook account from a producer that worked for Tru TV. They were making a new reality show called “Tru TV’s Top 20 Funniest” and they asked if we would give them permission to use the video on the show. This really stunned me because I would never believe that an actual TV show would want some foolish girl sliding down an escalator on their show. He also told my friend that we would both get paid for our video being used. I thought this was really exciting. Soon more and more TV shows were asking us, like Tosh.0! I grew out of my phase and realized that this video wasn’t something to be embarrassed about; it was something that happened for a reason and just a joke. It was hard at first but now it’s something I just look back at and laugh about.