Dylan's Story

Seventeen year old Dylan, a senior in our Cincinnati Affiliate, was a quiet kid. And he had been for a very long time.  

“I was really reserved and shy for most of my life,” he says—not surprising, considering the chaos and trauma of his early years.       

“My parents have been divorced for as long as I’ve been alive,” he says. “My mom is legally disabled, so that meant my dad was the only one who could bring in income. Money was a huge issue in our family. We were always hopping from place to place because we couldn’t afford the rent. Lots of times we ended up staying with people we knew, like friends or relatives, because we couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. Sometimes it was me, my mom, and my sister all crammed into the same bed or couch. Sometimes we got kicked out of wherever we were staying. Sometimes violently.”

            Luckily for Dylan, when he did withdraw, he found a rich inner life to sustain him. His own imagination and creativity provided a safe haven from the buffeting of his outer life. He turned to self-expression—drawing, writing poetry, and music became his refuges.

But his tendency to withdraw into himself didn’t earn him many friends.

“I got bullied a lot at school,” he says, “and I learned early on how to make myself so I learned how to stay inside myself and how to make myself invisible,” he says.

He came to Boys Hope Girls Hope at the age of 12, after his mother spoke to a neighbor who also had a child in the program. Suddenly, Dylan remembers, “there was, like, a thousand phone calls and a lot of activity, and there I was in the program. It was kind of surreal for me.”

Once inside Boys Hope Girls Hope, his transformation didn’t occur overnight.

“He was a nice kid, polite,” said his executive director, John van Gilse, “but way inside himself. You’d ask him how things were, and he’d say, ‘Fine,’ and then mumble something under his breath and disappear.”

But at the age of 15, something happened to him that changed his life forever.

“He was always pretty skinny,” says van Gilse, “but then, all of a sudden, he got REALLY skinny. He became emaciated. I looked at him one day and I thought, ‘This kid’s going to die unless we get him into the hospital.’”

Dylan had come with Krohn’s Disease, a chronic, extremely painful and frequently misdiagnosed inflammation of the digestive tract. Left untreated, the disease can be fatal. He was taken to the hospital, hydrated, and fed intravenously.

“It was a near death experience for me,” says Dylan. “In the hospital, they told me about someone my age who’d gotten Krohn’s two years before I had it. They didn’t know what it was when he had it. And he died. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow, if I’d had it two years ago, I might have been dead.’ So the timing kind of saved me.”

But it wasn’t the timing of the disease alone.

“When I was in the hospital, all these people came to see me and bring me gifts. All the people from Boys Hope. All these people from school. And I realized that I had people. All my life, I’d struggled with low self-esteem, and the fact that I actually had people—it just really changed the way I thought about myself.”

The experience awakened an interest in the inner workings of the human mind, and he decided to study psychology in college.

“I’m totally interested in the human race, how people think,” he says.

But his illness gave rise to another revelation, one even more life-changing.

“I realized that if I had people, other people don’t,” he said “And I thought to myself, what right do I have to not be there for other people? So I’m at the point of my life when all I have to offer people is myself. I’ll listen to anyone. I offer my time and my ears to anyone who needs to talk to me, any hour of the day or night. And doing that changed me. My life is an open book now. I’ll talk to anyone about anything. I’m not reserved anymore.”

He quickly figured out that, even as a high school student, there were other ways to help people.

“I’m really good at networking now,” he says, a wry tone creeping into his voice when he says networking. “I have about forty people’s business cards in my wallet, and when I meet someone who I think should talk to someone else, I hand out the cards.”

He also rediscovered an old passion. He’d stopped drawing for a few years, but started drawing again after his bout with Krohn’s. He began taking art classes at school, and even financed last year’s prom by doing pen and ink and charcoal portraits of classmates, and began thinking seriously about art as a career.

But his rediscovered passion for creating art seemed, initially, to clash with new interests.

            “I’d wanted to study psychology. And then I heard about art therapy, and I thought, ‘What a great way to help people, by making art and helping them make art.

“I want to work with teens and young adults,” he says. “Before I got sick, I went through a time—a phase—where I had myself convinced that I didn’t know who or what I was. I’d look at a piece of food, for example, and wonder whether I really liked it and wanted to eat it or if I didn’t. It’s such a pivotal age—people are really vulnerable at that age. If I can help people figure out who they are through art, that’d be a good way to spend my life.”  

 Dylan participated in a program between his high school, St. Xavier, and Xavier University in Cincinnati, working full time at the University during the summer. It gave him exposure to the University, and, “I just fell in love with the school and the people there. And I’m lucky, because there are a lot of people from Boys Hope Girls Hope who are helping me get there.”