Biography: The Story of Yumi

This is my dog, Yumi.

If you've been on my blog before, you've probably seen her. I'm kind of obsessed with her. She's the love of my life and has made the hard things in life a tiny bit easier for me to deal with. Yet, if you would've seen me a few weeks after getting her, you wouldn't have thought any of that could be true. So here's the story of the stupidest, best, most impulsive, and positively life-changing decision I ever made.

(Yumi at around 5 months attempting to eat a small branch for whatever reason.)

I'm not a decisive person. I don't just do things--I need days, weeks, years to make a decision. But in June of 2018, all of that somehow went out the window. I was casually watching a YouTube video (the first bad decision--never listen to social media influencers) of a girl who had recently adopted a dog. She said it was the best thing she had ever done, despite the terrors that come with being a dog owner. For some reason, that was it for me. I had been wanting a dog for a long time, but I figured I was too young to get one (I was and still am). I couldn't be tied down by an animal that would depend on me every second of the day. I needed to study, work, and socialize.

And yet, I immediately scoured the Internet and quickly found a dog that stole my heart. My mom half-heartedly tried to stop me, but I convinced her. Nobody in my life stopped me (I'm still not sure why--they definitely should have), so I figured everything would be fine. By the end of the week, she was mine.

(The day I got her. Her haircut made her look like a hedgehog.)

In the first week, she had fleas and worms. Lots of them. I think this is where her hatred of baths stems from. I probably used half a bottle of Dawn dish soap to get rid of as many fleas as I could see underneath her extremely thick and curly hair. I was hysterical. (My sister says all she remembers from that day is me screaming and crying an unreasonable amount.) She also loved attention and was attached to me immediately. I couldn't get anything done, and my only moments of quiet were when my mom would watch her for me so I could sleep or shower. I could not believe what I had gotten myself into. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't a bad dog--she was house-trained in under two weeks, she only ever chewed up one thing (my phone charger wire), and she was a fluffy ball of happiness. Still, the crate training (she hated the crate with a passion), her stubborn attitude, and the realization that I no longer could be selfish with my time were the two things that really hit me hard.

(She'll eat anything. Here she found a "wite-out" bottle at the dog park and definitely tried to eat it. She never grew out of that puppy phase... I'm still constantly trying to stop her from swallowing random objects.)

It took almost a year for me to accept that she was mine and this was my new life. Things got easier after that, and my heart started swelling with love every time she would cuddle up against me or when she learned a new trick. Now we are the best of friends and even though she drives me crazy sometimes, I love her with my whole heart. Our favorite things to do are taking trips to Lowe's to practice training and going to the dog park so she can sniff everything. She's smart when she wants to be, silly constantly, and is sometimes the only thing that can make me smile. She is also obsessed with my little brother and has helped teach him how to be gentle and kind to animals.

Should I have gotten a dog at the age of 21? Definitely not. I don't recommend it. In fact, I strongly discourage it. But Yumi has helped me realize that I need to take responsibility for my actions and decisions and make the most of them. She's helped me focus on the positive and not take life too seriously. She reminds me not to worry so much about the bad parts of life. Even if she limits my life socially quite often, and even if I lose sleep sometimes because she gets sick or refuses to sleep herself, I love her and I've finally figured out how to allow the good to outweigh the bad. I only hope I am returning the favor often enough by giving her the dog equivalent of this--lots of treats and attention.

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Author's Note: I saw some pet prompts on the biographical writing prompts page and I knew I wanted to write about Yumi. She's basically all I talk about anyways, so why not write her origin story? It turned into something more than just a story about her and made me realize how much she really means to me. The length is longer than I expected, but still counts as a microfiction. I think any longer would have been too much and any shorter would have been lacking in necessary emotion and detail. 

Image information: All images are personal images of Yumi, taken by me from 2018-2020.