If you wish to know someone, give them a tool for creation. We breathe, we draw, we build, we act, we write, we live. Our expressions betray our deepest thoughts, our darkest fears, and our brightest hopes.
It behooves the creators to seek themselves in the reflection cast by the mirror of the creations.
Today, I believe most people would say that I'm someone others would be glad to call a friend. I'm active in my community. I study hard and do what I can to keep myself healthy. I like to think of myself as quick-witted and generally of pleasant affect.
Seven years ago, most of that wasn't true. I was afflicted with what was then called "clinical depression." That was almost certainly true; I certainly engaged in several self-destructive behaviors and ideated several more. But admitting it to myself became an excuse to me. I let those words, that diagnosis, mar my view of myself. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I did what I often did in those days when faced with deep trauma: I ran. I hid from it as best I could, seeking sanctuary in escapism, alcohol, and generally asocial behavior. I was, like many young men in modern America, vastly underachieving in every axis because I had been told I was special, then thrown into an uncaring world without a keen knowledge of what it would take to stand on my own and make my way forward.
So, in all that time I was hiding from the world, I did what came naturally. I created. I daydreamed. I tinkered, trying to give life to ideas and ideals that remained unsatisfyingly ephemeral. One of the things I created was a level 1 Magic Origin Dark Miasma/Energy Blast Defender with a sulky black and blue costume. I didn't have time to be wounded, to be lost. The world, with its insistence, resisted that. But he, a costumed hero, could. He could be dark and haunted and, yes, even snide while still holding to the core of his ideals: there was good, there was evil, and there was a line between that should not ever be crossed at the risk of one's soul and spirit.
Then, I grew. A mentor at work sat me down and told me, point blank, that he expected more out of me than I was giving. Another person pointed out to me all the ways that my willingly-ignorant selfishness was hurting other people. I remained chained to my job, to my social circle, but those things began to feel like burdens. I'd become aware of my shortcomings and filled with an ache to do better. I needed a new start.
So I began to work in a pharmacy. My roommate moved out and we drifted out of touch. I changed apartments. Then, I woke up one January morning with a sense of resolve I hadn't had before. I was hurting people. I was hurting myself. And I needed to stop. I stopped buying bourbon. I began looking for challenges at work--I had a chance to put my past behind me and try to move on. And, surrounded by people that hadn't known me at my worst, I was free to be my best.
I enjoyed the game. I kept the game. And among my growing stable of characters, I kept that one creation as others churned out of and into oblivion. I kept refining the ideas, the story, oblivious of the tension in my psyche that had created him. His powers and his bleak outlook became the function of an extradimensional entity that had been forcibly implanted into him. It was a dark and cold thing that would drag his soul down, clawing and scratching into him for any foothold in the world. It was unknowable. It was inscrutible. It was a source of power and a burden. More than anything else, it simply was. It wasn't something to be reasoned with. It was something to be understood simply so it could be beaten.
Somewhere along the way, I began to discover that I had a knack for working with the public. Even when I was stressed, I discovered that I could be expressive enough to win empathy from the most demanding patients in a very short timeframe. My linguistic and mathematical skills began to show through. My nonlinear thinking meant I sometimes looked past the obvious, but I could improvise solutions to unusual problems. And people began asking me: "Why don't you go to pharmacy school?"
I was ashamed to tell them that I, in my self-destructive fugue, had never finished my undergraduate degree.
Somewhere in the midst of that, the game added user-generated content. I had also discovered that people enjoyed reading what I'd written, so I tried my hand at that. I came back to my old friend, the depressive Miasmist. Over time, and through my daydreams alone, his melancholic demeanor became a facade for a foppish playboy actor. That, in turn, became a facade for a man with no other allies in a war against an enemy that turned all of his own darkness against him.
Then, something amazing happened. In the story I'd written for him, with duplicity, strength of will, and--most importantly--trust in a greater hero than he was, he found a way to fight back. By the conclusion of the arc, the nature of the relationship between himself and the entity within had completely changed: its primal, unfocused energy could be channeled to positive ends relatively safely.
I believe it was the very next year that I went back to my alma mater, hat in hand, and asked all the people I'd embarrassed myself in front of there what I'd have to do to finally earn the honors degree I'd managed to deny myself. It took honesty, strength of will, and--most importantly--others placing trust in me to be a greater person than I was. And, over the next year, I finished an undergraduate research project unlike any other that had been attempted at the school to date.
I'm currently enrolled in a doctorate program, and I'm seeking a Masters of Public Health as well. I know now, through bitter experience, the worth of health--physical, mental, and spiritual--and the joy that comes with opportunities to succeed. I want to share those lessons with others, and I want to give others the chances to flourish that I have had.
People still enjoy my writing, but I don't write because of gnawing angst anymore. I've found ways to channel that unfocused energy to positive ends rather than let it consume me. But one day--maybe when I'm out of school, maybe when I retire--I just might go back and revisit that story. One day, if you read a modern horror novel about a foppish playboy actor whose body acts as a host for oily-slick emotional dolor incarnate, think of me. When he grows to accept his sins with such humility that his guilt can not be used against him, think of me. And when he tells the blackness within that it will not rule him, think of me.
Then, mention that you read this story here when you contact me. I'll be glad to sign your copy.
