The Road to Writing, Paved with Good Intentions

I’ve always been told that I’m not good enough. I often felt that there are parts of me missing that I can never recover; parts of my early life, bits of myself that should have been, but never were. They were forgotten long before they were created, and I often found myself searching for them in the lives of others.

“This,” I would think, “is who or what I would have been if things had gone differently.”

“This horrible place is where I should have been, except for dumb luck.” I had always considered it lucky that I was alive—not because I was loved or cherished or saved for any purpose. But because whoever it was that wrote my story didn’t care enough to kill me. It would’ve wasted precious ink. Depression took over my entire life. I was a miserable person to be around. I wanted nothing, hoped for nothing, dreamed of nothing.

And then one day, I took up a notebook and a pencil and started to write.

I still can’t remember why I did it, but I did—I took up that pencil and from it sprang an entirely new world, one in which I was valued. Cherished. Loved. And bit by bit the darkness receded and was replaced with handsome princes, dragons, castles, empires and their formidable armies at my bidding.

I created images of myself as I would’ve liked to be: complete, with no parts missing. I was at the center of every intriguing plot. Story after story they came, new nations, new eras, new characters—new people to mingle with. I could see them in my mind’s eye, so clearly in fact, that I saw them in the people I encountered in out in the real world...and so real that they began to take on lives of their own.

I lived in their world for nearly a decade, and I loved it there. But the longer I stayed, the more my real life began to suffer. I failed my classes. I missed events. I didn’t socialize. And you’d smell me coming a mile away because I didn’t take very good care of myself either. There would always come a time at the end of each day when I had to put the pencil down. And when I did, I was faced with the same issues I’d had before I started, if not worse. I had to do something about it.

So I sought help. Psychiatrists, drugs, hospitalizations. I was diagnosed as “Bipolar” and took a vested interest in correcting that and the real life I had neglected. I brought up my average and graduated college with honors. I interacted with the people around me; real people. For the first time in a long time, I was happy.

But with each passing day, it became a little more difficult to pick up that pencil again. That mighty river of thought and creation has dried up and one by one, my worlds are fading away into the old abyss of forgetfulness. Immortalized in print, but rarely read and scarcely thought of. I’ve begun a quest to reclaim these worlds and forge new ones. The old stories fade, but my thoughts are ever-filled with new tales of my old friends. I miss them. They are who I am, and they are the pieces of myself that I was missing before. I will not rest until their voices are heard, and I will never allow the darkness to take them, because to do so would be to lose myself as well. And that will never happen again. I swear it.

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