My Deepest Self

    "Creativity is frankly adjacent to mental illness and overlaps with it substantially. A lot of talented people kill themselves and all of them are miserable." 

    I could say this line turned something on in my head. Yes, this line is one line in an episode of Rick and Morty that focuses on being meta. No, I am not about to psychoanalyze the episode or even the rest of the speech in that scene. Smarter people than me can comment on that.

    This line triggered a line of thinking in me that I didn't want to stop and spent the next few hours thinking about it. As a writer, there are a hundred rules that I should probably follow to make the ideal story. And yet, popular fiction consistently breaks all those rules.

    I often give out similar pieces of advice to everyone.

    "If you don't care about a character, why would we?"

    "If you like it, if you think it's cool, then do it. I guarantee that there will be others out there that think it's cool too." 

    Overly Sarcastic Productions has over two million subscribers, and they discuss history, story tropes, and mythology. Yet YouTube is supposed to be a platform that only rewards those who specialize in a specific category. CinemaSins has over nine million subscribers and all they do is bash on movies for breaking the rules, even movies that they themselves love. There is an audience for everything.

    And yet, I don't take my own advice. I hold myself back from being creative in an effort to follow an unspoken rulebook that no one is actually playing by. I feel I have to justify the existence of my work to a non-existent audience because I never post anything that I am unhappy with.

    My most successful work in college was a raw passionate mess full of self-hate and mental trauma that I wrote at 3 in the morning and never went back and looked over. My biggest criticism was a lack of a trigger warning for some of the members of my class, which was a fair point since I discussed suicide in it.

    I have a multiverse in my head. A hundred fanfictions where I changed one thing about someone else's work just to see what would happen. Universes of my own design where I explored ideas ranging from building a space navy, a galaxy where I created alien races based on styles of government, a dungeons and dragon universe based on our world's mythology and even a modern fantasy that explored different classes in dungeons and dragons.

    My raw creativity could be seen as its own form of madness. I channel rage, depression, loss, and a desire for longing into all of my work. I wrote one for Descendants where Carlos became my vent for my history of bullying. I wrote one for Chronicles of Narnia where Edmund is saved from being a shadow-manipulating evil warrior by Aslan. I wrote one for Naruto where Naruto has to teach himself to be a ninja by cloning himself and transforming those clones into village kids that no one suspects. I have started and ended wars in MCU, DCU, ADCU, Mass Effect, and Star Wars. I have played out power fantasies on Teen Titans, Power Pack, and Ben Ten. And yet, no one has been allowed to enjoy those works.

    I am sorry to my non-existent audience for the stories I have deprived you of. I hope one day that I may bring these stories back to life for you. What I know for sure is that I think it's time for me to stop holding back.

    If passion is what it takes to be a creator, then it's time for me to stop holding back. I will dump my deepest desires, my nastiest scars, my darkest moments, and overwhelming anguish onto here. But I will also put my happiest moments, my greatest wishes, and my quirkiest likes on here too. I pronounce of the birth of my personal multiverse.