Her Artifacts Lost, Volume 1 - The Vanishing Vial

Introduction

I began writing this book out of necessity. At the time, I was attending Florida Polytechnic University, working towards a second Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.

Video games were and still are, very precious to me. The medium had supported me through my very painful, isolated, and crippling childhood. I had gone back to school for a second time, sincerely determined to follow my dreams and devote my life to making video games.

At the time I went to Florida Polytechnic University, several young men, students there, had committed suicide. The prevalence of school shootings across the nation increased.

More and more I began to see a pattern: that somehow, we began to normalize attacking young men and healthy masculinity. Tearing them down, caging them, and demonizing their heroic instincts. Rendering them heartless and numb.

Some of us declared them to be monsters. Embittered by the actions of broken men. Breaking these young men before they could ever cultivate the strength to illuminate their own shadows.

Being human is something we have to learn. If we cannot give young men this grace, we're the ones creating monsters of men.

Wouldn't you become a monster too, if everything you had that was precious to you was stripped from you? Your heart broken, your dreams shattered. Your belief in heroism, destroyed. Your very being, dismissed.

I couldn't unsee that moment of clarity. After going to school on a campus where the ratio was 1:4 (female to male), I began to have the gall to believe I was somehow responsible for the solution to this problem.

Within this book and its subsequent volumes, I hope to dismantle and destroy the illusions surrounding masculinity.

You might be thinking: you're a woman, how could you possibly claim to know what it's like to be a man?

And I say that we live in a dark time. Where women have become so fearful and distrustful that we've decided that it's just better to become men.

We're failing miserably at it. But trust me, we are trying our hardest to negate our own vulnerability. To destroy our femininity.

With all of this, I lead by example. I call it like I see it, and I plunge headfirst into my own vulnerability.

I am a woman, and I have spent my life obsessed with trying to be a man. So I believe I've learned a few things.

Enough to begin to get to the heart of the matter.

It's my hope that this book gives you hope that at least someone is seeing this and someone is saying something about it.

Thank you to all the young men who attended Florida Polytechnic University with me. Who took the time to connect with me and share their story. For reminding me of who I am and my dream of being a wife and a mother.

For helping me to understand masculinity and for giving me Allister.

I have such hope that my son, should he be real, could live out his strangeness, brilliance, peculiarity, and masculinity in a better, freer, tolerant, and more peaceful world.