Maybe We Should Go Back

Why is your writing so dark?

"You sure talk about some dark things in your stories..."

"I was completely shocked when I read your writing. You seem like a happy person in real life."

"Do you need help?"

"Why do you write such depressing and disturbing things?"

"Do you think about this disturbing stuff all the time and that's why you write it?"

"Have you ever been to therapy?"

"Is this based on your life experience?"

"Are you okay??????"

At some point I have heard all of these questions and then some. And no, I haven't heard one recently or even in quite awhile so this is not a response to anyone, I just wanted to talk. Every now and then these questions will be presented to me by readers or people in my life.

Once a therapist told me, "I think your writing reveals the truest parts of you, and that's why you won't show it to me." When she said that, I was kind of thinking, "Well shit, guess I'm fucked." This was said when I was maybe 19 though, and since then I've had time to really process her statement and there is truth in it, to a certain degree and in a certain sense.

I remember the first story I ever "wrote" like it's a  beloved relative I grew up with. At the time I didn't know it was a story, though. I had these characters just appear in my head one day (god this is gonna sound so fucked up), and over time I built a whole world for them, a whole life. Side characters started to materialize, messing things up or setting things up in just the right ways. Plot twists followed. A climax organically bloomed out of this thought garden with no effort from me and no idea what a literary climax actually was. I knew that all movies and stories had a really exciting part near the end, and I caught onto it quick. It manifested as stress, an anxious feeling in my stomach. To this day there are some movies (action mostly) that I can't watch because they stress me out. I feel too close to the story, like I'm living it, and the constant stress of an action film exhausts me. If I was stuck watching something like this, or something I didn't like in a theater, I learned to look for hints of a climax coming. Soon I could pinpoint it and know the movie was ending soon. I was becoming a writer without ever touching the pen to paper. It was happening organically and naturally ALL inside my little fourteen-year-old head. I had no idea.

I thought I was crazy. I was obsessed with this story in my head, and I started to leave this world and live in that one more and more, where I could control everything. My real life was so boring, sad, traumatic and stressful why the hell wouldn't I create a better one for myself? No harm in that. Right?

I never had many friends growing up (shocking I'm sure). I always felt so different from everyone else. From my youngest years I remember just feeling like an alien. I was always thinking deeply about some very complex and adult concept kids shouldn't be troubling themselves with. Like I remember thinking a great deal about death, a fascination with it that turned into a fascination with the paranormal. When I did make a friend, me and that one person (always one, never more than that) would be attached at the hip. The relationship would become extremely close and intense. I treated these friendships and the loyalty attached to them as an almost religious concept, absolutely sacred to me, and this freaked out my peers, who were just trying to be normal and have fun. I also was in love with one of these friends and only realized this as an adult. Probably a lot of my friendships tip-toed into the arena of same-sex attraction and even love, but I just didn't know my feelings back then. All I knew was, if you were gonna be my friend, you'd better be prepared to be my friend for the rest of our whole damn lives, because THAT is what I will expect from you. This was not only unfair but also hella WEIRD to the average preteen/teen, so let's just say I didn't have a whole lot of social commitments to interrupt my time in the fantasy world.