Journey of a Storyteller

Chapter One: The Adventure Ahead

September 10, 2017

It's a warm Sunday afternoon as I stew in my room trying to force myself to continue working on finishing my online course. It's going to be my main source of income, but one can only focus on the constructs of life before it starts making you go mad. All I really want to do is lie in bed and continue fantasizing about space.

I blame the release of Destiny 2 for this current imaginative obsession. Now a new story is forming in my head. One of over a dozen I have drifting in this mind of mine. All in do time, I tell myself. Once you're gone you'll have all the time to work on your stories. For now you need to focus on the class. But there's still fear attached to this Desire to teach.

Enough so that I can only manage to focus on it an hour at a time before the anxiety begins to consume me. At this point, I know enough to know how I would communicate with someone going through the same experience, but this is one of those situations Logic can't help with. It's a feeling inside I still have yet to deal with.

I wanted three more months, but life had other plans. That's kind of the thing about manifestation, once it gets going you got to be ready to seize the opportunities as they come. You don't get to control when something happens, only how you respond to it when it does.

I'm now fifteen days away before I leave Los Angeles and begin a new adventure, sharing and absorbing stories. Teaching the values of life through the understanding of story. Fifteen days and the last decade plus of my life become a chapter in a story I didn't expect to get so far.

By sixteen I wanted to be dead before eighteen and now here I am at thirty-four ready to live my life for the first time since then. This isn't to say I've been living a bad life. I co-created a business that will still be thriving once I'm gone. I've met so many amazing people, and even mended my heart enough to be able to truly love others once more. My life's been pretty amazing since high school, but I've only been an observer throughout it.

I was that kid that would always be willing to help out, because I didn't know what else to do. So I ended up as a roadie for a local indy band in my early twenties, helped a fellow storyteller work through his mid life crisis in my mid twenties, and then helped my best friend create a business in my late twenties. It was always the same thing. Someone needed help and I couldn't think of anything else better to do with my life so why not.

The moment I hit thirty everything changed. I was suddenly aware of an agreement I had made with my eighteen-year-old self. At that point in my life I had already written three novels, but as I reread them I realized they lacked any real life experience. So I told myself that I wouldn't consider publishing any of my stories until I reached thirty. This was considering I would still be writing actively during that time. Life didn't work out that way.

Now I was thirty and had all the life experience, but nothing written to actually publish. Which lead me to jump back into my work and infuse it with my new experiences, but then something happened I didn't quiet expect. I realized that my main character, Riq, a boy that's been with me since I was only ten years old had become this angry and bitter person. All because the last time we talked I was an angry and bitter person. Even worse, I still was angry and bitter. I had just gotten really good at pretending I wasn't.

It's always easier to find your smile when you're surrounded by people you love. You don't want your own darkness to pollute them so you bury it as deep as you can. At this point in my life I had dealt with most of personal issues, minus one or two big ones that a very particular woman would bring out of me, but that's another story for another time. This meant I was starting to understand my value and wouldn't allow myself to be undermined when my value wasn't being respected or appreciated. At the same time I still had a lot of faults that I was working through. Habits I now realized I needed to get rid and choices I needed to rectify.