What Brings Me Here?

Why this? Why now? There are a million reasons why I’ve waited. A thousand excuses to procrastinate, each one better than the last. How could I forget the hundred times I told myself it wasn’t good enough? Finally, I’m at that point where two simple words continue to ring in my mind like a dinner bell calling me home. Fuck it. This is the part where I get cliché, I guess but that term holds such a better meaning than people ever give it credit for. There was once a meme that compared “fuck it” to “let’s hope for the best” and it was one of the truest things I’ve ever read.

Do you know why “fuck it” is a term that holds more merit than hoping for the best? Why the weight it carries when someone utters those two words and truly means it should be scary for those who wish to see you fail? The one saying fuck it has accepted the fact they might fail. See hoping for the best means you’re still afraid to fail, you’re not giving it everything. There’s that small part of you holding onto hope, grasping that luck will be what gets you through not your own ability to do what you need to. When those two words finally come out of your mouth, you’re willing to throw all caution to the wind, without fear, to achieve something you never thought you could.

I always had a massive imagination as a kid. For eons army men, Lego soldiers, cowboys, and indians, waged bloody battles on my basement table, each faction trading minor victories but none able to fully control the Tabletop Empire and the precious resources it held. I seriously did this up until I was about the age of 14. I thought for sometime I had matured out of that phase but instead came to realize it had simply been replaced, with newer technology; video games.

I fell hard into video gaming, not so much the NES, or old school systems, but my first love for video games was somewhere around the time of Age of Empires II being released. Here was this game with these amazing graphics (for the time) and basically let me see the battles my inanimate soldiers would go through in real time. Video games were a dream come true and thus, a new form of imagination was thrust into the cosmos.

While video games can offer you a visual release there was always something about reading a book that captivated me. A journey you were led on, but not shown. While the words were there, the pictures were yours, your mind owned them. From barren plains, to mud soaked swamps, to intrigue, and romance, the journey you saw was not always the same as the person reading next to you. Ten people can read the same story and see ten entirely different things. While the characters, descriptions, scenery remains the same, all ten minds will alter them to visions they wish to see, the beauty of it being, none of those are wrong.

It wasn’t long before hours at the basement table, became hours at the computer desk, diving into campaigns and scenario creator. Eventually, the campaign wasn’t enough and I began making my own scenarios and maps and leading a group of heroes on an adventure through some far away lands, filling in the dialogue, story, and narration in my head. Then one day I had taken a course in high school, in which specifically we were tasked with writing a four page fictional story. I haven’t the vaguest clue as to what occurred during the following several hours, but what I can say is that somewhere around 5:00 PM that evening, I had finished the assignment four days early and three pages too long.

From the time the project was announced, I immediately went on autopilot. My brain kept whatever muscle memory it needed to get me through the rest of the day and home, while diverting all power to forward story telling. I remember watching the words show up on my computer screen but not feeling my hands making the movements. Then came the snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity, moment as the last period was typed into place.

I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I had never had this urge, this desire to write something. I turned in my paper the next day, and afterwards the teacher said they had given me an A on my first paragraph alone. I was elated! This moment ignited a new hobby, one I could wholly commit to. I wrote a lot through high school and college, almost always kept hidden from anyone other than myself, buried in subfolders on my computer for fear my family and friends would see it.

So that brings me here. Over the years I’ve written stories here and there, rarely ever making them public. It wasn’t until I decided to do this, I realized that I was judging myself based on other people’s likes and dislikes. I’m not a perfect writer, nor am I a great writer. I enjoy writing because that imagination is still there. The vibrant young boy creating fantasies before him, failing to see the cold plastic figure, but a moving being with hopes and dreams grasped in hand. 

Here you will find a journey. It won’t be perfect. There will be a lot of struggle along the way but in the fight, there will be growth. Almost all of these stories are incomplete, representing times in my life I felt I had the few seldom minutes to allow myself to go for a mental walk. Those brief trips where your mind seems to bend time and slow it around you making minutes seem like hours, words on the page turning to visuals in your psyche, images of those fleeting moments I could let my mind run wild with the inner child still ever so desperate to show me that there’s no harm in letting go. I don’t do this for money or fame, this is for me. This is about practice, pushing boundaries, and doing something that makes me happy, and if a little money comes along the way then awesome. As I was saying earlier, FUCK IT, let’s go.