I used to write a lot. That's probably not a plot twist. What I liked to write specifically was fiction, though. I haven't done a lot of that in a while.

When I was in middle school and high school I had a bit of a hyperfocus on macabre subjects. I liked writing about dark caves and terrible tombs, about vampires and giant spiders and dragons that would mash you in their teeth. It got me into trouble a few times.

My interest in the morbid only grew after I discovered HP Lovecraft late in high school. I felt a bit of kinship with this incredibly anxious horror writer who seemed to feel so small. It's too bad he probably wouldn't appreciate my company 'cause of a silly thing like my skin color.

After high school I had quite a bit of angst about a lot of things. So my stories dwelled in dark places for a while. I wrote about deals with devils in body horror landscapes that left old mothers in tears. I wrote about psychotic cyborgs sodomizing crackheads on adrift cargo ships. I wrote about things that crawled in your bones and waited until your worst moment to crack them open and bleed you dry.

Things eventually evened out, I wrote things about sad people finding other sad people and making happiness despite it all. I wrote about lost things finding their way home. I wrote about the forgotten being remembered. But still, it was always tinted with terrors and weirdly graphic descriptions of things that probably shouldn't be like that.

When it came time for me to go to college though, I gave it all up. I told myself that I was giving myself to science, and I meant it. I put away the doodles, I put away the writing. I even tried to put away my other loves, like videogames and movies, but that became detrimental to my mental health pretty fast and I had to add in video game time just to keep myself sane.

There was one prominent exception to all this, though. In November of 2014 I participated in NaNoWriMo in order to impress a lady who was doing the same. I do that a lot, unfortunately. But, as is typical for these situations with me, it took a life of its own. In 21 days I wrote roughly 100,000 words of a science fiction story I called The Stars in Her Sky, about a girl living in the far future of an ultra-colonialized universe currently recovering from a gigantic civil war. She discovered the cruelties of her own community while navigating her own mental illnesses from it, and met a variety of friends on her chaotic journey through events much larger than her. And there were several tastefully inappropriate romances. Y'know how it is.

Incidentally, the lady was impressed but still didn't show me her stuff, which is what I really wanted by then. Figures.

And since that time... I haven't written. I might have tried here and there, I know I've tried to revise that story once or twice, clean it up to make it more palatable to someone literate. But for the most part, fiction ended up being confined away from my conscious world, as I forced myself to pursue the material world of this commercial hellscape.

Starting this blog was an attempt to get back to writing. I look at some of my earlier posts and I can see how stilted and uncomfortable I was with writing, despite it not being my first rodeo, or even my first blog.

Creative non-fiction is absolutely cathartic. I can see how much more comfortable I am to put words to paper (or at least to screen) than I used to be. It's taken a lot of weight off me, to offload some of my stories here. People started telling me in my early 20s that I had a lot of good stories. Some folks went as far as saying I had an interesting life. I think everyone's life is interesting, sometimes you just gotta find the right frame.

I definitely never stopped telling stories. I'm still known for that among anyone who knows me. I think about the best way to present people from my past, to make people see the interesting side of them. Which isn't hard since I tend to meet weirdos for some reason. I guess we just know our own. I also think about the best way to present myself in these stories, especially when I could have been better. And it's important to be fair to yourself.

This blog's a bit of that. A lot of musing about my past. It's reminded me how the past is always changing, though. I'll tell a story at one moment and it might be a little different in another. Sometimes I'll see myself in a little harsher light than others. I often have to wrestle with my self loathing more than I'd like, but ultimately I feel I've moved past most of it.

And I don't think I could have gotten to this point without writing. I've spent the last few days writing songs, something I've never done before. It's actually let me express some feelings I don't think I've managed to articulate out loud as much as I should have, like ever.

This whole self improvement thing is a bit of a paradox though. I find myself trying to repair damage done to me by myself while I was trying to improve my life by focusing completely on professional endeavors. And don't get me wrong, I love my education, I think the way I think is one of the best things about me, and I got here with a lot of help from college.

It reminds me of something I learned about in my humanities classes at the community college. When there's a big change introduced into a society, there's a period where that change creates a lot of shockwaves, and then is synthesized into the greater cultural context and creates a new context during a period of resynthesis.

I'm not sure if dedicating myself to science and professionalism as zealously as I did was a good idea, but perhaps it was the only way I could learn all the stuff I did. I wanted to be a more meticulous, empirical person, and I accomplished that in spades. I did promise myself that all these things I liked would be waiting for me when I got back. I also spent a lot more time away from them than I expected to due to all the depression.

Maybe I'm not quite picking up where I left off, but in a lot of ways I'm further ahead than that. But fiction is still very difficult, like trying to squeeze juice with my bare hand. Maybe 'cause I'm a little more focused on the real world than I used to be.

I guess I'm in a period of synthesis. Or resynthesis. Admittedly, I never really got a good grasp of the difference between the two.

I find myself sitting here in my office at work, jerking around and feeling antsy. I ask myself what I could do to change my life and the answer is just what I'm doing right now: moving forward a moment at a time.

It's frustrating that now always seems to last forever. Of course that isn't true. A big chunk of the therapy I did was about overcoming that feeling. I remember all my friends thinking it was a gigantic breakthrough the day I had a hangover and said "meh it'll pass" when previously it'd leave me lamenting that I was to be a being of pure headache forever.

And my reliance on empiricism suggests to me that if I keep investing in myself, good things will happen. My chemistry professor always said "reactions only occur if there are things to react with" and so I just need to keep giving myself what I need.

I think this blog is one of those things. Though hopefully I won't always be so painfully introspective all the damn time. I've got 40K minis I've just painted, I'll post them in the next couple days along with the story of what they mean to me since I guess that's my modus operandi here.

I guess that's something I'm always reminding myself. I'm a storyteller through and through, and if I can't make up my own there's always the one I'm never apart from.