Blog Post #2: Get to Know Me (Part II)

Oh boy… I told myself I wouldn’t be one of those blogs that had one post, and then nothing else. Now look at me. I’m sorry for the tardiness of this post, but honestly, I forgot I had the blog. I’ll try to keep up with it weekly.

I ended the last post talking about my wavering confidence concerning Ashes of Ruin, and I guess some of that continues to this day. I’ve always said that it’s easier to criticize than create, and for creatives out there, the lingering doom of failing your audience is always on our minds. I don’t want to write a book that someone hates. No one does. But there’s always going to be someone who didn’t care for the book, or doesn’t connect with the writing style, or just states that they found errors and was forced to put it down. FYI, I consistently find errors in traditionally published books all the time.

I mentioned in the last blog post that my past caught up to my mind. What did I mean by that? I think the most crucial moment of my life that was creeping up on me was in my early adult life when I went through a very abusive narcissistic relationship. It was that event that started my path down depression. But when I thought the relationship was over, narcissists do what they do and manipulated everyone around me. I was lost. I was in a position that no matter what I said, no matter how many pieces of evidence I presented to the contrary of what was being spread, they never believed me. It came down to the influence this narcissist had over the people they were informing. Rumors were abound and I was alone.

So when it came time for Ashes of Ruin to come out, I started to panic, wondering if this individual would come back to haunt me. How would I protect myself in a situation like this? And the answer is fairly clear. You can’t.

As a creative, you put yourself out there. Once you publish your work, it’s out in there. You can’t unpublish it. Sure, you can stop having it printed, but you can’t stop others from selling it, or pirating it. And it was things like this that almost destroyed my confidence. But Jenn kept pushing me to get the book out there. She believed in the story and in many ways, she believed in me. Yet I was still afraid to publish the new edition of this story I’d written, the very story I wrote to get me through my depression. Oh! That’s a story worth telling.

After getting out of the relationship with the narcissist, or at least I thought I was out of the relationship, I went to therapy. I needed to go. Even though Jenn was a support system who continues to support to this day, I needed a third party. My therapist started by recommending that I come twice a week to start since the abuse from that relationship was strong. And they also told me that if I needed to see them more, that was fine. And we talked. And talked. And talked. We eventually came upon the issue within me at the time. The abuse was so strong that it would most likely be there forever. It wouldn’t hinder me through everything, but it’s something I’ll always have on my mind. There’s even days when I still think about what happened, focusing on crucial details that would’ve protected me, conversations that could’ve been stopped, etc. So in order to boost my confidence, they recommended that I journal. Now when it comes to confidence, I had none. I struggled to write those college essays where you had to talk about yourself and now my therapist wanted me to journal. I never had success with that before. I’d always get a journal, write one or two entries, but then just forget about it. And then it dawned on me after writing the first entry. In order to get over the narcissist, I not only needed to take my life back, I needed to claim it for myself.

Because I was a forgotten person after that relationship. I forgot who I was. I was starting to believe what the narcissist said about me. In my loneliness, I truly thought I was one of the worst people this world ever saw. But when I began to write that story that would soon become Ashes of Ruin, I saw the same thing starting to form. I was a nobody who had to grow into his own confidence. I was someone who made stupid mistakes that paid for them dearly. The only solace I had was to write this story. To this day, that’s what I love about fantasy. You get to just go away into another world.

And as major events occurred, events that allowed me to breathe through the trauma, I learned that I did have confidence. I just needed to create a situation where I found myself overcoming it all. I created the Architect’s Mind as a way to help myself calm, an infinite system of healing for myself. And the discoveries that came about truly guided me in how I wanted this story to form.