On Writing

A long time ago, I considered myself a writer. This is unusual, because when I was a kid (prior to my Junior year of high school), I despised writing. I would literally refuse to do any writing assignments at school. Which contributed heavily towards my abysmal high school grades.

Then two major events happened in my life. First, I was entering my Junior year and facing not being able to graduate if I didn't get my act together. So when our English teacher gave us a poetry assignment, I didn't dismiss it out of hand. I actually resigned myself to completing the assignment and, you know, actually -trying-.

Shockingly, I not only completed the assignment, but it was actually -easy-. And I'll be damned if it wasn't actually -fun- as well. Something about confronting the feelings I was having at the time, and translating that into words on paper, felt cathartic. It -helped-. And trust me, that was a time in my life when I really needed help with my emotions.

The second major event happened literally a week later. Through a series of very unfortunate events, my mother had me committed. Not that I was insane or even emotionally unstable. It was more that my -mother- was, and didn't know how to handle me. Surprise folks, kids in this country don't actually have any rights on their own. So if a parent says they can't handle their child and asks to have them committed, they can. It's as simple as that. It's why child advocates are so important!

But I digress. Going into first a short-term, and then a long-term mental facility had extremely radical effects. "Distraught" is not a word that even -touches- how I was feeling. Betrayal, rage, anguish... all of these were there and more. I felt like I would go out of my mind at first.

And then I remembered my English assignment. I remembered channeling my emotions onto paper. And so I turned to that again. The rage that tore through my soul flew from my pen, screaming onto the page. The utter darkness that threatened to engulf my entire personality opened a maw of infinity, and I dumped every emotion into it.

The other kids at the facility asked what I was doing. And I shared. Instantly, I became a mini-celebrity. I don't think they'd seen anything like it before. Several of them said it reminded them of song lyrics. They asked for more. And I had so much more emotion to share.

Eventually, I left the mental health facility (my father's insurance stopped paying for it, so I was suddenly declared "healthy" (though not healthy enough, as this was the main reason I was rejected from both the Navy and the Army)). When I entered my Senior year of high school, I had several credits to make up in English. I took both AP English and Creative Writing.

The creative writing class was of particular interest to me. I wrote my first abstract poem there. I don't have a copy of it (I'm terrible and have no copies of ANY of my old work), but I remember it coming from the duality I felt between creativity and logic. Up to this point in my life I had been strictly grounded in science and logic. Creativity was something I was still exploring. Most people, including my teacher, didn't get it. It was just gibberish to them. But the ones who had a leaning towards the scientific, mathematical, and the logical? Well, they seemed to understand and said it spoke to them.

I graduated high school and kept writing. By now it wasn't just poetry, it was prose now. Pages and pages of writing. I was forming my own fantasy world, with characters I'd grown up with in D&D. And I couldn't stop! I'd read about becoming a writer in an essay (or was it a book?) by Isaac Asimov. Somebody had asked him how to become a writer. He said that you didn't "become" a writer. It was something you couldn't -not- be. A writer was somebody who woke up thinking about writing, and did it compulsively, sometimes to the exclusion of all else.

And that's what it was like with me. I was writing -all- the time. Enough so that I was in danger of getting into trouble at work. I had already gone through my first divorce, and had plenty of fantasy to dive into and process my feelings with.

And then it happened. But before I explain what "it" was, I need to explain something. Something about being an artist. I can't draw to save my life, but by "artist," I refer to anybody in the creative field. I obviously can't speak for -everybody- in a creative field, but I think many people would agree that art is very personal.

I shared my work with others, but almost reluctantly. It was very important to me to earn the praise of others. I lived to hear people tell me how good I was. How they loved reading it and wanted more.

But all the same, I lived in absolute terror that I wasn't good enough. That people were just telling me it was good because they didn't want to hurt my feelings.

A few years before "it" happened, a friend of mine looked over my shoulder as I was writing in my journal. She asked in what sounded like an incredibly sarcastic tone, "What are you -trying- to do?" She probably meant nothing by it. She probably wasn't even being sarcastic. It probably was in my head.

But it didn't matter. I quickly hid what I'd written and mumbled some excuse about it being nothing. I felt physically ill and didn't write for a week. It was traumatizing.

Fast forward a couple of years. I'm at home, sick, and playing Everquest. I get up to go to the bathroom. I come back and I'm at the login screen. Apparently I'd lost connection to the server.

No big deal, this was in the days of dial-up. That happened all the time. So I tried to get back in. I received a message that my account had been banned and to call customer service.

This was "it". THE It. On Wikipedia, "It" is known as the "Mystere Incident" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystere_incident). If you follow the link, please do me a favor and go to the "Talk" page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mystere_incident) where you can get the facts of what happened from my perspective and words, and not the corporate bs line they sold to the public.

TLDR: somebody decided they wanted to betray all their friends in Everquest, and their betrayal of me took the form of calling Verant (who owned EQ at the time), and claimed I had tried to lure their little brother to my home. They dug up two stories I'd written -fan fiction I'd written six months prior- and used these stories as "proof" that I was a sick individual.

The stories in question weren't very good stories. One had been written in less than 30 minutes while at work, and used as an intro to a character I never ended up playing. It had graphic imagery about a sex slave. The details aren't important.

What happened next, is important. That tiny voice in my head that always said I wasn't good enough was suddenly about to recieve an enormous fuel source. Word got out about the ban, and Verant's defence publicly was centered around the two pieces of fan fiction.

Initially an outcry went out, led by several guildmates of mine who knew me well enough to know I'm a decent person who would -never- lure anybody to my home, underage or no. But once something like this gets into the public eye, things can get out of control.

I received tons of messages from people. Some defending me, but the vast majority of which had some extremely specific opinions on who I must be as a person to write such filth. How sick I was, and how the police should be involved.

Eventually the furor died down. Verant found out they'd been made a fool of. That the person who reported me had been involved in similar stunts with our other friends. They refunded every dollar I'd spent on Everquest on the condition I tell everybody publicly I'd come to a settlement and to please stop campaigning on my behalf.

I was more than happy to accept this, as I was still receiving hate mail from people. I deleted all my IGN and other message board accounts, and created new ones. The "Mystere Incident" was over. A dead issue.

So was my muse. As I said above, my writing was -extremely- personal. It was horribly foolish of me to post it on the Internet for all to read, but that was back in the early days of things. The only people reading and providing feedback were my online friends who played a game we all shared.

I'd exposed my emotions to the entire world, and the world took that opportunity to jump on a bandwagon and make an example of me. It hurt in ways I cannot even begin to describe to you.

I eventually got over that pain. But ever since then, I've been unable to write consistently. That desire to wake up and start writing has been gone for 20 years now. When I do force myself to write, it's just that. Forced. The words don't flow from emotion to page like they used to. And that's a shame. I really could use the emotional processing that writing used to do for me.

Occasionally, I get the urge to start writing again. And what hasn't gone away is the imagination. I've done much to flesh out my fantasy world since then. But the writing... the writing is gone, and likely forever.