I express creativity to escape into my true self, not to escape from who I am.

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A voice has haunted me for years. It’s told me to grow up, that my worth was measured by achieving traditional success in a “respectable” field. Make money, be interested in adult things. Sure, have a “hobby”, but don’t let it distract from what’s really important. Be entertained by music, books, movies, but certainly not by fantasy, comics, cartoons or video games. 

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I won a small victory against it when I formed a band, but the voice’s counterstroke was swift. Don’t tell your employer. They’ll say you’re distracted, that you lack ambition. I wrote music reviews to feed the creative beast that was trying to claw out of me. The birth of my daughters gave me permission to play, and their imagination and wonder gave me the nudge I didn’t know I needed. 

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It took me years before I realized that the discouraging and persuasive voice wasn’t coming from my parents, my in-laws, my friends, my work, or even society. It was coming from me. I had fellow travelers in my life that shared a common bond through entertainment that broke all boundaries and they had been there all along. We were the generation of Star Wars, Transformers, The Goonies, Zelda, The Gunslinger, and The Watchmen. Just as promising, new generations continued to devour the classics and fall in love with new ones.

 

Creating the experiences that formed that bond wouldn’t only be fun, it would be noble. I didn’t have the bandwidth to learn illustration or programming or the connections to jump into directing, but I knew I could write…that I loved to write. 

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The persistent voice was finally silenced.

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My characters are shackled with emotions like grief, fear, jealousy, or guilt, and the cost of being trapped is just as high as being caught by that squid monster hiding just outside of their reality. Sometimes they escape and are victorious, sometimes they fail.

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Contrary to my gritty writing, I live a happy and fulfilling life. Perhaps it’s the desire to explore the unknown frontiers that keeps me playing on the dark side.