A while back I explained that my iPhone, which contained all of my stories and chapters, had to be reset, resulting in me losing everything.
I've looked into it, and discovered my iPhone simply suffered on iOS 7's behalf. The operating system simply isn't optimized for an iPhone 4, and it crashed. The boot files were likely corrupted, explaining why I couldn't restart my iPhone. But that's not what I wanted to talk about, even though it's probably the only reason I felt like I should bring this up. If you don't want to read all of this, or you simply don't care, at least consider reading the bottom.
It's been a long time since I've been on this website. I know my stories, but I often forget you guys have yet to see them. Yet to see what makes me love to write. When I write, my imagination gets a rare opportunity to come alive. Writing is what makes me feel comfortable showing who I am to the world. With friends and in games, I'm the loud, obnoxious one, cracking jokes all the time, because I know my friends. I know it's ok for my jokes to be outright stupid at times, because it's my friends, or just some people on the internet. That personality doesn't carry over to the real world. I'm shy, I'm always in the back of the class by choice, I don't volunteer. The real world scares me. I've seen what happens. I've seen things I wish I hadn't. Things I wished were just video games. Writing is different. When you write a story, anything that happens is entirely up to you. You don't have to worry about how a character acts, because it's your mind, your choice, and the only people affected by that choice is other characters in your story. You don't have to worry about it sucking, or if someone finds an action weird or 'different,' because you made it that way on purpose. All you have to worry about when you write is whether or not you spell a word right.
I can recall many times where I can say I went out of my comfort zone for something and was proud of the result. In elementary school, I remember signing up for Band in 4th grade. I was always drawn towards drums, but had no confidence in my playing. Now, I can play anything I want and just not give a damn. I remember playing Smash on the Nintendo 64 at my daycare in preschool. It led to me getting a Gamecube and a copy of Smash Bros Melee. Brawl of course followed on the Wii, but when it came to playing competitive, it happened again; I was worried I wasn't good enough. Now, I happily enjoy Project M and Smash 4 competitively. As a kid grateful to have a decent PC, I played Battlefield and Halo on it, almost exclusively. But I only played for fun. I'd play 2142BF just to enjoy the Titan mode. I played Halo 1/CE to death because of how much I adored being part of the community. But, soon BF Bad Company came along. All my 2142 friends soon moved to it's more serious style. Halo 2 came out for PC, and it was just too competitive and serious for me. As a kid with few social skills, I found things that made me show skill I had yet to perfect daunting. If you compared me as a kid to how I am today, it'd be like two different people: then, I was enjoying being the nerd kid, playing games because I thought they were just cool or because they were fun, in addition to zero musical or mental confidence; now, I'm playing CS GO competitively, planning my career to being an adult, learning guitar alongside playing in a senior school drumline, enjoying life and friends. Having a social life, even as frail as it is. It's something I wish I had as a kid. Because the only thing I ended up finding true confidence in was writing and drawing.
As a kid, not much phases you. You might write a poem for school, or draw a picture of your family, and Mom or Dad'll say they love it and stick it to the fridge. Are your writing/drawing skills great at a 2nd Grade level? Probably not. In fact, you'd have to be sugar coating saying those skills weren't good. But for me, that scared me. Knowing that writing and drawing, two things I felt were like breathing to me, were usually crappy at that age. It lead me to do almost nothing but read the hardest books I could find, get every drawing book I could get my hands on. I purposefully pushed myself to learn to write and draw to the best of my ability, and never stopped. It affected most of my life. I isolated myself from friends, ignoring them until I could get a type of shading right, or write an interesting page of fiction. I can count the amount of friends I had from preschool to middle school total with one hand of fingers. I hated feeling like I wasn't good enough at something, pushing away everything else to get it right, and it only comes to me now that I think about it that, sometimes, my overimagination and lack of confidence led to losing quite a few chances to better improve my life. I'd get 100s on tests, but grades would slip because I'm too busy doodling an idea I had in the margins of what would be that night's homework, or writing some silly story into the back of my binder, completely forgetting to write down anything at all for that class. I'd embarrass myself in class for drifting off. Do you know how it feels to have an entire class of judging faces stare at you as you struggle to answer the very first question because you simply couldn't hold your concentration? Not just once, but almost every day? It destroys any desire to speak up. I remember every year I'd be one row farther back in the class when we picked our seats. An entire life bound to the twisted focus I had, with minimal chance of enjoying a normal childhood. I'd get so focused on one thing, and still do today, I would forget everything else.
However, this lack of a 'normal' life led me to become very fond of the skills I did end up with. I could pick up any game and master it with minimal time, whether it be puzzle, fighting, shooter, etc. If I wanted to, I could learn everything possible about the game, and most likely exceed the skill of many friends that have played it longer than me. I became incredibly ahead of my art classes, twice skipping to higher grade art classes because my grade's class simply wasn't enough. I never had a writing assignment with a score below an A, sometimes going beyond the expectations and getting extra credit for many of them. I'm almost always at the top of my music classes, even helping the teacher when they can't explain or play something to another student. Of course, I also can't forget how I've taught myself how to 3D model and animate in little over a couple years from school computers alone. These are all the few things I can say I am proud of. They're what I can say "I know that, and I can do that" to. So when one of these skills are taken away, it's like if someone took out a large part of what makes you, well, you, and forced you to deal with it.
As a kid, I was incredibly fond of drums, as I mentioned. I could find a drum, pick it up, and play something I heard on the radio or something made up in my head with little difficulty. Noticing this, my parents bought me a full drumset. At the time, it was probably the best thing I ever received in my life. My sister got me a book full of drum rudiments, as well as sheet music for many rock songs. Within a few weeks, I learned these songs with little difficulty. The rudiments became second nature to me, as I practiced for almost an hour every night. However, this hobby became a chore as time went on. I wanted to take a small break from drumming to focus on other things, but my parents told me I had to practice every night, sometimes not allowing me to do anything else until I practiced my rudiments and songs for about 45 minutes. Within a few years, I went from loving my drumset to loathing it. Today, I have no interest whatsoever in touching that drumset, as it sits in the basement collecting dust, a drumstick bag with 40 pairs of drumsticks next to it, never to be used again. It became a part of my life I didn't want. And just like that, drumming became something I prefer not doing unless I'm alone, or in drumline at school. Video games were the same deal, however the loathing was my fault. I'd learn a game until I was able to master it, which means that if I couldn't learn it, I would get frustrated. It would nag at me, knowing I couldn't learn it. I hate Melee just as much as I love it. I absolutely crushed the single player portions of the games, and would typically win when I played casually with friends. But when I learned about l-canceling, wavedashing, multishining, and pivoting, they became the only thing I cared about in Melee. I didn't care if I won a game, I only cared if I won from whatever technique I'd try to use to teach myself these foreign gameplay mechanics, even though at a young age I simply didn't have the muscle reflexes to perform such quick maneuvers. To this day, I cringe to myself with every missed hit in Smash 4, or every missed tec or bad read, knowing I could have easily done better had I not done something stupid.
Writing and drawing mean a lot more to me, and it destroys me when something hinders my ability to do either.
As a kid with a DSi, it's safe to say I exclusively used it for Flipnote Studio. Flipnote was a 2D animation program where you would draw out whatever you wanted on to each frame, which would in turn be played like an animation, with the ability to add sound and color being additional features. I would spend day and night on animations, drawings, everything. It probably brought me the most joy at the time because you were able to upload your Flipnotes to a community called Hatena, where other animators could meet and share.
However, DSi's aren't meant to last. Buttons slowly stopped working, and the touch screen would become less responsive. I would do literally everything I could to get things working, but in the end, I was left with virtually no tools aside from the given pen sizes, a broken top screen, and an incredibly unresponsive bottom screen. It made making Flipnotes frustrating, almost pointless. Nothing I made had any polish, as I couldn't get precise with such a glitchy touchscreen, and I couldn't use in-tool features as they stopped working. I ended up seeing animating as a chore, something I just wanted to get done with.
Writing, however, meant much, much more. I have notebooks on top of notebooks of stories, scenes, ideas, characters, and plots absolutely filling every paper inside. It was probably the most worked-on thing I ever did in my life, writing those stories; designing those characters, making these complex storylines, they all felt the most important to me over everything. As time went on, I literally ran out of paper to write freely on. With no extra paper or notes to write stories on, the drive to write began to fade. It wasn't until I found this website that the old feeling came back. That old desire to write something great. Because when I wrote, I didn't care how it turned out, because it could always be changed whenever I felt like it. It led me to take a shot at writing, which paved the road for the L4D2 fanfiction 'Jason.' You wanna know how many times I've updated, replaced, and removed numerous chapters in that story? I do too, because I lost track of the countless times I've rewritten entire chapters to it. Even now, that story in my opinion is quite terrible. It was a rushed piece I wanted to write just to get it out there while the idea was fresh. There's a good chance I'll probably redo that story again, it always has room for improvement, as with any story. I grew to love it. I saw reviews by people on how they actually liked it. It was huge to me! All these old ideas, stories I thought were far too silly to actually dive deeper into, grew, and I began going crazy with this enjoyment of storywriting. I would start making schedules to keep track of what chapter I'd upload and when, when I would post a new story, when I could finalize storylines. When I could do this, when I could do that. When. When.
When I would desperately try to recover my notes when I realized my iPhone was basically ruined.
When I would become incredibly depressed, losing pages upon pages of stories I worked months on.
When I would consider giving up entirely on writing, as I have with so many other dreams.
When I would realize I was foolish to think it would get anywhere.
And yet... here I am. Relogging into this account, checking for anything I missed, catching up on old stories I never finished reading. When I saw my stories as I scrolled through L4D2 fanfics, they called out to me. "I'm still here," they would say. I couldn't watch them just become more unfinished fanfics, lost in this massive website. I decided then that, no matter what boundary, I'd rebuild. Writing became such a huge aspect of my life, I couldn't see it go to waste.
I'm not fully sure why I wrote this. I guess it's just something I needed to say. Or maybe it's just my way of getting my opinion out there.
Or it could be my message, here, to anybody else who feels like nothing is working for them.
Odds are you didn't read everything here. You might have skimmed, or just skipped to the bottom here, but no matter what, I hope you remember this:
Don't be scared of failure. Don't be afraid of being made fun of, or ignored. Because no matter how much dedication you put into something, no matter how much of your life's effort you want to put into it, it will not be a smooth ride. There will be failure. You will fail, or hit rock bottom. But it's not a reason to give up. Once you've hit the bottom, there's nothing worse waiting for you. Don't give up on your dream. Hopefully, your dreams don't suck up your life like mine do. But don't let a failure destroy it. Build off of it. Let your imagination bring your dream to new heights.
Make it your story. This is my story.
What's yours?