From My Reality to Your Fantasy

One of the most common things you'll hear when you start writing is "Write who/what you know." If you're looking for the broadest translation, the phrase basically means that you're better off writing about stuff that you're already familiar with. Character relationships are based on people the author knows in real life. Story locations are based off of places the writer has been to. The writer draws on his/her own past to craft the narrative's conflict. And when the lines of reality and fantasy blur, sometimes you get something unique. We call that Reality Subtext.

Examples:

In the filming of The Princess Bride, the actor who played Inigo Montoya channeled the rage he felt from the cancer that took his father's into his character's anger at Count Rugen, the character who killed Inigo's father.

The Spongebob episode known as "The Suds" involves the title character getting sick, with him sounding especially ill throughout the runtime, more so than you'd expect from a voice actor. That's because Tom Kenny, the actor who plays him, was actually sick when he recorded the episode, so all of the awful-sounding sniffles and snorts were real.

When C.S. Lewis wrote The Magician's Nephew, he influenced the illness of main character Digory's mother upon his own mother, who had died of cancer. Fittingly, the story ends with Digory healing his mother's illness with a magic apple.

And then there's me.

A lot of aspects of my writing are based off of aspects of my own life, but I can't list them or we'll be here all day. Instead, I want to focus on the most prominent example: Lord Shadowseed.

Some of you might be familiar with this character, because I've featured him on my blog before. In fact, his character introduction was the only post from the original blog that wasn't deleted due to lack of relevance. But I digress. As I continued to write and develop this character, he took on an identity of his own, transforming from a generic evil overlord to a very fitting allegory for my own life.

I've mentioned in previous blog posts about my struggles to find my own self-worth. You can live with doubts and fears for years and not recognize them; but as soon as you find something worth fighting for, the self-doubt will attack you like a swarm of angry bees. And in my case, that self-doubt came in the form of my biggest enemy. Not Sloth, not Asperger's Syndrome, not even Depression. Those were all symptoms of a larger disease. That disease was Worthlessness.

Worthlessness first entered my mind through Impostor Syndrome: the belief that I was a fraud. All of my achievements and accolades just came from getting lucky, and I didn't actually earn them. Anyone else could have done what I did and did it better. Who did I think I was trying to be special? Worthlessness then doubled its power with Perfection Paralysis. If I wasn't able to do something absolutely perfectly, I wasn't able to do it at all. I would stall, put it off, try to get other people to do it, or just lose interest entirely. This has been especially prevalent in figuring out how to make Youtube videos. Twice before I've started and stopped, because I was too embarrassed to put myself out there with anything less than a perfect product. Despite the fact that the few video productions I HAVE made all received praise when they were posted, it was never good enough. People with Perfection Paralysis and Impostor Syndrome are the kind of people that will freak out if they get a 99 percent on a test. All those compliments and praises just hit the wall and fall down, drowned out by a screaming mind. Once that had gotten set in stone, Worthlessness went for the kill, by trying to get me to kill myself. To do that, it hit me where it hurts. It brought back painful memories of each and every time my father yelled at me, cutting me to the quick with the voice of the man I love. It would remind me of my Asperger's incidents, times where because of my Asperger's Syndrome, people I once called friend now no longer wanted to share the same room/dorm with me anymore. Each one was a bridge that's been burned forever into a black mark in my book. Even now, it still haunts me.

Worthlessness also likes to pull upon my vice of Sloth, transforming the sin from mere laziness to its stronger form of apathy. It whispers in my ear every day, trying to convince me that everything I've done, everything I am doing, and everything I will do is all for nothing. If I can't get a writing job, then my college degree was meaningless. If I can't figure out something, then I have no right to call myself an adult, and I'm a liability to everyone around me. My hobbies and enjoyments are pointless if I can't make money off of them. I'm just wasting everyone's time with pointless dreams that will never come true. And that's when things get heavy-hitting.

"You're going to die for nothing, and that's okay. There is no shame in dying for nothing. It's how most people die anyway. Because you're a man, no one outside of your family would care if you killed yourself anyway."

"Who could ever love someone like you? All you do is drive people away with your Asperger's Syndrome. You don't deserve friends much less a girlfriend. You don't deserve to be loved."

"You're a waste of space. Why do you think everyone keeps getting fed-up with you and leaving you behind? Because you have to learn and study what they do naturally, and no one wants to play catch-up. Ultimately, people just want you to hurry up and get better so they don't have to waste time worrying about you anymore."

"Kill yourself. Kill yourself. KILL YOURSELF. KILL YOURSELF!"

With the curtain of fantasy drawn over the story of my life, Worthless took on a new name. Lord Shadowseed. The concept became a character. A being who finds people who have fallen on hard times, given up on life, or are facing emotional turmoil and convinces them to become Brokenhearted. When they do, he gains power over them, able to see through their eyes, hear through their ears, and speak through their mouths. Similar how to people suffering from Worthlessness or Depression tend to live their lives in a heavily lethargic state, barely able to think or feel anything other than basic needs. Once they've become Brokenhearted, Shadowseed does one of two things. The first is that he leaches all of their magic out of their bodies and takes it for himself. Similar to how people that feel apathetic or worthless let their will to live slowly drain away until it's completely gone. They're technically still alive, but basically walking corpses. And the other thing Shadowseed does is enslave them to his will with a Dark Crown, freeing them from being Brokenhearted but at the cost of being unable to disobey him. Because why bother just giving up your own life when you can drag other people down with you? People who can't do things for themselves tell others that they can't do it either. People with bad moods try to spread them around so everyone else is as miserable as they are. Misery loves company, and Worthlessness provides plenty of it.

My goal with this is simple. If my characters can overcome worthlessness in my writing, then there's hope for me to overcome it as well. Worthlessness hasn't claimed my life yet; and if God has his way, it never will. As long as I'm breathing, I will fight to live.

(P.S. If you are struggling with your own battle with Worthlessness, feel free to click the link in the next sentence. Let us defeat Lord Shadowseed together.