I remember more innocent days from a time when I was well cared for, long before I knew what the words adulthood or neurodivergent meant, long before I understood how broken and different I truly was. I wanted to entertain people back then, and I wanted to hog the spotlight.
After my mother taught me how to draw in Kindergarten, I would sit or lay on any flat surface I found and draw for hours, my energies inexhaustible. I wanted to become a comic book artist, so I trained myself however I could, devouring “How To” art books by Stan Lee or Christopher Hart and tracing over comic art by the likes of Jack Kirby, Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, Joe, Andy, and Adam Kubert, Curt Swan, George Perez, John Byrne, John Romita Sr., and Todd McFarlane — the unparalleled masters of their industry — to hone my skills until I started developing my own unique style. I excelled in school art courses and attended summer art camps at the local art museum, stretching my abilities to their limits and beyond as if I were hell-bent to become a Disney animator.
I wanted to write stories as well, so I found books (fiction and nonfiction) far beyond my school grade’s reading level — 1984, The Manchurian Candidate, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Prince, The Mothman Prophecies, Ed Lorenz’s The Essence of Chaos, the King James Bible, and anything bearing the names Michael Crichton or Ray Bradbury on the cover — and I didn’t stop reading until I felt like my eyeballs would begin bleeding if I kept going. I ruined my eyesight reading by flashlight late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I scribbled horrible fanfiction and original stories that I have long since trashed or burned so nobody would ever read them, purging myself of several awful ideas while I scratched out decades of seemingly endless notes for better story ideas in notebooks (both online and offline) that still haunt my personal files to this day. I watched classic films and television shows to get a feel for how the industry tastemakers I wanted to emulate — George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, Ivan Reitman, Gene Roddenberry, Tim Burton, and Nicholas Meyer — held court onscreen. I tried to emulate their story beats and employ similar tropes, and I studied Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I wanted to act and sing, so I took any drama and choir courses the schools I attended offered, recited monologues from books or plays or comedy routines I loved until I could write my own by memory, and I practiced fake foreign accents and highly emotional facial mannerisms in front of mirrors until I was so sick enough of seeing my own face that I had to suppress the urge to vomit anytime I passed any sufficiently reflective surface. I honed my agility by walking around on my tiptoes barefoot at home and teaching myself to pratfall off of sofas or chairs until I knew how to soften or break a fall with ease.
I wanted to entertain people… and by God, I learned several ways to do it. I learned how to tell stories, how to employ appropriate metaphors in conversation, and how to educate others by explaining what I had watched or read in my own words as if every conversation was a persuasive essay. I learned to inform, advise, and critique like second languages, and I learned how to make people laugh. If I didn’t have you laughing with me, I’d have you laughing at me. As long as you were laughing, it went into my Win column.
You’d think I’d have already been published or chased a career in Hollywood by now. I’d considered going into that industry, but growing up below the poverty line has a tendency to make a person seek stability over gig work. I kept writing and I kept drawing for years after my primary education was complete… but nothing came of my efforts.
At some point, I allowed my forward momentum to coast…
I never stopped writing or drawing completely, but I did slow my practice to a frightening degree. I don’t really know what happened to cause me to throttle back on my progress. I have decades of excuses, but no actual reasons. In all honesty, I don’t even know myself why I quit pursuing my passions to the point where desire downshifted to hobby.
Back then, I was an eclectic extrovert. Somewhere along the way, I became an insane introvert. I went from constantly pushing to succeed to lazy, listless, and the phrase “bright but doesn’t apply himself” that I’d heard from so many grade school teachers in my youth.
To say nothing of the soul-crushing depression and madness that set in later.
What caused this? Did I finally grow weary of all the bullying in my youth and decide to lean into being the school loner and weirdo because that was what was expected of me? Was the change caused by that time in seventh grade when some anonymous fiend on my school bus slipped me a large dose of PCP without my knowledge right before my first period Choir class, causing memory problems that plague me to the present? When I fell down the metaphorical rabbit hole and got pointlessly lost in conspiracy theories, end-of-the-world prophecies and the prognosticators that promoted them, and the fringe religious movements I would champion around high school graduation time, did I forget to take any hope with me on my journey to the dark nether-realm of the subconscious? Did all the failed relationships, ruined careers, and moving about from living place to living place finally do me in and cause me to snap?
I really don’t know. Somewhere along the way, I lost my way. I crammed my head full of zany ideas, meaningless factoids, and fake news that I thought were reality that I lost my vital perspective. My passion died and was replaced by nihilism and ennui, my hunger for personal development was sated by stupid memes and junk data, and I just stopped trying. I set my writing stationary and drawing pads aside, and I fell deep into the fathomless bat caves in my mind and went into the long, cold, pitch black torpor that I’ve been struggling to shake off since the Twin Towers fell back in ’01.
I’m not hungry anymore, and I’ve been dying of self-inflicted starvation ever since.
Recently, I re-watched “Tapestry,” a classic episode from the sixth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the godlike entity Q allows a dying Captain Jean-Luc Picard to revisit his misspent youth as an arrogant, ambitious ensign fresh out of Starfleet Academy, a brash young man far more like Chris Pine’s version of Captain Kirk than the intelligent, highly disciplined, and eminently professional Captain Picard we all know via pop culture osmosis, a young officer that Commander Riker later describes as “hell-bent for leather.”
As fun as this young Ensign Picard sounds, the elder Captain Picard hated his younger self.
I can certainly relate.
Spoiler Alert for a thirty-three year-old TV episode: Picard undoes a critical mistake he had made during his youth, but this mistake changes the course of his whole life for the worse. He avoids an incident that nearly killed him as a young man, but that brief brush with death created the passionate and driven officer Picard became that ultimately led him to the Captain’s chair of the Enterprise. Instead, he becomes a lowly lieutenant (junior grade!) for the rest of his life, teal Science Division uniform and all, spending his days handing in astrometrics reports to his superior officers, charting stars that the series leads would actually explore themselves, and doing tedious grunt work with no hope of promotion or career satisfaction.
The following exchange from Picard and Q at the climax of the episode summarizes everything with crystal clarity:
Jean-Luc Picard: I can’t live out my days as that person. That man is bereft of passion… and imagination! That is not who I am!
Q: Au contraire. He’s the person you wanted to be, one who was less arrogant and undisciplined in his youth. One who was less like me. The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the ambassador, or take charge of the Stargazer’s bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.
I feel like I’ve been living the lackluster life of that milquetoast “Lieutenant J.G. Picard” for the past two decades, and for the exact same reasons.
Somewhere along the way, I lost my focus and my passion. I started drifting, like a busted, withered log eroded over time by soft rains and carried by lazy river currents that took me wherever they flowed. I stopped directing my own life and surrendered it to the elemental forces of life and civilization, reacting instead of acting, sacrificing agency for expediency in the vain hope of acquiring security instead of satisfaction. I never stopped caring, but I stopped behaving in accordance with my affectations.
To paraphrase the Master, I have earned my reward… as bitter a cup as it is.
As Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, I wear the chains of bitterness and dreariness that I forged in life. I made them heavy iron link by heavy iron link, miserable yard by miserable yard, poor decision by poor decision. I girded it on of my own free will through cowardice, caution, and carelessness, and of my own free will I wore it out of fear and lack of faith in myself and in my God-given abilities.
The darkness I drowned in was cheap, and for a time I relished it. It was far easier to dwell in shadow than it was to get up and turn on a light.
Must I remain interred in the grave dug by my lack of vision, though? Is the dark, doldrum fate devoid of passion that I weaved for myself the shadow of what will be, or the shadow of things that may be only?
Can my fate be changed? Can a life be made right?
I’m feeling very hungry again…
I’m bloody starving…
Can the old passions be reignited? Can that merciless, unquenchable, unyielding hunger that once drove me forward with the fervent and unceasing frenzy of a fanatical madman be brought kicking and screaming back to the surface again to spur me forward toward either eudemonia or oblivion? Can the vital energies within be stoked with fuel again like the pulsing, volatile steam engines that once moved the industrialized world?
By God, I hope so! I have lived the listless, lackluster life of the loner and the loser for far too long now, and for the first time in over two dreary decades I am hungry for something far greater than what I already have on my plate.
It’s feast or famine ahead now. I must take up the notepad and drawing tablet again. I’m famished, and I am desperate for something different. I will either drive forward toward destiny… or I will die trying.
