The Art of Fulfillment

I am most passionate about writing and gaming, and if I can make a living doing both I would 100 percent do so. That is why I am here on Vocal, and why I stream on platforms!

I write to entertain and make people feel emotions they don't normally come into contact with, regularly. I do it to re-create the many worlds I lived in growing up with my own creativity imbued within. I write to make my mark on the world and help people escape to somewhere else for a short time; as all these fantastical places did for me when I was younger and struggling with ADHD.

I game to stay connected with others, escape from time to time, challenge myself to be better, and strive to keep my reflexes and brain younger. In the end, I do it to entertain.

I believe that if people were to take the time to read my writing, they would see how powerful my stories and thoughts can be, hopefully, these thoughts and stories inspire them to pursue their own dreams and help them find fulfillment in their own lives.

Now, let me take you away for a while. I would like to tell you a story as to why and how these things came about in my life. I would like to walk with you on a journey through the memories of days not so far gone, all of which have the power to make us feel a little bit better inside sometimes.

I was born in the late '80s. Back then we had no internet, TV had just recently become affordable, hair metal was RAGING, and you could pay 100,000 dollars for a very nice house and not be in debt the rest of your life.

Back then cell phones were like gold bars, only the richest people of society owned one unless your car happened to have one built into it. Computers had just started to be shrunk down into smaller frames (and here I am at 30 something writing on one of the smallest laptops I've ever seen in my life) game consoles were new and arcades still ruled the land.

That time when the Cool kids wore Jordans and carried Walkmans, our phones were still attached to walls and had rotary dials, and Star Trek brought us into The Next Generation.

Those days when we couldn't figure out Who was the Boss, and we watched Arnold and Willis grow up under the watchful eye of Mr. Drummond and company... Or that time we never really questioned why the Korean War went on far longer on that one sitcom than in actual history.

All of these lovely things were prior to the internet, and just some that I remember growing up. A lot of you probably remember that the Internet only became available to the public in 1993, and even then you would have to wait forever for things to load. If you wanted to look at an internet picture, holy, you better hope your family members didn't need to make a phone call or someone needed to call you in the next 10 minutes.

This all has meaning to us. I don't write this just to send people on a nostalgia trip, but to point out that all these things we have today are still really young. To put this in perspective, I, and some of you, are older than the internet.

Think about that a second, there are people living nowadays that are far older than I am. I knew my Great Grandfather when I was a child, and he was born two generations ago, in the late 1800s (three now, I guess).

Napoleon was conquering half the world just a few years before my Great Grandfather was born, and my Great Great Grandfather, he saw the country-wide implementation of electricity. You go back one more generation, and those people saw the American Civil War. When you stop and think about it, as a 30 some year old person, you are one Generation removed from Two World Wars, and three to four removed from historical events that shaped this world.

All these things I remember came about through someone else's personal quest for fulfillment. A human being wanting to do something great, and leave a mark.

The Internet, cell phones, Personal Computers (or PC's as they are known nowadays.). They are all things that people wanted to invent to better the world and leave their mark. They did this because they wanted to feel good inside. Everyday items we take for granted, each and every one of them was designed with the ultimate goal of fulfillment in one's life.

The question we all want to have an answer to is how do we achieve that same fulfillment in our own lives? How do we leave our own individual mark on this big beautiful world? No one wants to be forgotten, and I think this is why I started to write.

Let me take you back to good old 1998, when Pippin, Rodman, and Jordan were plastered all over our 4:3 screens. Chumbawamba was still Tubthumping. N'Sync, 98 Degrees, Five, and Boys 2 Men were lighting up the stages around the world. I was just a pre-teen then, with two awesome brothers, sitting in front of the TV watching things like Dragonball Z, Beasties, Reboot, and Animaniacs. Living in worlds created by other people.

Then came high-speed Internet. Sure, prior to 98 I dabbled with the new technology that was the web. But I didn't have the patience to wait for things to load. So I didn't truly begin using it until 98.

When high-speed internet arrived, wow we, this is when I realized the power of this wacky, wild west-esque thing that connected billions of people and mountains of data. Literally, anything I could think of, all of it at my fingertips and into my brain in seconds. A Godsend for ADHD children, like myself.

From about 98 to the early 2000s, these were the years that I think shaped me as a Writer and a Gamer. Picture an awkward pre-teen, strange and different from everyone. Unable to understand many social queues and norms, with a brain that rolled a million trillion miles a minute with no filter, fueled by puberty hormones and Mello Yellow. This was me, and me didn't have many friends and a lot of pent-up mental energy and creativity to expel.

My first foray into the Online Video gaming world was Diablo 2. I bought this with my own allowance to play with the few friends I made in my first year of High School.

During the mornings before class, we would sit in the corner of the cafeteria and play Magic: The Gathering. We had a lot of fun, but a lot of the time they talked about computer games, and how they would play with each other at night and talk over TeamSpeak.

I was intrigued because the only multiplayer experience I had up to this point was playing two-player games with my brother on Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 at home. I felt I had to be a part of it. I went out and bought Diablo 2 and found an old microphone my Dad used for work to join them on TeamSpeak.

Through this medium, I began to meet new people. People just like me from all over the world, then I made an email and joined MSN Messenger. I did this so I could add all these new friends I made and chat with them when I wasn't allowed to game.

Then came the dodgy chat room era, ASL, and all that stuff (You know what I mean). Then I discovered RPG Message Boards, these were the key to my growth as a writer. These places where I could join random Dungeons and Dragons-like games without the dice and the "real life" friends and just let my creativity flow.

I learned a lot from RPG message boards. Some of them were really strict on things like grammar and Role Play Etiquette, to the point where you could be banned from the board if you made too many mistakes. I learned to describe situations, characters, and paint vivid pictures with my words in these fantastic lands I became a part of.

Then came Gaia Online, a place that I could not only write fantastical adventures with people all over the world but create my own little avatar that had a speech bubble. It was like I was talking with these people in "real life"!

Friendships, real and digital were made and broken through Gaia Online. I seriously lost my best friend from childhood because of something that happened on a message board there. Back then, it was serious business. Then I moved on to second life for a bit, but that was short-lived. It became too weird for even someone like me.

Eventually, video games took over my free time. I was able to live within fantastic worlds through a visual medium, instead of a mental one. I grew out of the RPG Boards and played stuff like World Of Warcraft, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Call of Duty UO.

However, at that point, I had been on the message boards long enough to have sewn the seeds of writing and the enjoyment of it. I continued to write my worlds privately, some of them still sitting on my hard drive today, unfinished. Some of them which I plan on sharing with Vocal and others I hope to publish in the future.

Here we are now, today, June 2021. I am home with my beautiful wife, living history behind this white computer screen. I sit here tippity tapping black and white keys watching my letters write themselves and formulate sentences that transfer my thoughts to those of you reading this, all because I grew up in a time where the internet was new, fresh, and high speed and I happened to be a loser.

You know what though, all that trash I went through as a kid and growing up. The ridicule, the name-calling. Bullying and trauma, I don't think I would have wanted my life to go any other way.

I wouldn't be who and where I am today without all those past experiences in my life, I am just thankful that I made it through with very few scars. I always remember that some of us weren't so lucky.