#BehindTheScenes 69 - Early Renditions & the Silence

What do you mean, early renditions and the silence? By the picture and my occupation, it looks like it has to do with writing. So, what did I begin doing when I decided that I wanted to put my thoughts down on paper? Did I think it would go anywhere? What became of all those ideas?

This #BehindTheScenes is going to spill some of the tea.

It's also pretty raw and mentions abuse, so this is your trigger warning.

I always liked to tell stories. My parents' friends always told me that I liked to entertain people with tall tales. Not of things I did, but of good overcoming evil and sometimes love stories. I mixed components of what I learned, heard and watched and made my own characters. But this only happened when we had guests over.

Another way I made up stories was when school required it or when I was alone in my head. Both times, I was always lost in the moment of it - making choices based on a scene, making it happy and ending it with open questions. But this first incident really made me question my abilities.

I was in first grade when it happened. The assignment was simple - draw a picture. The homework was to create a small story from the drawing. I was excited to get home and get it done. I had so many ideas!

All it was: me picking apples from a tree. I seem to remember somebody else was in there picture, maybe my parents, but I cannot recall. I don't even know what I initially wrote either. Honestly, I don't even remember how I got to the next point.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting across from my father at the dining room table. I was trying hard not to cry, but it was difficult to not show that. He looked menacing, almost demon-like, and he bore his teeth at me at every sniffle. The page where my drawing was had been bent and smeared by a careless pencil eraser.

I can't tell you how or why it got to that point. But I feel from the memory that he decided to check my homework and deemed that I did not do the assignment well enough. The handwriting could have been too sloppy, or I did not spell something right, or I annoyed him. In any case, he did not like it because it was nothing.

From that moment onward, I was resolved to remain silent about my ideas. No more sharing stories, no more repeating my favorite VHS, nothing. I mean, if my own father thought that my words meant nothing, then I was the nothing he claimed that I was. This was later confirmed years later, by another family member, when I started keeping small notepads as diaries.

It wasn't until the end of my junior year of high school that I got my own room. Until then, I shared it with my older sibling. With my autism, I was so trusting of others, including this sibling, that every word out of their mouths meant the truth to me. Back then, I thought that family would never lead me down a bad pathway. That included my writing.

Yes, I know it's naive, but I was young and stupid.

Until maybe after sixth grade, I allowed this sibling to read everything I wrote. At the time, I was inspired by Anne Frank and her diary, hoping that I too would find a way to get mine published. In the end, all this sibling told me was that it was horrible and that I complained too much.

That was a common complaint in my family. I whined too much and always said the wrong things, encouraged by my godmother. It was another nail in the coffin.

By the sixth grade, I thought that everyone hated me because of my big mouth. I decided it was best to keep everything to myself and not show off or tell someone something I knew. My diary thoughts were soon shared with a cousin, until that book was lost and I went solo in another blank book. The journal that turned into A World So Bright and Dark was one of the last times I wrote down my feelings and life around me.

That was about the time I turned to fan fiction.

The fan fiction stories never stopped. Since I was a child, they whirled in my head and none of them were shared with anybody else. For the moment, I had an empty audience and no way to put it down on paper or a computer. I was embarrassed about using older shows for my fantasies anyway, knowing that even my classmates would point and sneer (no idea if they would have, my trauma and autism told me this). Besides that, everything I did and owned was monitored carefully, both at home and school.

The silence continued into high school. By the time I reached this new kind of freedom, I realized that I could save my works and print them out. Somehow, I could hide myself. I began finding new hiding spots for things I wanted to save, most of it hidden amongst my schoolwork.

Then, something strange happened: I had people I could hang out with. From them, I learned about a new world. I was quiet enough to get gossip too. One of them was about the school magazine.

It was the prospect of being published in that magazine that got me interested in showing off. But those critical voices began to pick on me again, and they were from my sibling and the group we hung out with. They said I was just doing it because everyone else was. I had nothing original. That sibling chimed in with memories that made me out to be the loser, the idiot and the child.

Regardless of truth or not, it brought me courage to break the silence. None of them understood. It was not a phase or a way to copycat. I truly wanted to write and have an audience.

Next time in #BehindTheScenes (sometime in September, after Calvin starts school), I will talk about the high school and college years, where the stories still whirled in my head, and how the early years of motherhood also shaped what I was experiencing. There were years of fan fiction writing until I just decided one day to do it. I was going to release my first book and somehow embark on another career, much different than the call center one I had.

Until the next season...stay safe. My son, Calvin, and I are off for new adventures. I hope to reconnect at least one more time this summer.

Namaste!

#IRL #Connections #IndieAuthor #EarlyCareer #Rejection #TheTrueMe