Ramblings of Me (AKA The Unnecessarily Long Explanation)

Hello

September 7, 2022

Wow, it's been a while, huh? This site has changed so much, it's damn near unrecognizable. When the hell did they add story notes?! Where was that when I needed it to make sure I remembered Ian having a dog?! Ahaha anyway, I'm sorry for this unnecessarily long explanation. TLDR; I probably won't come back, I'm unpublishing most of my works, please respect my decision and I love this community so much, I will always be grateful to Wattpad and my readers, I love you all.

Now keep reading if you want to read my barely coherent, middle of night, freezing my naked ass off in my office chair ramblings about my years on Wattpad and writing.

I started writing when I was 12, because after reading a particularly bad YA book (probably about vampires) I thought to my little 12 year old self, "I could have written that SO much better!" and so I started writing. I soon learned I could not write "SO much better", in fact I was so bad I wouldn't even use punctuation, everything was one long sentence, I had zero plot or direction. It was really bad, I mean so bad I just blocked it from my memory and choose to remember that I always wrote the way I did when I wrote My Mother's Boss, which in itself is really bad compared to a lot of amazing writers on this platform.

All that aside I started improving with my writing, I can see it, I'm sure you readers who have followed me since the beginning could see it, and I was doing great writing wise. I created this account when I was just over 15 (2 months after my 15th birthday) and I posted my very bad writing.I had no idea what I was doing, I was never really expecting much but I also really wanted people to read what I was writing.

The caveat is that I didn't want my family to know what I was writing. So i used a fake name "Isaiah Stone" because I would write stories revolving around LGBTQIA+ characters and my family was homophobic and religious enough to not like when gay marriage was legalized. My logic was if I doned a male persona then they definitely wouldn't find out it was me, which they wouldn't do anyway, they had no idea what Wattpad was. But I was a paranoid kid.

So...basically I wrote this "sinful" stuff about two guys kissing and having *gasp* sex! And I would even include in my nightly prayer that I am so sorry that I write stuff about gay guys, that I feel bad but God I'm sure you of all people understand, you love everyone, right?

This was before I realized religion isn't my thing and I turned to athiesm.

Quick aside, ya'll ever read that really cringy post-apocolyptic short story I wrote For Your Religion? That was a big yikes. I want to be analytical and say that you can really see my struggle between Christianity and athiesm but really I was just cringey and that was a whole thing I'd like to delete out of my brain lmao.

Anyway, so I published my first stories when I was fifteen. I was going through a rough time, my family life has always been awful (let's leave it at abuse for now) it was getting worse, I needed an outlet and somehow writing helped to an extent. I mean, we've all heard this story before.

I grew up, I finally got out of the toxic home environment I was in and I should have felt better. I was 18, I was working, I was paying bills, I had friends, away from my parents, all that good stuff. I always attributed my lost interest in writing as being caused by my job but really I think I just grew away from it when I finally got out of the very stressful situation I was in. I still wasn't ok though, I began drinking and smoking because I could, I would self-harm a lot still, I still had suicidal thoughts, I would be more anxious, and I didn't understand why.

Spoiler alert, I have long lasting trauma from childhood, I mean I'd wake up to screaming, go to bed to screaming, was essentially homeless until I was 12, my father was incredibly abusive physically and mentally to everyone in the family and my mother constantly pushed me away, neglected us and gaslit everyone around her. I have nightmares still, I still have intrusive thoughts regarding my parents and events from my childhood, scars, terrible thoughts and behaviors. Essentially I'm messed up and I've been away from my parents for 6 years but I'm still having lasting effects and I probably will for the rest of my life but hooray for my husband's job giving me free health insurance so I don't have to spend thousands of dollars on therapy and medication out of pocket. *Cue conffeti*