Hello! I am Jasper Waters, owner of the online alias DarkStuff, and an SCP author since July of 2016. Since then, I have written much more, both on-site and off- (though mostly on-), and begun a musical career (as much as any of this can be called a "career") with the publishing of my first album under the name Natural Language in April of 2022. I have gone through a lot of development both as a person and an artist, as has the world around me and everyone with me. My style has changed gradually, but is very distinct now from what I used to create, except, perhaps, in length — I have always been, and am likely to forever be, long-winded.
If you already know me, and wish to get right to the links, I will lead with them here. You will be able to find my SCP oeuvre, as well as my growing off-site creations, my Bandcamp for my music, and my Patreon should you feel so moved as to gift me some artist income.
But for those of you who have come here to get a sense of who I am, or who need some convincing — or perhaps some context — for my works, let the rest of this page be an introduction, or an elaboration, on myself and the motive power behind the works linked here.
or, My Encounters With this Intimidating and Inspiring Mess Variably Called Life, Death, Reality, the Earth, Everything and Nothing, the Immensity of Which Can Not but Elude Written Word, but Which Nonetheless Must be Clumsily Contained and Expressed, or Else We May Never Learn Anything
Hello again, but in a less accommodating fashion — hello and welcome to the me you must come to learn if you are to understand the aim and passion of my art.
Who am I? I'm a cishet white male with a persistent eggy flavor, second generation progeny of the Summer of Love, 1967. I'm a Californian through and through. I was born in Vallejo, but have few memories of that place before my family moved to Nevada City, a tourist town in between Sacramento and Reno. I'm ambiguously pagan — a celebrant of the solstices and equinoxes, those being Ostara, Beltane, Mabon and Yule — but culturally Christian by virtue of growing up in the United States of America. I am the child of two philosophy majors. My mother grew up in the Bay Area in California, a chorister with dreams of becoming a nurse. My father rode the dot com boom, becoming middle class after his poor upbringing in Nevada, and now writes grants for non-profits. I have an older brother, an English major who decided to take a hard left into conservation efforts and botany. My house growing up had Buddhist imagery, and in fact I worked out anger issues when I was very young by meditating with my father for ten minutes every day before going to school. The mantle above our fireplace was often decorated with sun imagery, as we recognized the sun as the original divinity. I used to go to church with my mom — Unitarian Universalist church, in fact, which I lovingly refer to as hippie church.
This, I think, is already a wonderful lens through which to view my works, but it is an incomplete picture. One day, I may be inspired to write a full autobiography, though honestly I give it a low likelihood. For now, I'll try to be brief (we all know how good I am at that, and if you don't then you will soon come to know), and pass over some few sections of my life thus far. I'm 22 years old, so not too far through my life, should everything go well, but I can't wait to become a whole being before I recount who I am. If I did, I would wait forever.
Section I: My Life
Part I: Pre-Authorship
I came into being on the 29th of November, 2001, only a few months after the United States reeled from September 11th (and never fully recovered). My parents didn't like the idea of raising their children in a city, so we moved to Sierra Nevada foothills to Nevada City, the place called Oustomah by the Nisenan, now the seat of the whitest county in California, Nevada County, selling itself as a tourist destination for those interested in the Gold Rush of '49, and a vacation spot for its Yuba river, which attracts a large number of Sacramentans every summer.
To everyone's great surprise, I turned out to be an introvert. I didn't make friends easily in school, though I didn't make none — I found girls much easier to engage with at a young age, I didn't mix well with the physicality of boys. As might be the case with many young boys, I was often mistaken for a girl, or called "ma'am" over the phone. The family anecdote being that I was singing since before I could talk, I entered choirs as soon as my parents could put me in them, and with my high male voice, I ended up singing soprano most often, further cementing a feminine sense of self.
As I grew up, these occasions, being "confused" for a girl, became less frequent. Perhaps subconsciously, but also explicitly because I didn't like going to get haircuts (once a barber cut the bottom of my ear by accident and I still have a scar there), I began to grow my hair out as I became more obviously a boy in late elementary school. This seemed to work, at least, and I even got whistled at from behind as late as early high school, before turning around and the offending teenager taking note of my peach fuzz moustache. Beginning in 5th Grade, I never cut my hair again, except for trims to get rid of split ends.
Rewinding to 4th Grade, that was when I started at Nevada City School of the Arts, or NCSA, which is by far the best school experience I ever had. I had long been doodling, and I made a name for myself by becoming the artistic kid of my grade, specifically the visual arts kid, who other children would approach and ask to draw things. Girls flirted with me by asking me to draw them, though I either didn't pick up on it or didn't care. My identity seemed tied to my art from a young age.
So it was unfortunate, in about 6th Grade, when someone new transferred to school and immediately outdid me on that front. Middle school started with me losing the crown of "the one who is good at art," and I didn't have an incredible motivation to reclaim it, or to keep up. My drawing seemed mostly motivated by the community recognition of my efforts, and without it I moved to other interests, primarily being video games and YouTubers. Here, I found Markiplier, whose SCP Containment Breach playthrough introduced me to SCP, and I was instantly enamored.
I read plenty, though primarily Series I, the classics, and did what many do, attempting to read everything in order, and, of course, failing. As I explored, I became taken with the idea of contributing myself! To fill the hole I was suddenly missing in my waking, walking life, I became attached to this community who I might be able to show off my artistic accomplishments to. From very early on, the goal was to contribute something that would have a large impact on the site.
Of course, I was 12 at the time.
So that probably wasn't going to work.
But it remained something on the backburner for me, and I lurked for a long time. Meanwhile, middle school was good to me. I was emerging from being the angry child, and had yet to hit the hormonic nightmare that would turn me into a creep for the duration of high school. All in all, I was okay playing Terraria, Minecraft, and Binding of Isaac, waiting to be of age to write something for the site (of course, I lied about my age and tried sooner than that, but was quickly downvoted, as expected, and in a strange moment of early maturity, realized that there was likely a reason that the age minimum of 15 was probably there for a reason, then resigning myself to waiting).
I whiled away, taking the public identity of the singer and actor instead, a burgeoning theatre kid and musician. Still, despite the positive feedback I gained in these roles, my mind lingered on the possibilities of being a writer. I was studying the craft with my brother late some nights, brainstorming episodes for our fictional show called This Won't End Well (and it didn't) inspired by the anime we were watching, like Sgt. Frog, Soul Eater, and Girls Bravo (which I absolutely should not have had access to at the time).
And one day, in early high school, freshman year, I decided I had waited long enough. I was going to write and do it right this time.
Part II: Authorship
So I did.
I rushed a little, being simply unable to wait for my 15th birthday, and wrote SCP-2728 when I was still 14, a sophomore in high school. The inspiration was simple: after a family vacation to Spain, in which we saw an interesting building standing atop a hill in Barcelona but were then later unable to find it on a map or in-person. The anomaly was obvious. I just had to sprinkle in those eerie qualities I had been studying for the past few years!
It was successful, and thus started my authorship. SCP became my life and my escape during the hardest years of my life — I was so sick in freshman year I missed half of all my classes or more, and in sophomore year I fell into a deep depressive episode that led me to neglect and self-harm. The latter was due in large part to the incredible attraction I felt to my lady peers, and the dissonance between how I ended up approaching them and how much I hated myself for doing it. (The girl I dated sophomore year was first warned about me, because I had that kind of reputation. That relationship did end up ill, though in retrospect I would say the blame for that was even-handed: two highly depressive people with deficient self-control and self-respect don't usually make for a supportive team, and our friendship remained destructive until we finally split — undeniably my fault — many years later, in the midst of covid.)
Thus, even less than in my middle school years, my waking world didn't feel like it offered much for me. My existence became mostly online, and I more than neglected my social life, I scorned the efforts others put into being presentable and sociable and made it a point not to do so myself. This, and other factors, led to slowly drifting away from my best friend from elementary school, and the friends that were more his than mine who I had furnished my social life with in the past. By junior year, my circles were entirely different, consisting of two brothers from my church, my now ex-girlfriend but continued friend with benefits, my best friend to this day, and a few people who sat with the latter two and I at lunch but who I never really spent time with, including the girl who ended up valedictorian of our class.
My joys were still in the arts, though, wherever I was engaged in them. I made it a point to be in choir and drama class every year, even taking two choir classes sophomore year and onward (because chamber choir met an hour before school, and I attended that and then the normal boys' choir later in the day). Despite my participation, I felt like I fit into neither of these groups. I did make a friend in the baritone section in choir, but he at one point uninvited me from a party because I didn't drink and he didn't want me to be a party pooper, so that should tell you how close we were. In drama class, the majority of the students were boisterous and outgoing, loud extroverts and passionate partiers, which was an energy I did not hold within me.
I wasn't wholly miserable, but certainly I didn't care much about my grades except for the classes which I enjoyed. I took AP and honors classes not because I got incredible grades but because I liked the energy of those classes much better than the more usual public classes. I skated by on C's and B's, with A's in drama and choir and sometimes English because I cared. Still, much of my time in school was spent on my little laptop, a school-gifted Chrome Book, writing.
I would say it is a safe assumption, for any given piece of mine posted before 2019, that I wrote it in-class as an alternative to paying attention. Even in classes I liked this was often the case. Choir and drama were intrinsically satisfying, moments of physical and emotional expression I wasn't often afforded (either by myself or others) in other contexts, and though I did receive compliments for my efforts in them, I never felt quite as recognized as I did on SCP, where people would actually comment on my works, vote on my works, and talk with me about my works. In choir and drama I participated, but I was always a part of something, and said something wasn't mine. On SCP, I was a part of something, but the part I played was wholly mine. It bridged self-expression and collaboration beautifully.
As I graduated high school, I watched many around me cry at various goodbyes and at the graduation ceremony, and I felt profoundly like I was missing something. I simply hadn't laid connections that I was sad to see go, and my friends weren't immediately moving away for high school either. I now think this might have been partly (though not wholly) due to having put so much of myself into my online persona, whose digital roots were liable to remain firm no matter my physical location, and could weather many life circumstances that in-person relationships and interpersonal dynamics can not. The blow was not as great for me as it was for my classmates. I somewhat regretted this. I still do, but now I believe my perspective, and where the regret lies, have changed.
We were coming to the end of my most prolific period, and in a sense I could feel it. As I went into college for something I actually was continuously interested in — music theory — my focus shifted towards my waking life, and my artistic endeavors trended in musical directions that took me off of the site (and which started much slower owing to my relative inexperience with the new craft). Still, I felt my authorial spirit strong and started on a project many know me for, that being Take It Away, My Darling, which now remains in suspended animation, as this all happened just before quarantine and the great lull.
Part III: The Lull
I feel kinship with the whole human race as I change tone to address how the pandemic affected my life. Of course, as with everything, the pandemic itself was not a lone factor, and combined with other trends in my life to create an internal landscape hostile to my art.
As I came out of high school and started college, I did so with a new confidence I had never had before. I was paying attention to my wardrobe and how I presented, regretting my lack of connections in high school, but also expressing real confidence in who I was that I did not have before. My self-image adjusted slowly to this change in my attitude and outlook, and once the pandemic hit I naively believed that I would weather it well due to my introverted nature and lonely past. This was absolutely not the case, and soon I would discover the creeping feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had been robbed. At the cusp of college, where I was going to learn something I cared about, ostensibly alongside other students who were there to do the same thing, I was prepared to be a socialite I had never been, making connections with fellow artists and potential collaborators who shared my passions and my appetite for expression. I was in college only long enough to see partial success — a semester in which I made a solid new friend and was able to approach and strike up conversation with a stranger at a cafe without dissolving into an anxious puddle.
As my education went online, I, and many, thought that I could use my new free time to actually increase my artistic output, the thought of which birthed my newest project and my most ambitious one yet — essentially setting myself up for failure out the gate. Lack of social opportunities — the new devastation at realizing probably the most socially profitable years of my life had just been taken from me — and a sedentary repetitive day-to-day easily wore a fresh depression into me.
I lived in a small town, and my closest friends and our families and I decided we would be willing to share our germs and get sick or stay healthy together, so I did still see my church friends and my best friend. This was a great boon to my sanity, and none of us ended up taking sick during the whole of quarantine, miraculously. (I did get covid just this last year, for the first time, which was annoying but not terrible.)
Returning to my education: not merely were my social opportunities crippled or removed, but I also began to slip in schooling. I actually got better grades because the teachers were not prepared to teach online classes and had terrible methods to prevent cheating, and in my upset I didn't much care how I passed the classes and so was not properly dissuaded, but I did not learn how I wanted to.
Besides, I was beginning to feel that I did not want music — or art, generally — to be my career. Long have I struggled with ego, and it was dawning on me just how self-involved art can be. I feel the need to state here that I am a great supporter of the arts and artistry and artists, myself included, but I felt that I would be happier, more fulfilled, doing something for others. A direct service. Something where I wasn't the center of it — merely a deliverer of a greater good.
This was what I was thinking about after having worked a retail job, and then working at a pizza place in late 2021, the sales aspect of both killing me a little inside and sending me home feeling like I had wasted a part of my life every day. (I actually have more nuanced and some positive feelings about working at the pizza place, but those can wait for another time — in short, I did really enjoy my coworkers, and actually, working the rushes was really invigorating and satisfying.)
So my devotion to my studies waned. Without passion for school, no access to theater or choirs (in-person anyhow, and I was completely disinterested in alternatives), limited social opportunities and certainly no way to make new friends, I was beginning to feel a massive hole in my life, a complete lack of direction. I tried to supplement writing for this direction, and failed. Art is work, and the fuel for that work is emotional. I had no energy to spare, none saved up, and what little I did went, eventually, to work with me, and would be spent by the time I got home. I accepted rather quickly that I wasn't going to be able to write.
Still, there were some productions during this time.
Covid brought my old best friend, from whom I'd drifted, back to town from college in Santa Cruz — he wasn't willing to pay for an apartment if his classes were going to be online anyways, and I can't blame him. Somehow, and I don't really remember how, we reconnected. Both of us were looking for something to occupy the time in quarantine, and so I asked if he would collaborate with me on a musical project which I had composed all the songs for but had never been able to bring into existence. He agreed. The fruit of our effort was Artifice, the first real album by my artist name Natural Language (barring the first project, Songs for Sasha). This project was easier to do because most of the creative process (on my end — my friend added plenty of his own flavors during the production phase) had happened prior to quarantine, and really all we were doing was recording and producing it. Still, it was immensely satisfying to complete, and finishing a real worked-on and worked-at album felt like a necessary step towards the artist that I wanted to be.
The other major production from this period would be SCP-6500, a massive collaborative article for the 6k contest. I don't usually participate in contests, especially unless asked… but I was asked! And I'm glad I was. Something about the energy of the entire group putting effort into this piece, and their reliance on my getting my section done, broke through some of my paralysis and allowed me to produce a rather large piece of writing in the middle of a drought. I might compare the fervor to a monsoon in sudden onset and intensity, and then immediate departure. I was — and am — very proud of this piece, and though it is not wholly because of its inherent quality, I do feel it is deserving of being my most read and most popularly appreciated article. (It's not my favorite of all the things I have written, but I am not upset that it holds the position it does.)
Otherwise, though, this period of my life really is marked with dreary days and long fretful hours of sitting in front of a computer, getting nothing done, and being perpetually disappointed in myself.
As the pandemic waned, I was working as a pizza delivery driver. One day, I was very upset for one reason or another, and yet I was at work, delivering pizzas. It struck me just how much I was sacrificing my mental well-being for nothing. That I was unhappy, and yet had still come in to work, to make pizza convenient for a local population, felt like meaningless suffering. As I finished giving a pizza over to an apartment-owning family, I walked back to my car, and before driving back to homebase, I just stood there in the parking lot a moment, watching the orange-gray sky as the sun set over the smoky foothills, and thinking that this was a shitty way to spend my time.
Though I hesitate to draw any hard lines, I would say that moment starts the end of the lull. I was not immediately prolific again, but this thought process would propel my next life movements, which would eventually get me to a better place again — this place, here where I am now, a new fertile ground in which I can see the seeds of a new, wild garden.
Part IV: The Now
After claiming my Associate's degree in Music Theory & Composition, I dropped college and thought hard about what I wanted to do, career-wise. Not trusting much in the future — with a licked finger to the air, feeling a strong eroding wind — I wanted something I could rely on. I wanted job security. I wanted something outside of sales, something with community and servitude in mind, something that would survive the great American storm. In my brainstorming, I thought up deathcare. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, for both practical and spiritual reasons. To detail all of my thoughts on the matter would take up its own essay, and is something I am continuously exploring and developing, but needless to say, I was taken — dealing in life and death felt like something universal, something eternal, and, perhaps most important of all, something real, an island in the sea of modern invention.
I set sail, so to speak, deciding to get an entry level job in the field to get my foot in the door and look around, see if I really liked it before committing to any expensive education. I ran out of options in my hometown — an echo of my running out of social options as the meaning of the term retirement community became clear, all the folks my age emigrating to greener pastures — and quickly had to look further afield for an occupation.
This took me to Sacramento, and so I moved out of my parents' place for the first time and into a rented room from a three-degree connection through our church, getting dirt cheap rent and a landlord who actually went and bought the groceries for both of us. (I wouldn't yet say that this was me learning how to "live on my own," heheheh.) This didn't yet break me out of the lull proper, as my mental health suffered greatly for this move as well, owing to my working night shift and being on-call, an incredibly efficient method for having no energy and no opportunities.
That said, I loved — and love, still — the work!
I work as a "removal technician," though it's more intuitive to say that I work as mortuary transport. In Sacramento, working for SCI (Service Corporation International, a dystopian name if I've ever heard of one and the secret mega-corp of the death industry you've never heard of), I was on-call to pick up decedents from their places of death and get them back to our cooler for a number of funeral homes. The majority of calls were to family homes, though there were calls to facilities (hospitals, nursing homes) where families weren't present. Some situations are easy, such as an itty bitty old lady dying in bed, but others were hard, such as a three-hundred pound man dying in his bathtub.
But, importantly, I felt like I was helping. There was a situation that required action, and I was there to supply. More than retail and more than food, I was getting regular gratitude from the people who I served, many thanks from grieving families, and even recognition from my bosses who would relay happiness expressed by families to funeral directors about the removal process. (Also, it paid… really well, and was an easy job to land. For any of you out there who need something that pays well for no prior experience, I actually recommend it — that and pizza delivery driving, which gets you pretty good income from tips. I've actually gotten a one-hundred dollar tip at both jobs!)
So, though I was still suffering from loneliness and terrible sleep, I was doing a job that didn't make me feel as though I'd wasted my life when I got home. This was pretty incredible, and I decided I really did want to continue down this path, and stay in deathcare.
Two very important things happened during this time. One…
Ponies.
This could be a very long conversation, so I will leave it for another time, but something about a lack of community — this time having moved away even from my best friend (and my church friend having moved away, as had my brother) — drove me to desperation, and, already being a flavor of furry, I became interested in bronies. My coworker who I connected most with was also a brony, so that promoted the exploration of My Little Pony, which we began to watch together regularly between and after work.
Oh, and that's the second important thing that happened. Making that coworker into a friend! He and I are actually roommates now, because I followed him up to Portland when he moved for college. I have always had a desire to move north, as had the rest of my family and my friend group. I didn't expect to be the first to leave California, but that is how it turned out. I keep the same job here now, but for a different company, this time with contracts with my previous employer (SCI and all their many associated funeral homes), a collection of various other funeral homes, but also the medical examiners (aka coroners) for several counties (Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas), and some organ donation facilities. So, my work is more varied now — and I more often see much worse things. I'm happy to say that none of it seems to follow me home: I feel uniquely capable of withstanding the emotional rigors of this job, which is one reason it really rang true when I thought of it.
Rewinding just slightly, during my time in Sacramento, I did produce one important work, my first work of fanfiction (outside of the incredible incestuous fanfiction of the SCP wiki — fanfic of fanfic of fanfic, fanfic of fanfic of itself), titled The Forever Egg, published on the 17th of September, 2022. Though very much stewed on and elaborated on, the bones of the work did literally come to me in a dream, which somehow fueled its creation while still squarely in my creative drought.
But now, I live in Portland. I work during the day. I live with my peer and friend and coworker, as well as my brother who moved in some months after we moved up. Our front door exits into a block-wide park on the Portland State University campus, and our backyard is essentially dense forest parkland. Somehow, we get to have short walk access to hiking trails as well as short walk access to downtown, which has been a really great time. I continue to love my work, I am looking to go to college in Fall of 2024 and pick up a funeral director certification, and hopefully meet people and make new friends. (Well, more hopefully, a romantic connection.)
I'm in a much better place. I have clarity of purpose I did not have before, a positive self-image I did not have before, and an approach to my art that excites me that I did not have before. I am coming in to a new stage of my life, and I'm hoping to furnish it with new artworks. I have inspiration that I did not have before. If you've read this far, you're probably my audience — hi! I hope you enjoy what I come up with in the short- and long-term, I hope to be making music and telling stories for the rest of my life.
Section II: My Art
Part I: The Superficial & Arbitrary Reasons Anyone Starts Anything, & Why I Started Writing
Necessarily, this section will repeat information from the prior writings, but I felt this needed special attention. Firstly, I am community-oriented. From the outset, my motivations have been social — I drew for fun, but I took to it because people recognized and encouraged it. When that ceased to be the case, I dropped it. I took up writing because of the availability of a community that would see, read, and comment on my artistry, and if that were not the case I highly doubt I would have taken it up. Of course, I did also do some writing with my brother, for my brother, but I would cite the social aspect of that as well. Essentially, in my eyes, if I'm going to be the only one to experience something of mine, then it's no better expressed in reality than it is simply in my head — it may be brainstormed, but no more.
This is also broadly applicable. Another hobby of mine is gaming competitively — of course, gaming does have an intrinsic reward for me alone, the satisfaction of accomplishing a task given to me by the game, so I have in the past just played games to complete them (though I will say that I usually announce my big achievements to my friends and don't usually play story games because I don't feel like I'm accomplishing anything I can share and lose interest — with some exceptions). However, the game I play most (and by a lot) is N++, which I play because of the tight community around it. I've been playing since 2017, only a year after I started SCP, and now I'm actually in the top twenty players, globally. (As of the time of writing, my big project in that game is highscoring the Community Tab Project, a huge mod that replaces the main campaign with player-made levels, and I am currently in the lead, having over four times the highscores of the guy in second place, so it goes well!)
This is all to say that when I decided to start writing, the weight I placed on it was just about as much weight as I place on highscoring N++ now. It was a fun thing to do, that got me attention and felt satisfying to accomplish. I don't think this is at all a poor way to find inspiration, and in fact I feel like finding something simply enjoyable is one of the purest reasons to start anything — a green flag for future endeavors. But it's important to note that I wasn't putting a lot of thought into my art beyond how fun it was to do, and how it connected me to the community.
So, early on, you get something like Vend-a-Friend. Other than Take It Away, My Darling, Vend-a-Friend is my most popular piece of writing (outside of SCPs), which I'm not upset about — in fact, at one time, I was incredibly proud of it. I'm still proud of it, but less so. It bears some hallmarks of my approach to writing at the time, which I don't really enjoy now. For anyone who's read it and is now reading this and drawing the first, most obvious conclusion, no! I still love the rambling style, Brainy Brian remains one of my favorite narrators I've ever written and I every once in a while think of ways I might contrive to write Brainy Brian again, but I often come up short.
No, what I'm referring to is its community-orientation and its lack of higher thought.
Vend-a-Friend came from a very simple idea, which was honestly a rather half-formed idea in the first place, the idea that it would be subversive to write a Wondertainment piece that was actually, secretly, very dark. Unlike other Wondertainment pieces at the time, I thought. This was a pretty unresearched thought, as now I am fully aware that actually Wondertainment started out as fitting right in with the SCP creepypasta origins, but at the time I thought this might be breaking new ground. Unwittingly, I was more-or-less returning Wondertainment to its roots. But I was interested in writing something that tied into site lore, because I was taken with this idea of having an impact on the site, and a lot of my early efforts were in this direction. I was often trying to interconnect things, set myself up for making a tag, things of this nature. It wasn't my whole occupation with the site, I did plenty of things just for fun, but it was a guiding light for my works, and a reason I made two tale series, which I felt had grandiosity enough to draw attention, while still being something I really wanted to write.
Anyhow, returning, I felt I could shake things up by shuffling around Wondertainment lore, create something different and eye-catching. At the same time, I wasn't putting a lot of thought into what it expressed. Spoilers for Vend-a-Friend incoming, skip this paragraph if you would like to miss it, but… I killed kids in that story, basically for the shock of it. And this scene comes about after our protagonist, Brainy Brian, ceases taking medication for an unnamed condition that can be nothing except schizophrenia, because that's what the named medication he has treats.
This is not, in my current view, a responsible representation of mental illness, and furthers this "the unwell are dangerous" viewpoint I disagree with heavily. All I was doing, at the time, was regurgitating the media portrayals of schizophrenic disorders and psychotic episodes with very little reflection on their contents. Worse, I kind of knew I was doing this, and in fact, that was why Brainy's condition is unnamed — I didn't want the burden of researching to accurately portray this.
I made a similar mistake in my next and lesser-known tale series Dancing with Rachael, in which PTSD is given a similar treatment. I was rule-of-cooling through both of these series, and in that mindset I missed how much of my hand I was revealing, when it came to my own misconceptions and malformed ideas.
I was not without want for messaging, and still attempted to put some meaning into these works. In fact, I like some of what I did with them, and I still am proud of my younger self for having the passion to create as I did. I only think that they are clearly juvenile when compared to my modern works. They failed to consider themselves holistically, and delivered mixed messages in the process.
In 2018, I published SCP-3466, and struck gold. Wilson's Wildlife Solutions, the group of interest introduced in that article, caught like wildfire, and is a commonly referenced piece of site lore by this point, to my great pleasure and satisfaction. It got a tag, its hub is at over +300, and it truly does not require me to stoke the fire to stay alive. I consider this a great, great success, and it was exactly what I had been wanting to accomplish since joining the site. Doing so made me have to sit back and reconsider what I wanted from authorship.
Up until this point, I had put very little pressure on my writing. As I said, I gave it about as much weight as I give highscoring N++ now. It was something I did to have fun and feel nice and get attention. (I am not, by the by, saying "get attention" as a negative thing: while I certainly don't find it a noble cause in and of itself I also don't find it outright harmful. Humans like attention. I find it natural and neutral, and probably the art of getting attention is a useful one for a variety of purposes.) Despite my prolificity, I did not actually conceive myself as a writer in the spiritual sense. I had not married my identity to it.
This served a great purpose. Having no pressure on it left me free to try and fail at no cost — I felt no shame for being bad at it, because I was not it and it was not me. I attribute my early writing success — which obviously paved the way for current success — to this very condition.
The same can not be said for my relationship to music.
Part II: How Attachment Breeds Meaning, & Thus How My Relationship With Art Evolved
Let us rewind for a moment, back to sophomore year of high school, my deepest depressive episode. Let us rewind even further just to remind ourselves that I had been in choirs non-stop since I was eight years old, and that I had taken clarinet, piano, and guitar lessons over my years of school (though no instrument stuck except the voice). Let me also emphasize the role music played in my family: my dad has played guitar every day for my whole life, and my mom had the chorister in her that I must have inherited. So, one might imagine that this would mean that music held a lot of meaning for me. It did, but I wasn't aware of that in early high school.
So one night, when I was feeling especially shitty, I tried to think of something I could do instead of laying in bed and wasting away, and I thought of putting on headphones and listening to an album my friend had been raving about, Spirit Phone by Lemon Demon, which had come out earlier that year. This was the first time I had ever listened to music as its own activity, and I was greatly rewarded. Thus started my love of musicality in life, thus I discovered harmony to my soul's melody and sought after more records that would strike such emotional chords.
At the time, or shortly after, or maybe even this started some time before, I don't really remember the timeline, I was (or became) part of Youth Music, a program at my church that is rather self-explanatory. I was there with my church friends, who were brothers, one of which played piano and the other played violin. Freshly inspired, I (or someone, I can't be sure this idea was mine originally) floated the idea that we could make our own song instead of just looking for songs to play and cover. This song became Here's the Sunset, the first ever song I wrote (other than musical doodles on the piano), much later put onto the album Artifice.
This started the way that my art projects normally had, with social reasoning. The song was co-written by those involved — the brothers, the organizer of Youth Music, and of course myself — and it was fueled by community involvement and friendly collaboration. Plus, making music with people is one of the best experiences in the world, as many can attest. By the summer of 2016, we had actually made a number of songs — maybe two or three — and I was catching a creative bug. I wanted more. It seemed that of us, I was becoming the primary composer, and so I started writing songs in my free time, and showing them to the Youth Music crowd. By summer, I had a collection of maybe ten or eleven songs, and I approached the church brothers with a plan. I wanted to perform and record all of these songs, and release them as an album.
The response was middling. They had other obligations, and weren't sure they could commit to the time and effort that would require. They were both academic types that took extracurriculars and had clubs and sports. I was very disappointed. Probably, if I did not have a deeper connection to this project, I would have dropped it here or shortly after, when realizing I couldn't make the entire thing myself (and I couldn't). But something terrible happened that prevented me from dropping it: I discovered that I am a musician.
My being a writer came from what I did. My being a musician came from what I am.
This raised the stakes drastically. Suddenly, when I failed at any attempt at musicianship, I was failing at being me. I could not so easily write off the failure. I felt deficient and lesser.
Music affected me so deeply — so much deeper than any other media — that I held its ability for self-expression in high regard. I noted, and accurately, that art is by its nature self-expression (among other expressions, such as cultural-expression), and I became hypersensitive to this idea that I was expressing a poor version of myself in my music. This desire, this striving to create music because I was music and I wanted to get out, to be expressed, required effort be expended on this album, Artifice, and yet my attempts went nowhere. I was unable to gather a group to perform the pieces with me, and every attempt at producing the thing myself (electronically mostly) was painful as every experiment that didn't see immediate success (all experiments) felt like I had just failed myself. It was easier to stay away from this side of me than it was to engage with it and so, largely, I did.
Unfortunately, escaping the feeling was not so easy. Having discovered the expressive properties of art in the form of music, I began to note the expressive properties of art in general. This was at first inspiring, and then demoralizing, as my feelings about music bled into my feelings about writing. Suddenly, my writing held very similar properties — it was something that expressed my thoughts and feelings. (This is in part an inherent quality, in another part it is because I, trying to fill the void of what I couldn't do with music, began to intentionally place more of myself into the works that I created.) Suddenly, the stakes raised there as well.
This was a major factor in the oncoming lull. I had fulfilled my initial goal with writing and had to fill the void with something else. Once I filled it with what was natural, a journey of self-expression and meaning, I unexpectedly ran into the same issues I had with music, if to a lesser extent (I didn't feel so bad about failing, I only felt very pressured to do something good and didn't enjoy settling for less). Take It Away, My Darling came from this place, and suffered the consequences. Over the course of writing it, my sensitivity to self-expression increased, and there came a point where what I had already written didn't meet my standards, and to continue writing on would necessitate resolving and referencing plot points and hooks that had been set up during that period I no longer liked — infecting the later chapters with the inadequacies of the earlier ones. The only hope would be to rewrite everything.
I didn't have the energy to do that. So I stopped writing.
No longer making art — no longer writing music, no longer writing stories, and, though it fell off much earlier, no longer drawing pictures — all I had available to me was to think. To many others, it may seem like a strange substitution, but I filled the hole with N++, where I went to still make achievements recognized by a community. It was a very different artform — a competitive, physical, dexterous artform — but it was art nonetheless. My products went from the soul-bearing to the skill-bearing, but my highscores replaced my writings and songs. It was safer.
And so, through quarantine and on, I stewed. I found some direction in other aspects of my life, namely the discovery that I didn't want art to be at the center of my days because it felt so incredibly self-involved. But I slowly came to other conclusions, necessary conclusions. I faced many beliefs and ideas and anxieties that paralyzed my ability to create, and yet I held firm that creation itself was not only good, but integral. That I needed art back in my life. And somewhere along the line, I started feeling better about myself, and I got a clarity of purpose that I have been holding onto. I hope, now, to share that with you.
Section III: My Creed
Part I: An Inventory of Beliefs
I apologize in advance for how disorganized this will likely end up — this is the first time I have ever made an effort to write out exactly what I believe. It will still be a very truncated version, but even a truncated version will be more complete than anything else I've written — doing what normal people do, only expressing beliefs as they are relevant, and exploring only certain ideological thoughts in extended conversation. That said, let us start with my beliefs on how beliefs are formed, and, consequently, how humans engage with material reality.
Humans are subjective creatures. We are born with some certain biological impulses that form the walls for how our reasoning develops, such as sexual instinct, consuming instincts, and a great deal of social instincts, such as empathy, senses of justice, and otherwise. I am no psychologist and thus can not make an exhaustive list of the axes upon which humans judge things — and in fact I imagine such a list would be nigh impossible to make, because humans can develop axes based on activities, though perhaps all such judgments could be put on an axis that measures based on perceived worth? That is an interesting thought but besides the point, a philosophical question surely tackled a million times over by people with more patience (and perhaps more conviction they might actually be able to come up with an answer) than I. My purpose with this line of thinking is only to say that I believe humans act on some biologically-coded methods of judgment, and that our ways of thinking are shaped by these in ways largely subconscious. Furthermore, I do not believe these judgments to be reflections of absolute reality. Is an assessment of the attractiveness of an object a judgment of objective reality? Do good and evil exist in the world outside of human perception? No, they do not.
But there are qualities we may consider "objective" that humans also perceive subjectively. Easily, one can point to our perceptions of colors and distance, which can be incredibly muddled by optical illusions. Something that is purple in one context can be red in another. Something that sounds loud in one context can be quiet in another. Dark and bright, hard and soft, these are all things we can measure, but which require instruments — outside observers — to write down. In the human brain, all of perception is subjective, even things we think of as objective are first presented to us as arbitrary judgments. Contexts may make us more likely to pick something as dark or bright — purple or red — but these are likelihoods, not definitives. Nearly nothing is definite within the human brain.
For this reason, I do not believe that humans interface strictly with reality.
I do believe in the existence of an objective reality — a finite (or perhaps infinite) series of truths about mass and energy and light and materials and space and a nearly uncountable number of things that, when added up, produce the universe which we are all simultaneously a part of and products of. I, for example, do believe in the existence of an earth — and I do think it is one earth, or at least a finite number of earths, that we all exist on and subsist on. I believe these things to be the case due to our ability to scientifically measure things. I think that without a singular objective reality, many more inconsistencies would arise from our measurements of the world around us — and let me say that there are not none — and this gives me confidence that such a world exists.
I don't believe that humans — or living beings for that matter — interface with this objective reality. I think that even our scientific measurements enter our brains as subjective things, as series of judgments. For example, we are judging, at every moment, whether a piece of data is true or false. For many things, what is true and what is false seem simple and clear to deduce — such as the chemical composition of a substance. But we make the exact same judgments about very subjective things, such as whose fault an action is. I do not believe these judgments are separate, I in fact think they are the very same judgment, and that their marriage to one another — their use of the same systems within the brain — prove the human inability to accurately and fully interface with an objective reality.
And even if we could, would it not require, at all times, exacting measurements? That sounds like an incredibly exhausting task, to measure everything before making any action. And by the time you have all your measurements, the measured things would change — the world is in a state of flux! You have to at some point make a call without all the information, there is simply no other way, and so humans operate on judgments and subjectivity. You can only operate on what you know, and what you know is really only what you very strongly think. Facts exist, and they inform how we judge, but eventually we must judge, and judgments are created by our arbitrary values, which are themselves created based off of our biological bounds, what our brains are constructed to consider.
We may live in an objective world, but we create and are engaged in a subjective world.
Hopefully that is the most I dwell on any one point, and the rest of this will be a little speedier. I believe that reasoning is social. Think about it. Sure, a scientist may make a measurement and present it. But what reason do you have to believe them? If they've supported things you have thought in the past, then you're likely to be more credulous to anything they "discover" now. But what if someone says something that strongly goes against your own perceptions? When you make a judgment here, you are not judging based on fact — you are judging based on your own experience. You may judge your own experience to be very complete, varied, a strong foundation for your beliefs, but that is at its core a judgment.
If you are the scientist, you may have more claim to know the truth, having performed the experiment yourself, but everyone who hears of it has to trust that you both performed the experiment and that this was the real result, and their judgment of that will depend on very subjective factors. (Do you look the part? Do you talk like other scientists they trust? Do they trust scientists at all?)
Consider for a moment a different scenario, one in which someone claims a fact that you have no strong feelings about one way or another. However, everyone in your support network does: they think one thing very strongly. To have a belief that goes against theirs would be to invite conflict and potentially shake your supports — and besides, these people have generally known what they were talking about, as evidenced by the way they have supported you. Where do your priorities lie? For I would argue the vast majority of humanity, an individual in this scenario will conform. An outside party claims that a pot is hot, their personal party claims the pot is cold. They have not personally touched the pot — but their group claims to have enough evidence to claim the pot is cold, even including some people who swear they have indeed touched the pot and it is cold. It seems easy and natural to become a cold-potter in this scenario.
I think all of the above is how humans reason. Some will touch the pot and report back — their report will be taken with varying credulity depending on the individual's — and group's — own experiences and lenses.
Let me call my party the hot-potter party. I identify with all people who claim the pot is hot. There is still a lot of variability about descriptions of the pot — what material it is made of, how big it is, how hot it is — but we all agree the pot is hot. I, personally, have not touched the pot. But a lot of people I deeply trust, who hold qualities I find to be common among discerning and thoughtful individuals, say the pot is hot and have claimed to have touched the pot. I also strongly believe in a number of measuring instruments. For example, I'm generally credulous to pictures and videos of the pot, showing evidence that the pot is hot. Was I there when the video was taken? No, I wasn't. I am extending a lot of trust in this scenario. Do I know for certain that this thermometer, which they claimed they used to measure the heat of the pot, was actually used to measure the heat of the pot? No, I don't, but I trust the people who took the measurement not to lie, and I can see the number on the thermometer and agree that it is hot (another judgment, by the by).
I would say that the only difference between myself and those I oppose is that my party actually knows the temperature of the pot, but the other party is sure to say the exact same thing.
This realization, this headspace, has led to a lot of paralysis on my part. How can I be sure of anything? What makes my position more worth fighting for than theirs? These are tough questions. To tie these thoughts into material more familiar to this author page by now, how can I be sure that the messages I am putting into the world through my writing are worth sending? How can I be sure I am not causing damage if I can't be sure of my own judgments?
This brings us to a line of thinking that has assuaged many of my anxieties tied into the first, and which is a natural conclusion from the idea of social reasoning.
Humans are neurons. We do not think alone. We are all parts of a singular system that thinks together. No one neuron is ever meant to have all the answers, no one person is ever meant to be perfectly attuned and knowledgeable. I might say that I am a neuron in the brain of the hot-potters, but I am also a neuron in the brain of the cold-potters whenever I engage with cold-potters. In fact, I conjecture that you can take any collection of human beings and call them a distinct brain. This includes just one — and that would be their own brain, this is the identity of an individual. But there is the United States brain, the world brain, the Christian brain, the people-who-work-at-the-arts-and-crafts-store-in-your-hometown brain, the First Nations brain, the two-guys-playing-chess-in-Chile brain. They have a great deal of overlap but are distinct from one another, and you can gain insights by looking at each individually, each together, and also at individuals. These brains can be expanded to include animals, and even traditionally considered dead objects, but this gets into another topic of conversation entirely.
For this, it is turtles all the way down. I would compare this to the human body. We can acknowledge that each cell in the human body is like its own organism. There are thoughts that the organelles within cells were once independent actors, and are thus themselves organisms. Yet we are also an organism, singular. What about our stomach? Is it an organism? It seems distinct, it in fact has a brain — look up the "gut brain," it is truly fascinating. Is it perhaps its own organism? Is our brain one brain? There have been (I believe outdated and inadvised) procedures which split the brain in two, disconnecting the brain at the corpus callosum to address epileptic disorders. Experiments then suggested that the two hemispheres, while cooperative with one another, had distinct personality traits — that the right hemisphere would respond to a question one way and the left another. (This is also fascinating to look up and I suggest you do so.)
These ideas challenge our self-images of being perfectly individual — we ourselves are collectives. This makes it easy for me to jump to an idea of being part of a collective as well. In this view, we are less burdened with perfection. We can recognize that we hold imperfect and even harmful ideas (harmful being another judgment we ourselves are making) and be at peace with that, knowing that the fate of the world — and even our own world — does not rest entirely on us.
So, are we dissolved of responsibility, then?
This is a tougher question, and begins to lead into beliefs I feel less strongly, less fundamentally. Things more for myself than universal. Do I believe everyone has responsibility? Yes. I believe people should feel a sense of responsibility. But should is a judgment. Not that the rest of what I have said isn't based on my own judgments… perhaps we should go down a different path before returning to this thought. Let's put a pin in it.
Why do we care whether the pot is hot or not? Well, even that question will bring a multitude of answers, but mostly, it is because we need food, and the temperature of the pot will determine the food we can make. If we do not make food, we will not be able to eat, and our health will suffer for it. It is incredibly important we know the temperature of the pot for this reason. Well, those who touch the pot will know what food they can make, and they will — assuming they also have culinary abilities — create better food and eat well. Those who don't know the temperature of the pot — or are willfully ignorant — may hurt themselves trying to cook food they can not, or touching a hot pot and ignoring the burns claiming it is cold for purposes that suit them.
As with all opinions, while it is subjective, the proof is in the pudding. To humans, and probably all living beings, what is more important than reality is what is useful. If something works, you don't even have to know why it works. Of course, knowing why it works is useful for the purpose of fixing it if it stops working, or knowing if it is sustainable in the long-term. But generally, our beliefs are practical — even if the practicality is whether or not it gets people to like us, or if the purpose is to make ourselves laugh. We are very unlikely to do things for which we gain absolutely no reward. Even if the rewards are fleeting or harmful long-term, humans do things for reasons. We may hurt ourselves to distract from other pains — the distraction is the reward, the practice. We may cut off connections because it makes our life simpler. We may neglect ourselves because we have decided that doing otherwise is too costly. From an outside perspective, we may be bewildered by these actions as they harm the user, and might undermine our idea that humans work for rewards, but I see them as operating by the same logic — a subjective logic, which is always working on individual judgments informed by biological and social factors.
We wouldn't care if the pot was hot or not if there were no purpose to the pot being hot. To some, who have never touched the pot and furthermore have their own separate way of feeding themselves (or falsely believe they may be unaffected), their allegiance to cold-potters or hot-potters may be entirely social, completely informed by the company they like to keep and which groups support their individual goals more. But rarely do volatile issues arise with all invested parties having no practical purpose for caring about the facts of the matter. (There could be a long and very interesting discussion about the exceptions.)
So we have to believe that those who know the correct temperature of the pot will gain an advantage — that being, they will be healthier, they will be stronger. Those in the opposite camp who have reasons to not feel quite so strongly as their neighbors may see the vitality of the correct temperature camp and convert. Children may arrive, their judgments fresh and less informed by the social structures their parents have, and see for themselves that their crowd is deficient in ways the other crowd seems to not struggle with. They may break pattern.
We hope that these kinds of processes will produce more people who carry the more practical belief, and that our belief in the practical purpose of that belief will fuel us to act with conviction in support of that belief.
I suppose it is impossible to communicate that without coming off as a little bit socially Darwinist. I'm essentially arguing that beliefs with more practical application will gain an advantage in a battle against impractical beliefs, and that this advantage will win. I can not rescind that statement because that is how I actually think, but I acknowledge the awful and violent history that such "survival of the fittest" arguments have had, and want to clarify a few things.
One, I think these patterns are very long-term, and that I have greatly simplified an incredibly complicated scenario. Two, I do not think that survival of one camp means destruction of the other — in fact, I believe that it is always good to have people with different views that can discuss, because we are all working on judgments and need the views of others to round out our own lenses. None of us are objective, and we may discover we are valuing something incorrectly. I do not think that this "battle" is necessarily violent, and I do not think one party wins only when the other party is dead. I do not even think it has to be thought of as a battle — though it often becomes one. In an ideal world, it would be a discussion, a debate. It would be a series of experiments. It would be a meeting of minds and souls. It would be speaking, it would be listening. I think we must do this regardless, but when a belief incurs violence, or the conviction one has in a belief incurs violence, it is right to use violence to protect oneself, for the practical purpose of living, which, if we did not value one bit, would completely undermine the majority of human reasoning. (Not that tradition is the be-all-end-all of right and wrong, but I think enough people agree that life is valuable that I don't feel the need to belabor this point.)
So, do we have responsibility? Only inasmuch as we have responsibility to ourselves, which, if you believe in a collective humanity, begins to include more than just oneself. I personally am in the camp that you should act outside of self-interest, but I am also in the camp that believes that the practical results of working together for greater community health will win out against self-interested actors anyways. So, I believe in feeling responsibility for a greater community in the same way I believe that the pot is hot — I think it is practical, and the people who believe this with me I identify as my people, but it is not an inherent conclusion from the more fundamental beliefs I expressed — that of living within a subjective world, and of human reasoning being social, and of human existence being collective. You can certainly believe all those things and still enjoy your individual success far too much to value others' happiness over it. You can also certainly believe that certain parts of the human collective are diseased parts and don't deserve your help or resources, while still believing you are part of the same organism.
I do not hold these beliefs. But they aren't impossible within my schema, and I acknowledge that. I in fact find it incredibly important to acknowledge the humanity of those we despise the most, for in that acknowledgment comes the admittance that we could have fallen down the same paths, that we are capable of horrible actions, that what separates us is a combination of circumstance and, we hope, mindfulness.
(P.S. After having written this, I admit a feeling of doubt as I dwell on the subject matter, in several places. For example, does my adherence to my own beliefs rely on the idea that they will win out against the beliefs I disagree with? In that case, am I following a secret "might makes right" doctrine? Or would I follow my own beliefs even if I knew, for sure, that they would eventually lose out to greater malignant forces? I could expound on these contemplations for many more thousands of words, and in fact I believe I would never truly finish, because thoughts beget thoughts. I will never be a perfect finished product, and neither will you, so I will always have to accept putting forth incomplete ideas. The acceptance of this has been a large part of my journey.)
Part II: A Series of Admittances
Equally important to the beliefs themselves are their sources. As an avid contemplator and rambler, and not an avid note-taker, I can hardly write a bibliography for when and where I first thought every thought and who gave them to me, but I can tell you much of my mind-state and background, which informs thought like anything else. I've already told you a broad description of myself, but I feel a need to point out that which is inherent and yet often left unsaid.
That being, I hold within myself racist, sexist, classist, and otherwise bigoted beliefs. I, as with all human beings, hold a great capacity for prejudice and profiling, and despite the mindfulness I exercise, I can not become truly blind to the visual differences between all people. I can't help but create associations: I can't unwatch all of the popular media that has informed by growing up; unread all of the books; unplay all the games. You can be conscious of your perspective, but you can't see things your perspective keeps you from seeing, and you can't unsee things that your perspective shows you.
We are, every one of us, limited. I am no different.
Sure, I don't expect someone would label me "a racist" — that wording implies more active engagement and promotion of the bigoted rhetoric. But the fact remains that I grew up white in the whitest county in California, and my media has portrayed Black people in a number of roles more limited — and less flattering — than it has white people. There are discomforts I have that I greatly dislike having, which I am working on actively, but which must inform me in ways more than just the conscious. In fact, it's a great sign that what I have described is something I have identified: what I am more than aware of is that, like cockroaches, for every one you see, there are ten you don't.
I am suspicious of the term "unlearning." It seems more likely that you learn "on top of" than you learn "in place of." This, at least, has been my experience — you must first learn a different approach, you have to give yourself an alternative before you can stop defaulting to what you know. Eventually, hopefully, consciously taking the alternative will wear a new path and the old will overgrow until it's nearly impossible to recognize it at a glance, but the reality is that your entire life you will be in a state of flux, an incomplete project. I can't allow knowing that I have harmful beliefs inside me to stop me, because if you locked yourself in a room until you were safe to touch, you'd never come out.
These admittances serve two purposes. Firstly, I think that many people — especially white people — are afraid to admit their own biases and prejudices. I have talked to friends and family in private who hear and relate to my experiences in this regard, but you will hardly see a public figure say "I have bigoted thoughts." This is because there is an unfortunately large group of people who own these faults as virtues, and they are loud enough that the assumption at this statement of fact is to believe the admitter to have pride about it, or at least has no intention to change and improve in this regard. I think, as a rule, that we do better to talk about things rather than to shut up about them. To put it politically, we, the left, have to have space for people who see this within themselves, we have to have those on our side that someone who is struggling with these thoughts can identify with. I want to promote this idea of flux and constant, inching improvement.
Secondly, this will give you, dear reader, an understanding of my intentions with my works! The curse of an artist is to reveal things about themselves they hardly know that they are revealing. You can make the shallowest, most basic piece of art, and it will still run through the channels of your brain, carrying with it the ideological sediment and depositing it onto the page. And to you, the artist, you may not even notice it — what we call normal, what is the disregarded negative space in our world perspective, is incredibly telling to others who see the color we miss.
So when a reader stumbles upon something questionable in a piece of art, they will often wonder, was this intentional? An oversight? Did they mean to use a Jewish stereotype here? Is this insensitive or ignorant? Context on the artist themselves will often clarify these details. Of course, the impact of an artpiece lives beyond the artist. While I believe authorial intent to be very important, if you unintentionally made warhawk art, then the message lives beyond you, and you may drum up support for things you yourself do not.
(This is another paralyzing artist thought. What if I'm putting garbage into the world? But if you wait to be omniscient, you will never make art. Make art anyways. Experience art: you don't merely have to learn from your own mistakes, though I assure you you will make plenty to learn from. Become media literate. Become a critic. This will increase your ability to assess the messaging in your own art by magnitudes. That is my suggestion to you.)
Hopefully, hearing these admittances will help readers give me the benefit of the doubt upon finding any possible "did he…?" moments (such as my representations of mental disabilities in my early art). I am not saying I am not representing real thoughts and feelings, I am not saying that I "didn't mean it," but I am saying I might be blind to it, and I learn and grow when these things are brought to my attention.
Part III: A List of Vows
Here we go!
I vow to represent myself and all my beliefs honestly and without reservation. How am I supposed to test a belief against the beliefs of others if I hide them? Just as a muscle gets stronger with use, beliefs get refined with expression — and just as techniques get refined with practice, so do expressions get refined with repetition. I do myself and others no favors coveting my inner thoughts, shielding them from any discussion.
I vow to exist in flux — I vow to never be too sure. If I ever believe myself to be perfect, to have made it, I will immediately shutter my windows and commit to only one perspective. I will be promising to miss things: I will be promising to work within narrow, imperfect margins. Though the diamond is hard, it is brittle — it is better to be flexible, to be adaptable, than to conform to one shape forever.
I simultaneously vow to act with conviction. Humans achieve nothing by hemming and hawing forever. It is better to act, make a mistake, and learn, than it is to be sedentary. Knowledge means nothing without action. Of course, action, in ideal conditions, should be premeditated — if you know a belief to be unresearched, and you are about to act on it, if you have the opportunity, research! Seek council. Ask. But you can't wait forever, and if you are looking for the perfect conditions, you will never find them.
I vow to act in the interest of things larger than myself — be they community, life, or justice. My comfort is not my number one priority, as it should be no one's. We are none of us independent creatures, and even those most selfish are held up by community and the labor of others, whether acknowledged or not. Even if I were to retreat, I would be benefitting off of the food farmers grow, the energy plants create, the electricity the sun beams down and the machines that harvest it. I would be benefitting off of the oxygen trees create, the water crawdads filter, the meat animals give. I can not make myself a garbage can, a dead end — I can not be a sink on everything, as can none of us.
And now, a bit more relevant to my audience…
I vow to make unaccommodating art. In the age of profit, it is revolution to be uncompromising in your art. My art is myself — and my art is the world as I see it. I reject my self as a commodity: I can not be bought and I can not be traded.
I vow not to bend to what will make me more popular, to not be enticed by profit. This is for my art and for my life. I promise to be motivated by my values more than my stomach.
I vow to find the beauty in everything. I vow to share what I discover.
I vow to not think too highly of myself or too lowly of another.
These are the core tenets I am attempting to operate on. I vow not to be too hard on myself should I not meet them; it's been said and it's true, we are all works in progress. I vow to always be aspiring, because as soon as I stop, I have given up living.
This and more will make it into my art. This is the code to my works from here on out — at least in this section of my life, the new era of my works, but I feel very confident in these vows. I think they will stick around.
Conclusion
As I said, I don't know how not to be long-winded. So, apologies. Kind-of-not-really. I expect that in my future, there will be fewer SCP works and more other works, hopefully some fully original stuff too — I'm certainly not low on ideas. I feel, finally, like I've reconciled my inner tensions about making art and the messages I am putting out into the world. I feel confident, I feel new. I suppose it's probably premature to name this new era of my art, as it will be defined by what I make and we can't know how long it will last, but I figure it's not a big stretch to call it the Portland era. I'm excited for this era, and I hope you all will be joining me! Consider how long this bit was the first "filter," where I weed out people who aren't going to be as into the things that I write. I hope everything I write will draw in people just as much as it will weed people out, heheheh. I think having a somewhat antagonistic relationship with my audience sounds like good fun.
But with that, I'm pooped. If you're at all intrigued, scroll back to the top and you can peruse my works! But while you're down here at the bottom, I might as well say, I'm thinking of encouraging the discussion page here to be used as an AMA. Ask me anything! I'm a wordy son of a bitch, and I love love love talking. If I sound like someone you would be interested in talking to, I assure you I am also interested in talking to you!
Hope you have a good rest of your day and life. Ciao~!
