I have always felt like the triangle block being forced into a round hole. It might be due to my conservative, Pentecostal upbringing, or possibly because while my friends were praying-through, playing sports, or working on figuring out the fairer sex, I was oblivious to reality. I was off in my own world somewhere else, having the time of my life. Of course, maybe I was born this way.

I had a good childhood, and my parents were “normal” and loved me, so I don’t really blame anyone. I just ended up not pursuing my creativity. My teachers complained about me daydreaming and having difficulty focusing, but diagnosing and understanding someone with ADHD was not common in the 70s. I was always reading. I read every book I could get my hands on whether it was the KJV Bible, The Lord of the Rings or Lady Chatterley’s Lover (weird but true). When my nose wasn’t buried in a book I enjoyed watching Night Gallery, Kolchak, or Twilight Zone marathons.

However, an interesting turning point happened to my appetite in 1978. One of my uncle’s collected Old Time Radio shows and gave me a box of cassettes for Christmas. I discovered programs such as Suspense, Escape, Lights-Out, X-Minus One, I Love a Mystery, Dimension X, Mercury Theater, The Hermits Cave, and dozens of others. These shows introduced me to a variety of twisted and macabre adventure stories written and directed by people like Orson Welles, Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Rod Serling and others. I suddenly found the theater of my mind on site in far away places, way beyond my middle-class church community. Daily, I bounded into lost cities in the jungles of Africa, or fought crime in smoky bars to rescue breathy redheads from the mob, or sometimes I rocketed to newly discovered planets in search of aliens. But my all-time favorites were the ghost-hunter stories when they investigated haunted houses or dark, native cults, preserved for thousands of years on hidden pacific islands.

This combination of sci-fi, Gothic fiction/horror, noir, fantasy, and adventure produced the off-center person I am today. It is kind of like my view on sexual orientation, it doesn’t matter if I learned this behavior or if I was born this way, now that I’m here, the mental concrete of my brain is pretty much set. After the economy crashed in 2007 I found myself jobless, with an obsolete telecom resume. Since I dropped out of college my first semester as a young person, I wanted to return to finish my education, so I took the leap to re-invent myself to pursue my creative side. It took insanity, courage, and a lot of support from people I love, but I have never looked back. I have done social media and writing web content now for four years, and although my ADHD still kicks my tail, I love what I do.

While society may reject my dark and out-of-sync tastes, I have found a place where I do fit in. My writing friends are my people. They give me honest criticism, they get my jokes, and most of all, they accept me for who I am.