Since I was old enough to talk, I've been telling stories. I was impressively articulate during my single-digit years and would often strike up conversation with people much older than me, constantly picking up new words and writing them over and over in my notebooks for no reason other than childish pleasure. During these formative years, I engaged with every detail of the world around me in many ways, often drawing the ire of people who weren't used to my antics. It was during my first grade that I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker when I grew up.
Through my elementary school, I kept myself busy by drawing, writing, singing, thinking, and coding. Origami, hand-drawn comics, martial arts, and flipbook animations colored my existence a pleasant, homely orange. These years were some of my fondest.
My middle school years brought a lot of new experiences with them - new friends, new hobbies, new feelings. The bullying I went through during these years contributed into turning me from the loudest and funniest kid in the classroom to the quietest. During the pandemic, my mental health took a very deep plummet - as did everyone else's - and it took me over four years to break out of that.
High school threw quite a lot at me while I was there, from teenage drama to declining school performance to increasing social pressure to the complete reshuffling and eradication of my entire friend group and social life. Those school years were tough, tiring, annoying, and altogether useless, but the calendar years they ran across brought some of my best and most mature work to date, and really made me reflect on how far I've come in just seventeen years.
Eventually the pure banality of school got to me, and I dropped out. I think maybe some people might see that decision as a cocky, attention-seeking, or risky one, but for me... I just thought there just had to be a better way to spend my last few years of boyhood than trapped in dingy classrooms and being taught the same useless things over and over. I want to tell stories in my life, to take back my story that racial stereotyping and bullies had taken away from me. I want to provide perspectives, teach life lessons, and change minds. I want to create the stories our children watch, engage with, think about, and learn from. I want to make people feel fulfilled and whole. I want to make them think and laugh and I definitely want to make them cry (insert maniacal laughter). At the very least, making cool stuff online is a start to that!
Although I'm incredibly conflicted and unsure of my future right now, I will continue doing what I do, growing as a person, learning new things, and gearing up for the turbulent rollercoaster of adult life.
My short memoir The Stars Have Eyes, available on my work page, goes into more detail about my childhood and my journey up until now. (And in general, much of my work has autobiographical elements.)
If you have read this far and are a teenage creative, please reach out to me! We are a rarity nowadays, especially with the depopularization of creative hobbies in our age group, and I want to make as many connections as I can (in case one of us does something that changes the world, y'know). Even if you aren't a teenager and would just like to chat, I enourage you to go ahead. I'm sure we'll at the very least have an interesting conversation :)