For as long as I can remember, writing has always been with me. Long before I ever reached the legal age to work, long before I had even thought of using writing to make a living, I always did it. It's the one thing in my life that I could always come back to when things got me down. Whenever I got the urge to express myself I would write or draw, it was a way for me to give a voice to all the thoughts I had in my head and it helped me to relax. I started when I was about twelve with a package of lined paper and a bunch of pens, I would begin to hand write a story that had come to me while I slept. Most of my writing stems from dreams I have and back then that was the only way I could express them. That one story would begin to take on a life of its own and before I knew it, I had run through half of the package of paper. The pages were kept in a binder so they wouldn't get lost or lose the order they were in. It was later on when I was about fifteen that I started numbering those loose sheets of lined paper so I could always find them again if they did fall out. I also kept journals of my thoughts or just to write down what happened to me that day, I used my journal a lot in high school. Whenever a writing assignment would come up in English class I always got a little bit excited thinking about what I wanted to write for it. My English marks were always in the high 80's and it was one of my best subjects, my mom said it was because I read a lot and she knew that I did write too.
It wasn't until I turned 21 in 2004 that I had been working long enough to earn a tax refund that allowed me to buy my first laptop. It was a Windows Vista laptop with a moveable camera built in to the screen. Before that I was using a desktop computer to write with, which wasn't very portable. I had wanted one since I was 14 years old but in 1997, a laptop was just too expensive a thing for my parents to get me for a birthday or Christmas present. By 21 I didn't do as much hand writing anymore outside of the occasional journal entry, I found that writing on a computer was much easier (and didn't have the hand cramping) that writing with a pen did. It was also in 2004 that I had discovered the Sims 2. It was a brand new medium that opened up a whole new world for me, it let me combine my love of drawing with my love of writing. I could now create the characters I only wrote about in an actual 3D model that I didn't have to draw with my own hand. I could watch them live their lives in the 3D world they lived in and it helped my writing to evolve. I could now write more stories based on what the sims did in the game and for three years that was all the writing I did. In 2008 I joined the NaNoWriMon site that I had been hearing about from the other Sims writers on the Boolprop forums where I had been posting my stories. My writing once again evolved. At first it was overwhelming, writing a 50,000 word novel in thirty days? I never wrote that many words in anything I did before I joined this site. It took me a year to build up my writing skill enough to take on the NaNo challenge. And in 2009, I finished one. I was very proud of that it was my first completed NaNo, it was a prequel to another story I had been writing on that laptop of mine before then. I was surprised at how fast those 50,000 words came out.
I kept writing my Sims 2 stories using a blog-style format on LiveJournal, another medium that many of the writers on Boolprop had turned to when The Sims 2 Exchange was shut down in favour of the new Sims 3 game that had just come out. I didn't know how to create a PowerPoint story and I realized it was pretty neat to see how it looked when other Sims 2 players would put their stories into that. It took me another three years after I had been posting on LiveJournal to figure out how to make a PowerPoint and put it on my LiveJournal. In 2009 I bought myself a new desktop computer with Windows 7 on it, the old one my dad bought me for college in 2003 had finally run its course after I had to reinstall its operating system twice to try and save it. The old desktop had a Windows XP operating system. I got a Windows XP Professional install code from my ex to put on it after the version it came with started acting up. I loved having a computer to write with and the fact that the only desktop I had at the time with my beloved Sims 2 installed on it was starting to fail on me, it was heart breaking. Once I got Sims 2 installed onto my new desktop I couldn't believe how much nicer it looked on Windows 7, it reignited my passion for writing my Sims 2 stories.
It wasn't until 2011 that I finally got on the Sims 3 bandwagon I put it on my new desktop and for the first time I was able to experience for myself the new version that had everyone on Boolprop playing and writing with. I didn't start creating Sims 3 stories yet though, I still loved Sims 2 because it was still popular enough on Boolprop, Sims 3 was new and of course it had its issues as all new games do. In 2014 though I began to write with Sims 3, by then it had been out long enough for most of the issues I had seen when it was first introduced to be resolved, either by EAXIS (EA and Maxis) or by the players themselves who found fixes for some of the issues that EAXIS didn't bother with. Because in 2014...Sims 4 had just come out and as usual, EAXIS started making the transition away from Sims 3 to promote their new game, despite their previous version still selling quite well. Anyway, I kept going and kept writing and I wasn't about to stop just because my favourite new medium was evolving again. I didn't stop with NaNo either, there was a period of three years starting in 2013 where I didn't complete my NaNos but I still started one.
Which brings me to my more recent history. In 2015 around October I started noticing something was off with me, out of nowhere when I was talking about something and my speech would suddenly started to slur. I didn't think much of it at first, I thought it was only a temporary thing that would go away eventually. I was wrong, it didn't go away. My parents noticed this and were growing concerned, they had heard it happen for a few months and in January 2016 my extended family started to notice as well, I was attending my cousin's daughter's christening, three months after I first started having speech problems it was still there and my aunt and uncle witnessed it first hand. I was also stumbling sometimes when I walked and had a near constant pain in my lower back. My parents were afraid I had a stroke and didn't even feel it, my family doctor recommended me to a neurologist and from there my neurologist ordered some MRIs to be done. The MRI detected a problem in my brain, lesions had appeared on it. Their detection ruled out a stroke and even diabetes, I was sent for another MRI in July 2016 to check after the first one in March of that year. The damage was still present so another test was ordered for September. In August 2016 another symptom had shown up, I was experiencing double vision. The cause was finally determined after the test in September, I had MS. That diagnosis surprised everyone, including my parents who never even thought about that. That diagnosis made it even more important for me to keep up my writing, I would start to forget things. Things that I was always able to remember before, I couldn't anymore so when I wrote them down it helped to keep me from panicking too much about it. In short, writing is the one thing that has remained constant in my life, it's helped me through good times and bad and now that it's 2018 I know that it will continue to help me, not just because I forget stuff more now but because it helps me cope with forgetting things.
No comments:
Post a Comment