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In a week and a half, it will be my birthday. July 20th marks my eighteenth year on this pale blue dot (spent outside a uterus). Maybe I will draw porn to celebrate. (Probably not.)

In all seriousness, though, I'm glad simply to make it to this point.

I can't claim to have had a terribly difficult childhood from a material or financial standpoint, though from an emotional one it's a bit of a different story. My parents divorced when I was one, and I've had to deal with their intense hatred and disgust for each other ever since; my mom remarried when I was two or three. My stepfather is what my mother calls a "type-A personality" and what I call a "stupid dick". His words for me are well-meaning but poorly phrased at best, and downright abusive at worst. It seems that everything I do isn't done right or just isn't good enough for him.

My father spent a few years (I forget how many and don't care to recall) in a marriage with... a woman who met the classic fairy-tale depiction of a stepmother. She habitually said deep-cutting and hurtful things to me, with an insincere, smarmy, grimace-like smile that I quickly came to loathe. Surprising, actually, considering that she worked as a nurse for special needs children. Maybe she was so passive-aggressive to me because she had to cover it up in her job. Maybe she just plain couldn't figure out how to deal with a kid who WASN'T retarded. In any case, they're divorced now, and I can't honestly say that I miss her in the slightest.

I've moved three times - twice in preparation for a new baby brother - and all during my time in elementary school. (Four, actually; my parents were living in Florida when I was born and moved to Rhode Island shortly after.) My father has moved two or three times as well. This had the lovely effect of completely preventing me from developing friendships during my formative years - every two or three years I had to start anew. I would take a fair amount of abuse from the few "friends" I did have, since they WERE all I had. The last move whisked me away from 6th grade in an elementary school and plunked me down in 6th grade - in a middle school. I was thrust into that most petty and vicious time of a child's schooling - middle school - with absolutely no charisma, confidence, or friends to speak of, whereas everybody else had at least one friend they knew since kindergarten. The only thing I had going for me was my pretty keen intelligence - which I doubted (between my crap self-esteem, my stepfather's empty criticisms, and the fact that I'm pretty good at doing dumb things) - and which was just another reason for the average shitheaded middle-schooler to dislike and insult me. My weight, my slight lisp, my greenness to the school and all the kids, my fairly benign last name - and oh yes, my brains, which were supposed to be an asset.

So yeah, it was a sort of unpleasant time for me.

While I was going through middle school, I also did two things: I graduated from "baby" CTY to "big kid" CTY, and I actually started getting active in online communities.

(About CTY: Suffice it to say that it is a 3-week summer camp for nerds, and that it is most definitely a life-changing experience.)

(About the internet: This wasn't the first time I was exposed to it, just the first time I actually began to participate instead of just lurking. My first online community was, I recall, a message board for Pokémon fan fiction. There were some brilliant stories there; I remember one told from the perspective of a Caterpie/Metapod/Butterfree, and a sort of end-of-days thing where all the people were turning into Pokémon; that story was one of the assorted reasons I'm such a transformation buff now. Hrm - maybe I should draw transformation art instead of porn for my eighteenth birthday. This is probably a better idea.

Anyway, I decided that a good idea for a fan fiction would be to use the exact script Forrest Gump, except the characters were Pokémon. Forrest was a Mr. Mime named Forrest - it wasn't even supposed to be a thinly-veiled plagarism; the whole POINT was that it was "Forrest Gump with Pokémon". Bubba Gump, in my infinite wisdom, would be a Vulpix. I... I don't even know. I got about as far as the prologue, then had a pretty terrible "oh god what am I doing" moment, and basically fled from the forum. I had lurked for a hell of a while, but I think I only wound up accruing four posts in total.)

And a funny thing happened. When people met me for the first time, and got to know me - when people judged me by how I acted, not by petty things like appearances - when I met people that WEREN'T the dumb-as-brick schoolmates I was used to - people actually liked me.

And thus began a very long and very necessary process of growth and healing.

I still have problems - I'm still rather crippled by an overwhelming amount of self-doubt. It's taken me a while to get used to simple things, like that people actually mean compliments, and that they're not just saying things so I'll feel good. I still have many moments when I think I'm completely worthless. It still surprises me when amazing artists compliment me on my mere scribbles, or when people with far bigger e-penises than me take the time to actually talk to me, or even call me "friend".

(This may not seem so impressive, but it is to me - it's about meeting somebody well-known in what they do in their own element. Think about how impressive it would be to meet a musician backstage in a concert, or to hang out with pro athletes in a locker room, or to be with a Hollywood actor on set. For me, it's the same idea, if a bit lesser, to meet somebody steller and talented at internet ON the internet.)

But I've come a long way. There's now more to me than just "oh he's smart and likes Nintendo". And though I love informal English and barely decide to put pen to paper, and that I can arrange pretty well but can't mix worth a damn, and I've got a neat cartoony vibe but am still totally baffled by anatomy and motion and clothing folds - I've got talent in writing, and in music, and in art, and that's a pretty damn powerful trifecta. As frustrated as I get with myself - I can now realize that yes, people like me, and I am certainly far from useless.

And every single person who sees this, whether I've known you for ages or if we just started talking last week - you've all shaped me and helped me become who I am today, perhaps more than you might realize. And, for all my flaws (and they are certainly many) - I don't think I'd want to be anybody else.

Thank you.

I really, truly mean it.

Here's to another 18 years of growth.

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