It doesn’t feel all that different. I’m told the world, and people, are somewhere out there. I just have no way of getting to them. It feels like I’m the last one in the world, like it usually does.

I’ve spent the last few days working on a series of CG renders for the Amaranth Chronicles. I’m choosing to spend these uncertain times studying different rendering techniques while I model the characters, the people running around in my head. I’m pretty happy with the Lithia and Cade models, but the lighting is something I’m still working to perfect. I’m going to carve out a section of the Artwork page to showcase these latest works.

As I’ve sat here, tinkering away, part of me feels thankful for the decade of my teenage years locked in a bedroom with nothing by my computer, the Internet, and all the time in the world. Like most writers and artists, I am no stranger to prolonged periods of profound isolation. In fact, I’m reminded of the quote by Dieter F. Uchtdorf,

“The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before.”

Few have ever put it so eloquently. Often, my creative spirit seems more of a coping mechanism. It’s a relic left over from my formative years that developed into a type of failsafe mode. It’s a way of tuning out the world, putting blinders on, and focusing my attention down to a small, white-hot point. This was my safe place. A place where things were ordered, where injustices did not go unpunished, and where I could be limitlessly creative and unbound by the constraints of the world.

There was a time in my life where my existence didn’t extend past my safe little bubble. Growing up in a lower income family with all the trappings of abusive, cluster B personality disordered people, the only way I survived was to retreat to my safe little cocoon. To most, the Internet was little more than a novelty or a place to download music and cheat codes, but to me it was a limitless library cataloging the range of human expression. School lost any shred of interest it had previously held for me and, if I’m being honest, I can’t even say it was the social aspect of school that held what little attention I gave it. To my knowledge I was well liked. Those that I remain connected to seem to have some sort of adoration for memories we share.

“You were always really smart.”

At least, that’s what people from that time tell me. I didn’t feel very smart, however. I was definitely a nerd, but smart? Well, intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. By high school, my caretakers had given up on making me attend. When I did go, it was typically only long enough to be sent right back home for some little comment or “observation” I’d made. I was a convenient target for every teacher looking to make an example out of someone. I was there to give every bullying administrator a scapegoat to help regain control over the other students.

Silicon Valley, for the most part, isn’t the fabled city on the hill, but a glorified farming community that was ripe for a handful of modern visionaries to plop their companies down between the single-family tract homes. The public school system of the area looked a lot more like the movie “Dangerous Minds” starring Michelle Pfeiffer than it did Stanford University. The handful of kids slated to go to college were typically from a two-parent household, were Caucasian, and would be given generous scholarships to attend San Jose State University if they could maintain a 3.5 grade point average.

At some point, between pirating Tupac’s latest album for the gang members and Quake 3 for the nerds, the outside world began to feel as unsafe as home. Many teenagers isolate themselves in their bedrooms when their family dynamic seems unbearable, and many are hopelessly, selfishly, melodramatic. I can’t say that to an outsider I would have appeared all that different, but while my contemporaries were being sent home for drug paraphernalia, I was being sent home after a teacher held my failing grade up to the entire class and said“. This is why Alex will be flipping your burgers the rest of his life.” I replied, “Maybe we shouldn’t be taking career advice from a public high school teacher. This couldn’t have possibly been your first choice.” I was escorted home by the resource officer after that one.

At least at home, once the screaming stopped, I could isolate myself in my room to work on a Photoshop illustration, or a model in 3D Studio Max, or my next custom level of whatever video game was popular.

The world isn’t safe for “smart” when the system caters to the lowest common denominator. I think that’s one of the reasons I started writing...to give a voice to the ideas and aspects I was terrorized for having. That’s why these CG renders, these characters, and this story is so much more to me than just a hobby. It is a lifeline. If Cade comprises the exacting side of me, the singularized, razor sharp, measured focus that would seem unfeeling, then Lithia is my final permission to feel my entire range of emotions. I am empowered by their authenticity and humbled by their power.

But I digress.

At the risk of airing out my pernicious belief systems of not being seen, despite my best efforts, I leave you with one last quote:

“How frightened we are of being known, and yet how desperately we long for it.” - Hannah Kent