west

I made this account around freshman year of high school (2019ish), when I was writing my first full length screenplay. you never saw it. i had a sfm indie deal that fell through unceremoniously (LOL) you instead read it as the fic Some Kind Of Fallout, and got a pile of SFM posters to go along with it. you all knew and nobody irl did because i was a kid embarrassed about the art I made. my own parents had no clue

around seventeen i disappeared. (the retirement i speak of) i had finished skof, i was working through across the ashes... and then real life came around. things in my life destroyed me and my passion. i let go of my dreams. the story i wanted to tell. the time between that loss of heart and the return i like to treat as an empty space/forget. just before nineteen, i got out. i told my mother i wanted to make movies (imagine her surprise at that one...) and i went away to school to do so.

i wrote a story called Contract when i got to school. it had been so long since i had written a real screenplay, and I went home to the characters i had known best. i brought it in to a club to be evaluated. they liked it. the same club then put a cinema camera in my hand and gave me the ability to help others better their screenplays. when i help others tell their stories, i feel a certain way. like this is the thing i was always meant to do. i can feel it in my bones - its the closest to a religious feeling i have ever felt.

i still dragged my feet about the art in my past. i forgot, for a while, until i came across the SFM folder on my desktop a couple months ago. i realized that the way i feel about film is the way i felt as a teenager about the art I made. and i could see it. everything i do now, the way I frame things and the way I ask for my lights to be placed is all the shit i learned spending 6 hours a SFM poster.

today i am twenty and almost a half years old! i will not say that i am going to make a 'comeback.' I was so active as a teenager because I had the time. I have movies to make now, for better or worse. But my SFM art, the stuff that used to embarrass me, is a part of my professional portfolio, right next to all of my indie and student stills.

on a more personal note, I can see now as an adult why I made the character of JJD the way he was. The things I went through make me a little like him. My memory is notoriously horrible, I used to have a bad habit of avoiding my problems, I didn't want the future my parents wanted for me, I wanted to be unconditionally loved, and I wanted a life of my own choosing. I wanted to save my friends and I hated myself when I failed at it. I tend to be irrational but also tend to captivate.

i don't think i'd change very much about the story if i went back. maybe some of the prose itself. but not the message. the message was always that we suffer and we overcome but we must let love in to do so. what i have learned in adulthood is that there is suffering and that i could not overcome it alone. i wish i had turned to my own story in my darkest times.

thanks again. i'll always love team fortress two, but most importantly i'll always love the fans who made it what it was to me