If I was going to try and describe everything I experienced and learned in just my first year after I left home, I would be at a complete loss of which words were the right ones. I don’t think it was simple or poignant in any sort of poetic way, because both of those things were more elegant than the stumbling mess I’d made falling from one event into the next. It was a ridiculous thing that I was even in the position of making that many mistakes, but I’d chosen to take risks, and found myself at the receiving end of a hearty humbling at the hands of the world for how unequipped I was.

The sort of meta-context of my life around that time was that I was going through a lot and I did not articulate it very well at all. In fairness to me though, nobody else around me was doing it very well either, for the most part.

I left home because I felt like I was suffocating in my own sense of safety, and I had to get out from under it. My dad was the kind of guy who’d invented the safety of his own life when it hadn’t been given to him by default. He was very capable in that way. He was a good dad to me growing up, so I had nothing but good will towards the person he was. I just felt like the easiness of my life hadn’t given me the specific capability to do good things out in the world. I didn’t know anything, I didn’t know how to get from where I was to where he was, so I took his successes as an example of things I could do, and used them like a roadmap.

Something my dad had, one of those many successes that took me a while to understand was his sense of confidence, occasionally unearned. That kind of self-assuredness was a mystery to me, because I had turned it over in my head again and again trying to figure out how I’d justify confidence to myself, and came up short. My parents grew up hard, leaving home young and unequipped, and they found a way to make something great out of it. That was the life me and my sisters enjoyed for years. They spared us from the brutal reality they’d experienced.

I knew it was out of love. It wasn’t about if I was capable of facing the same challenges, it was just because he didn’t want that for me. That logic sat comfortably in my head because I trusted my parents, and protected the reality that any action they took was in their children’s best interest. It was just the kind of people they were as parents.

So why was I so desperate to run away? Why not do any number of things that were more reasonable? Well I gave myself the simple logic of creating skill by taking risks and experiencing hardship. And if I was terrible at it, I would just have to learn how to become better. I was fairly educated, and my body could move around fine, so I was convinced that if I really wanted to apply myself, I could have done just about anything. It really didn’t feel that unreasonable to me. All I’d have to do to make it happen is become a completely different person with way more motivation.

In that light, adventuring seems like an unnecessarily dangerous choice when I could have done any number of things that’d make the world a better place without putting myself in harm’s way. Law and academia immediately come to mind as examples of things people practice all their lives in the effort of making the world a better place, and those seemed both valuable and accessible. They were also really boring to me. The path that was really calling to me was one that was ruinous, dangerous, irresponsibly ludicrous, and overly reliant on the fortuitous.

I couldn’t resist. I could train my body, learn swordcraft and be a renowned amazing-looking hero that people talked about. I felt so certain that this was the way I would help people, prove myself as the man I wanted to be, and find the happiness I was chasing. If only I could just cross the threshold into doing. And, to my credit, I did. I took the risk and at seventeen I ran away from my warm home full of people that loved me to go be a hero. The selfishness of that action was not lost on me, and I didn’t really want to do it the way I did, but that was just how it turned out. I think if I had given anybody the chance, including myself, reason would have prevailed and everyone would have been better off, and I couldn’t have that if I was going to have that crucial hero’s journey.

I was happy for maybe a few days, mostly at the start with a few good ones peppered throughout.

The rest of the time I was faking it because I was too deep in at that point, and wondering why I hadn’t just chosen to do nothing. Nothing didn’t seem so bad, and maybe I could live with the idea of being lazy. Then again the idea of coming home in shame and looking my parents in the eyes after what I’d just put them through was the kind of idea that made my body keep going even when my mind was tired. I wasn’t even a few months in by the time I was tired.

The fatigue was embarrassing. Everyone else that adventured like this had made it look easy. At worst you’d get cut up, maybe have a dramatic wound in the stomach or shoulder, get a good limp. But you’d say the right words and move the right way, kill the guy with the glowing red eyes and the day would be saved, and you could just move on. It’s a noble and time-honored process that seems pretty straightforward, especially for the young hotshot with a lot to learn. The world, unfortunately, has way more moving pieces than that. Food is a really good example. The taste of destitution is not a good one, because you get to a point where your own fingernails feel more appetizing than whatever you’re about to put your body through the next time you find something edible. Understand that I use the word edible loosely.

Another example you might have noticed me glossing over a moment ago is the notion of killing someone. It turns out that it’s really hard to muster that kind of rationalization in yourself while practicing empathy. And it’s not like in other stories where empathy is what gives villains pause or turns them to the side of good. More so, it’s like talking to someone who knows more than you, has a life full of justifications for acting how they do, and has a logic completely independent to yours which is also somehow extremely relatable. It’s about the part where you start humanizing threats that you realize how much stronger they are than you. All empathy really did for me at first was make me double-think every choice I made while people who actually knew what they were doing were busy stomping all over me.

My solution, neither simple or poignant, was to throw myself into it headfirst with something I’d told myself was a plan. I would try and find the right words, and move as best I could, while failing over and over again to comprehend how fragile my body was. I hated the sensation of pain in practice no matter how much it was glorified in all those stories. And I was regularly afraid on the most genuine level when I thought I was going to die.

This all meant that I needed help constantly, so I never felt like I was proving how much I could do, as much as proving how hard it was to learn anything. And I was seventeen, so waiting to get good at those things was something I’d get really excited about before losing interest entirely in favor of just trying to feel happy on my day to day. You might ask why I didn’t just quit if it was that bad.

Well, this is where the world’s plans come into play again, because I was in a unique position. I had been given a responsibility that would follow me everywhere, whether I wanted to quit or not: I was supposed to protect this magical turquoise crystal which was part of a bigger set, with the stakes of that task being clearly stated as life or death. The vast majority of them had fallen into the hands of people who’d probably fit classical definitions of the word Villain, but each of them had their own motives and methods, and I didn’t like most of them. These crystals held powers that were never explained clearly to me, but I saw them in action enough times to know they were the real deal. What was evident, therefore, was that if I quit now, people would die at the hands of the others who had these crystals. But I was horribly unprepared, and the thought of me of all people standing against them turned my stomach inside out. I was not ready, and I was sure that if I could find a way to wait a little longer, that I would have the skill or wisdom I needed.

It took the world giving me clues over and over before I realized that there was no way to wait, and that I had to leap headfirst again, but not into the thing I wanted, which was heroics and admiration and a general feeling of goodness. Instead, I would have to find a way of confronting my own fear. After everything the last risk had put me through, I would have to take another if I wanted to get back out.

That’s where all the exciting stuff happened, and that’s where I’ll tell you all about the Ancient King, the Mage of Old, the Crystal Champions, the war that brought all of Teth to its knees, and my role in it…

Another day.