She stared quietly at the notification for a moment before deciding that she felt well enough to deal with the drama that usually surrounded her everywhere she went, though at least this time it was on Facebook and not the usual endless barrage near her front door.

A former instructor, reading her just pouring out a bit of what was left of her soul and telling her she should return to writing. But why? It wasn't as though the good intentions behind those words were weighed with just how much her artistry had caused her pain in the course of her life - psychiatric wards, people bent on using her to feed their own egos, finally trying to embrace it leading her to lose the few people left she had grown close to. She was isolated, relatively quiet compared to who she'd been before now.

There was always that fear. She stood up from the laptop, in her living room as it always was, bottles for alcohol and sugar-based pop alike strewn about the room as she stepped into the kitchen to check her freezer. About a shot of of vodka left, the familiar No. 21 she had grown so fond of... but nothing else. Not even gin, as she so often joked about the depths of her alcoholism reaching.

She sighed and closed the door. There was no need for that. She needed a push to not make a massacre of someone well meaning, not a shove. She sat down and thought carefully as she wrote a reply - there was some work that she had done, sure. Somewhere between seeing that her former lead writer had written a story that was probably about (or at least inspired by) her and falling back into the deep depression that had defined large stretches of the past three years, she had written a game draft, a pitch for her one chance to let it all out. She calmly linked the public draft pitch - may as well show the woman what she wanted.

She didn't mention that she'd been doing a lot of freeform roleplaying online until her medical needs overtook even that, finally digging out a handful of her oldest characters to develop them through playing them. Perhaps she wasn't writing actively in the traditional sense, but she'd been writing in a more subtle sense. And always, always the begging for her to resume all her talents she left behind.

"Your writing makes me afraid I'm not good enough for you when we do this" was the offering of one user. Another wrote to her "What do you mean you're not actually what you say you are? It's impossible to tell. You play the part too well". There were reqests for comic scripts to collaborate with her on, for her to give critiques on writing, for her to do something other than hide in private and not let the good side of her mental problems go to waste.

Sometimes they'd ask her if she had anything published. Actually, a lot of her work was self-posted online, just not under any familiar name - and she never looked at the commments. She'd gotten submission of the day twice on one site, even. Some of her work was formally published - college anthologies and a couple modest collections of no real import. She didn't feel great about it, hadn't even submitted what she really wanted to submit to the college books. Her work was such that she wanted people to see it and hoped that maybe it would give them some heart or help them along, but didn't want to hear about it.

A terminal window found it's way open, sifting through directories until she found the one she was looking for. A folder with a game mostly finished. She asked it to build the game. It replied, more or less, that it was impossible. In her head she have a wry smile at how time went and made history of anything she laid out - she had volunteered for what was needed to make it work with the latest libs and such, but hadn't found a chunk of time to do it yet.

And there was that public draft. A piece of her was encouraged, wanted to go ahead and draft the engine layers out as a thank you for the nudge towards her artwork. Another part of her screamed about how trying to do anything ended badly, she may as well do her best to not be much of anything but try not to be useless.

On one hand, she was sure she could be somebody. Well, maybe - at least had enough sitting in her head and drafted out that she could take a stab at it. She had a rolodex full of contacts - people who had begged her to collaborate that she'd turned around and said she'd make a deal of work for work with them, and even let them have a cut of the profits she made from the work she'd take from them. She had so many notes and lessons learned about character development from the RPs that she didn't know how to begin to marshal them into categorical order. She had a slew of game design notes - things she hated in games she played, things she loved, things that maybe could be better or worse but should at least be tried and toyed with. Many other things that were hard to group enough to express at all...

... And on her other hand, she had the fears she'd held onto for the larger part of a decade now, that to merely express herself was to show just how far she'd lost it. Of her 24 years, she'd spent 8 screaming that she'd never be an artist again, never suffer the betrayal that comes in being misunderstood or pay the price for it. And in that came some good - she made what most people had to deal with plainly apparent, made it their fault if they didn't understand her. Her beliefs and her feelings were on her sleeves - almost literally if she'd actually build the game that the iconography on her sleeve was supposed to be from - but her heart wasn't there.

At times she had tried. Countless stories that started digging in deeper to her psyche and the host of characters she held close to her chest had been written, deleted, and written only to repeat over and over - each time a little closer to perfection as she could see it but never any closer to the security it would take to let people see it. Countless times she'd sat in front of her tools for programming, had more design notes than any reasonable person needed to do their work, could do ideas and clean up the notes over and over with ease - but when it came time to actually write it, she'd stare blankly at the carefully and beautifully written notes and go numb, unable to keep cohesive long enough to get more than the declaration of a statement down, not even a functioning piece of code.

She wouldn't even call herself "she" in public. Some people had an inkling, those she had spoken to weren't surprised once they heard it. But she did her best to just keep it realatively quiet. It didn't matter, after all, what she wanted to anyone. They looked at her and saw what they would have wanted for her - always with good intentions, but never with what mattered to her at heart.

Another night wore on, tossing it around, trying to make headway, eventually being dragged away to do a bit of a game - her current off-on-off project for art in her own way, building a beautiful base of the glass-based tiles in Terraria for someone who said they liked them, stations in the sky for easy travel and a neverending symmetry and subtle beauty in the design. This, too, was her art - taking disorganized fragments of material (virtual or real) and making more than people thought possible of them. She was occassionally proud of it long enough to have it crash down on her that it didn't matter, people would only see it and mess it up - the person she played with often seemed to mess things up if she didn't push him away, and the jump to defend what she'd worked so hard to build often made an enemy out of someone who had decided to become one of her closest - if geographically most distant - friends.

The night drew to a close, her illness from medical procedures gone wrong, worry, and depression claiming her energy and leaving her in fitful light sleep as it so often did, making nothing but ruins of the broken pieces that she couldn't make anything out of - herself, a thousand fragments of beautifully stained glass waiting to find someone who knew how to bring it together, never finding how to do it for herself, knowing that in reality nobody could ever do that for her.

And thus the story goes, of far too many that could-have-been and still-may-yet-be, waiting for time to finish burning them out, set to drive with their wheels locked in place. Incapable of beginning or ending their own stories correctly, incapable of forming enough cohesion to even start to tell a story. (And, naturally, this would be the end of the story, if I could find a cogent way to end it.)