DARK REALM Forum Hello, Newcomer Calling.

I haven't been here for very long at all, and I am already surprised by the amount of talent that I've seen. I'll try my best, but it seems like I wouldn't stand a chance against most of you. Everyone here is very skilled. I've only been alive 18 years and writing for 13 of those! I appreciate the sense of challenge that I find amongst expert writers, and I love to recieve citiques on my own writing because it helps me improve. To be quite honest, I have never recieved a true critique. Thus, my writing style has not changed except for the subject matter and the growth in my grammar and spelling. It's always been hard, writing about things that people don't normally understand because I was always made fun of. My father often asked me quite seriously if I ever would live in reality. I do, it's just different than others for me. Am I right? Therefore, my quest as a writer started out a little rocky. My teachers would grade down my papers because they didn't agree with the subject matter, even if it was a free-write assignment. I found my English homework to be very boring and too easy for me because I had already learned and knew what they were teaching me. I would experiment a lot, and sometimes it got me into trouble at home. My parents didn't like the creations I penned, and often would have me throw them away as soon as they found them. So I stopped writing for a while. I moved out of my parents' house when I was 17, and I began writing again due to a horrid night terror that I experienced and the events thereafter. The text, in whole, was fiction, but very real to me at the same time because it presented the very world I detested most: my own alternate reality, full of all the negativity, fears and darkness that I'd carried from years of bullying and anger denied release. I never told anyone that I heard voices as a child mainly because whenever I tried, they'd simply ignore it. To them, it was a simple phase. I didn't have "imaginary friends" because the things I saw were anything BUT friendly. Early in my adolescence and til the point I was 16, I experimented with both Black Magic and Wiccan religion. I daresay the Wiccan study didn't hurt me very much, but the Black Magic may have opened a door that I now have a hard time closing. My memory falters under extreme duress or directly after a confrontation, leaving only a few words to my thoughts. I do not remember those three years, and I'll never know why I forgot everything. It's as if my very core shut down my entire thought process, like it was trying to hide something from me. My parents claim I was a violent, self-destructive child, so I sought help from a local mental institution. My second bad choice, because the medication they gave me did no good. It made me sleepy all the time, and I could never concentrate. The voices never stopped, but the visual hallucinations came to a slow-down. I now only see a fleeting shadow now and then. To conclude and prevent any further boring of the public, I simply come to bring my story to the world and help people understand that what I hear and see isn't in my control and likely never will be.