For as long as I can remember, stories have had a prominent place in my life. As a child, I would drown myself in worlds beyond my own, relishing the awe and wonder I would often feel as I explored through the eyes of countless characters from countless books. In fact, it didn't have to be in book form—films, music, visual art, and even video games had just as much of a story to tell, and I became just as engrossed in them as I was in the pages of a paperback.

Eventually, when my wanderlust couldn't be satiated by just consuming stories, I turned towards creating stories as well. I would allow myself to get lost in realms of my own making, on journeys ranging from the most mundane to the most fantastic. These endeavors, to me, were escapist in nature—by immersing myself in fictional experiences, I am both reminded of and distracted from the fact that my actual life is woefully ordinary in comparison. Perhaps it is no wonder that fantasy is my favorite literary genre—after all, it seems to be the hyperbolic opposite of real life.

To a distant observer, it seemed that I wrote to detach myself from my own life. I wrote to avoid my own reality.

Or did I? Ultimately, I realized that facets of my life were still present in the stories I created all throughout the years. Even in my most outlandish works, things I've seen and experienced peek through. They showed themselves in the way my characters spoke, thought, or behaved. They bled through my descriptions of cities, kingdoms, or even things as simple as a garden. Some of my story's conflicts mirrored my own. In taking inspiration from my own life, I manage to create new things.

Perhaps I wasn't writing so that I could detach myself from my own life—perhaps I was writing in an attempt to make sense of it.