The Worlds of Edward Beekman-Myers
THE BURDEN OF SELF-DEFEAT
I’m not gonna ignore the truth: I fought a long and harrowing battle to get where I am today.
The battle was with a hideous, vicious monster...one that worked extra hard at holding me back from accomplishing the great feats I’ve always dreamed about. It’s this monster’s fault that my life took over 30 years to finally get going.
There’s a name for the monster. Often we find it difficult to speak it, but it’s certainly not forbidden. The monster is called Self-Consciousness. It’s rabid and vile and undeniably crafty, but it’s not undefeatable. The trick is to stare the monster straight in the eye and simply and firmly tell it to go away.
For too long I refused to face my own personal monster. But after years of treading the edge, I finally found the courage to cross the safety zone and challenge Self-Consciousness to a final duel.
That’s not to say we still don’t clash from time to time. However, these days when I see the monster’s raging eyes leering at me from the dark regions of my confidence, I am better prepared to not only fight the battle but to win.
I claimed my first major victory over the monster by returning to school in the fall of 2002 to earn my Bachelor’s degree in English. Three and half years later, I not only had my Bachelor’s but also my Master’s, an honor I hadn’t really planned for or anticipated.
Due to encouragement from my professors and fellow students (and due to my hunger for knowledge), I set my sights on earning that extra degree. And it turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
After far too many years sleepwalking through a variety of pointless retail and customer service jobs and feeling every drop of life essence being slowly drained away, I found a career that gives me a reason to get up in the morning. I am now an English instructor for several colleges in the Springfield area, and I totally dig it!
Helping students strengthen their writing skills is incredibly rewarding. Not only does it assure me that I’m doing something worthwhile as I stand in front of a classroom with dozens of faces staring at me, waiting for me to say something profound, it has also given me extra ammunition in my struggle against Self-Consciousness. For the first time I am the one in charge. People look to me for answers. I may not always have the right ones, but I do what I can to lead them there.
It all began when I won a Young Authors competition in second grade. My little story, a tale about a puppy with big ears who felt like an outcast, earned me a trip to the YA conference and a free book. Most importantly, it ignited my desire to regale readers with my own unique sense of wonder.
In the formative years that ensued, that early victory prompted me to take up pencil and paper in order to recreate the elation of acceptance that came with winning the contest. However, many of my attempts were embarrassing failures. I was a total sci-fi geek at heart, and I wanted to be the master of the universe. But the problem was I hadn’t yet lived enough in my own world to convincingly create other worlds
Aside from a sci-fi story published in the local library’s young writers literary journal during my sophomore year of high school, I never got around to actually finishing much of what I started. Most of my creations saw light in the form of short plays for the French club (including a parody of Star Trek IV where the Enterprise crew comes back to the 80s to recruit our French teacher to communicate with a deadly probe; the premise being that French was a dead language in the 23rd century).
Entering college opened up a whole new world of experience for me. At the time, I had my mind set on being a journalist. Superman had always been one of my favorite heroes, and I dreamed of living his alternate life as Clark Kent, covering exciting stories and jetting to thrilling adventures around the world. However, I was too young and naïve to understand adventure is a rare occurrence in the real world of newspaper reporting.
In addition to taking journalism classes, I joined the newspaper staff at Lincoln Land Community College, where I ingrained myself as a primo entertainment writer. My repertoire consisted mostly of movie reviews, but I did manage to put an impressive design spin on the entertainment section. Eventually I graduated to assistant editor, which gave me the opportunity to pen several insightful op-ed pieces on a some sensitive topics.
Like so many others, I didn’t really come into my own until my early/mid-20s. I moved to Chicago and spent a year at Columbia College. I had abandoned my fleeting dream of rubbing elbows at the Daily Planet in favor of hobnobbing with Hollywood. Movies had become my passion, and so I desperately sought out my own slice of fame and fortune. Despite making a somewhat impressive student film, I still hadn’t gained the confidence I needed to grow and succeed. Nor had I gained the necessary amount of worldly awareness.
When I came back to Springfield, I started to come out. After years of denying who I really was, I decided to embrace it. My brother-by-love Jason gifted me with a blank book to encourage me to keep up with my writing—and it couldn’t have been a more perfect present. I used that journal to document all the frustrations, the heartache, and the disappointment I encountered as I wasted so many years searching for that elusive lifelong love connection.
My journaling culminated in a stage play based on my experiences, which itself was born out of an assignment for a playwriting class I took at the University of Illinois at Springfield. The feeling I had as I scribbled my life story down on paper was indescribable. I was like a master painter at the canvas, letting my emotions bleed onto the surface. The result turned out to be one of my best works ever: The Muddy Death of Vyolet Synclaire.
I had the extreme pleasure of bringing my creation to life at UIS. It was hard work, but the end result was amazing. Again, the feeling of seeing my work unfold before my eyes was indescribable. It’s one thing to picture the story in your mind, but to have it leap off the pages and into reality...well, it makes a writer’s ego swell with pride!
Unfortunately, shortly after Vyolet Synclaire had its (so far) one and only run, I stumbled blindly into a deep emotional pit. The details of this disaster are rather pointless now, but they involved deception, naiveté, a return to Chicago, and the absolute worst heartache I had ever experienced. It was the bloodiest battle with the monster to date, yet I learned so much about myself from this experience—once I found the strength to stop crying.
Armed with a newly discovered self-awareness (and reinforced shielding around my heart), I returned once again to Springfield. After taking a couple of years to regroup and reevaluate my life, I made the decision to finish my higher education. It was at this point where I took my first creative fiction class. In this class, I gained a vast amount of knowledge about the craft, and I continued to take as many sections of fiction writing as I could. With each semester I found my skills growing stronger, and eventually I discovered my true voice.
It was also at this point where Comet Sweat was born. It started off as a short story for a contest where the top prize was $5000. I never did make it past the first round, but what I gained instead was worth far more than any amount of money. I gained a brand-new set of friends—family even—who immediately took on lives of their own. Declan, Jett, Klaashhh, Smith, and Spitt are not just characters from my imagination. They’re real. Somewhere, in some alternate reality, in some parallel dimension, these people exist. And I am their god, shaping their destinies and promising them eternal life by sharing their exploits with as many people as I can.
A writer’s journey is never easy, but a good writer’s journey is fraught with pain and confusion and loneliness and loss. Writers are the ones who stand at the sidelines, taking note of every little detail of the game but very rarely being invited to play. We are the ones who study the monster before attacking it head-on. We question its existence, its purpose, its necessity in our lives. We wonder if it is truly possible to ever defeat it.
Ultimately, it’s not. But a good writer refuses to give up the fight.