Foreword

The healthiest way for me to deal with struggle was always through fantasy.

Whenever a problem would befall me, sometimes it became difficult or meaningless to put logic or intent behind it. Sometimes the universe just is the way it is. That’s why I created Void and their world.

Void started off as a personification of how I was feeling, as many of my characters have. The adaptation of their stories and their encounters with creatures became a mirror to whatever was happening in my life, a mystical way for me to process what was happening, or had happened, and move on from it. Like chapters in a fairy tale, I refused to put away my times of strife and ignore them and instead let them build the book of my life. The dramatic, scathing surrealness of Void’s journey was designed to counteract the saccharine, clean, stress-free life I felt compelled to share with my colleagues.

Since the beginning of college, I had been creating these other characters to represent whatever struggles, abstract or concrete, as vectors for lessons to Void, and in turn, to myself. These lessons came from a multitude of places through my fast-paced and rather mobile college career - withstanding short or bad relationships, relocating to unfamiliar places, losing and rebuilding friendships, learning to live independently, surviving assault, exploring gender and sexuality, experiencing displacement and broken trust, making peace with the past, and, most importantly, growing. Intermingling with the hardships were sprouts of good - friendships, forgiveness, discovery, adaptability.

Though a lot of Void’s journey focuses on the difficulties of life, it is not meant to be seen as a cry for pity. Rather, it is validation of the unknown personal problems people around us face every day that may be swallowing people’s worlds without us ever knowing, or ever being able to do anything about.

When I got tired of griping over events, or upset with myself that I couldn’t get over something that had happened to me, I’d memorialize it in another character that Void would have to interact with. Loose ends and fragments became windows for storytelling. People who have, and will, never meet became intertwined anonymously by a fantastical narrative coping mechanism. Someday, I told myself, I’d weave it all together in a coherent story and put it all to rest. That someday is now.

These are the Chronicles of Void.