I’ve lost the tools that let me create. And anything will help. Even $1. I don’t like asking for help. But pleas read my story and help if you can. Say a prayer if you can’t. And thank you for your time.
A couple of months ago, after years of surgeries, moves, and living out of storage, I finally started unpacking what used to be my art studio. I wanted to draw again. Not just sketch. I wanted to make finished work about everything I had been through. The first thing I reached for was my marker sets — the expensive ones I had spent years saving for on a fixed income. When I picked up the box the bottom was discolored. My stomach dropped. I opened it and the markers had leaked everywhere. Ink had soaked through the packaging. Most of the tips were dry and brittle. Only a handful were still usable. I remember slamming one down on the table out of pure frustration. I had waited so long to get back to this. It felt like the patience had been for nothing.
Then I got to the computer and the Wacom Cintiq. The tablet was ruined — screen damaged beyond use. I sat in a chair staring at a piece of equipment that had cost twenty-seven hundred dollars, something I had relied on for years. Later I tried the computer itself. At first it powered on. I attached it to a small monitor my wife had and felt a flicker of hope. Then I learned what had happened. My four-year-old had used it as a coaster. Liquid had spilled into a vent near the motherboard and he hadn’t told anyone. When I sat down to try a game there was a sharp pop and the unmistakable smell of burnt electronics. I unplugged it fast. There was a scorch mark and a puddle of water at the bottom of the case. I went pale. For a second I wanted to throw the whole thing out a window. Instead I called my son over, explained what happened, and hugged him while he cried. Things can be replaced. People can’t. I have been the angry father before. I refused to stay that man.
That moment is why I’m writing this.
In 2011 I was serving as an Army Infantryman. During a night training exercise I fell approximately fifteen feet while wearing full body armor, a Kevlar helmet, and a complete combat load that included my rifle. My boot heel caught on something in the dark. One second I was upright. The next I was falling. There wasn’t even time to yell. I crushed a disc in my neck and two in my lumbar spine. I tore the meniscus in my right knee. I completely separated my hip bone from my tailbone. I nearly tore my right bicep off at the labrum. And when I landed there was a post directly in front of me. I smashed my forehead into it and suffered a traumatic brain injury.
I tried to hide how badly I was hurt. Soldiers do that. We push through. But the damage was too severe. Walking became nearly impossible. The pain never left. I have now had thirteen surgeries, with more still scheduled, including one coming up on my lower back to repair a spinal stimulator that failed. I still live with chronic pain, nerve damage, and a recent diagnosis of narcolepsy that makes it hard simply to stay present with my children.
When I became disabled, digital art became the one thing that still felt like mine. It was how I coped when the pain was constant. More than that, it was the example I wanted to set for my kids: no matter what is taken from you, you can still make something. You can still overcome.
But even that started to slip away. My hands began failing. It started with a coffee pot. My hand simply released on its own and the pot shattered on the floor. It happened again. Then my arms were constantly numb or tingling. I started dropping styluses and pencils mid-drawing. Once, holding my newborn son, my arm went completely slack. The only reason he didn’t hit the floor was that I was standing next to the bed and fell forward with him onto the mattress. The pain in my dominant arm would get so intense that lifting anything over twenty pounds put me on the floor swearing, holding the arm, feeling like I had been punched by a heavyweight. Surgeons eventually found my bicep hanging by a single strand of tissue at the labrum, bone cutting into the rotator cuff, a crushed disc in my neck pressing on the nerves, and crushed nerve pathways in my elbow and wrist. After the bicep reattachment, the disc replacement, the nerve releases, and more, I finally got feeling and grip strength back. After nearly a decade I could draw again.
In the darkest stretch before those surgeries, I was barely walking. Part of the time I was in a wheelchair. My wife had to help me to the bathroom. The strongest pain medication the VA would give only took the edge off. I was drinking heavily — going through a handle of whiskey every few days — and sinking into a depression that felt bottomless. One night I couldn’t stay in bed. Every time I shifted the pain woke me. I ended up on the couch, alone with everything I had been carrying. I started talking out loud, first to myself and then, for the first time in a decade of calling myself an atheist, to God. I was honest about the ways I had hurt people, the anger I carried, the ways I had wasted what I had been given. I wept harder than I ever had in my life. I told Him I didn’t want to be the angry man anymore. I wanted to be someone who could support my wife and the child she was carrying. I wanted to be a rock instead of a burden. Suddenly a warmth and calm moved through my body. I heard the words “I forgive you.” Whether anyone else believes that moment or not, something in me changed. The compulsion to drink left. In the days that followed I started reaching out to people I had wronged and apologizing. I felt lighter than I had in years.
Not long after that my first son was born. He used to sit on my lap at the drawing monitor and just watch. When he was four I sat him down with a ruler and taught him one-point perspective. Then two-point. Then three. He spent weeks turning simple boxes into buildings, asking questions the whole time, completely absorbed. Watching him was like reliving the best parts of my own childhood. Now he draws constantly. He has created an entire series of short comics about a super-powered rat. His little brother watches him and has started drawing too. Our daughter is already wide-eyed at the pictures her brothers make. Those ordinary moments at the table are some of the most beautiful things in my life. I want to keep being the father who can share that with them.
I still have a best friend from the Army named Mike. The day I met my squad, every single person told me the same thing: you’re just like Mike. Same personality, same love of comics, art, and video games. When I finally met him we went to lunch and became friends almost immediately. On our off time I taught him figure-drawing techniques. He has since far surpassed me and has worked on card games and indie titles, mostly in horror. He is my oldest son’s godfather. The kids call him Uncle Mike. He sends them gifts. He has checked on me through the worst years and talked me back from the edge more than once. I trust him as much as I trust my wife. I was the best man at his wedding. For years we have talked about making a game together. We are both finally at a place in life where it is actually possible. The idea we keep coming back to is something in the spirit of Castlevania mixed with Lovecraftian horror — the kind of game we both grew up loving. That is what a working computer is for. After that I still intend to earn my Master of Fine Arts so I can teach sequential art and drawing at the college level. I already teach my sons. I have never stopped helping other people get better at what they love.
I am asking for help to replace the computer, the drawing tablet, and the traditional art supplies I need so I can work again. This is not an open-ended medical fundraiser. The surgeries are largely behind me or already scheduled through the VA. What I need now is specific and concrete: the tools that let me create finished work, contribute to my family in the only professional way still open to me, finish the game with my best friend, and keep showing my children that you can lose almost everything and still make something worth making.
Any amount matters. Twenty dollars replaces a set of markers. A larger gift helps replace the computer and tablet that make digital work possible. I will not waste whatever is given. I have waited too long and fought too hard to treat a second chance lightly.
Thank you for reading this far. Thank you for considering helping a disabled veteran, a husband, and a father get back to the work that still gives his life meaning. I still have dreams. I am asking for the tools to chase them.
