I loved knowing that there was another world out there and by the time I reached the third grade I was making my own little worlds. I never got totally lost in them, but I was always trying to find a way to escape the world I was in. I loved just being able to share those with my teachers and then eventually with my parents.

At first I was deathly afraid of what all these people might say. I was afraid of getting in trouble, but I didn’t get in trouble. No, they encouraged me to go on. They wanted me to keep writing and to keep sharing my imaginary world with the people around me.

I know that the other kids around me were not the kind of kids that would want to read the things I was writing about. They teased me because the teacher was allowing me to write while the rest of them were forced to listen as he read a story out loud to the rest of the class. The only thing was that I was outgrowing the things they were having me read. I wanted to move on faster. They put me in an advanced reading class and tried to get me to open up in there, but even the reading they were doing in there was still behind what I wanted to read. I was reading so much and so fast that I needed to take in so much.

I would find books about new and different subjects and I would read them. I read Hamlet for the first time when I was entering the sixth grade. I read other things as well. By the time I was in high school I had read many of the plays that they wanted us to read, and I had become well versed in reading authors such as Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was about my second year of French that I learned something that I didn’t know, I read The Count of Monte Cristo in its original language, French.

So as I grew up my childhood was filled with many different worlds and many of them I claimed as my own. I wanted to feel like I belonged in those worlds. And I am thankful for my childhood friends who were in those worlds.

There are people all around me who try to convince me that it will be alright to alter my schedule, and do things that I wouldn’t do normally, but I know that if I deviate too much, I am likely to end up having problems producing what I want to produce.

So who am I? I am Adam J Kugler, a relatively new suspense author, who has spent a lot of time trying to figure out just where I belong. Today I spent some time listening to two other authors talk about their discovery of themselves and I realized something, I am about just as good at the creative arts as I have ever have been. When I talk about creative arts I am talking singing, writing, painting, anything like those items. I have struggled to stay on task with those things all of my life. For a while I will be able to focus on them and will be able to write and do the things that I love, but then, in a very short period of time, I will shift and I will see how things will change. I will struggle to get up. I will struggle to stay on task. I will struggle to even make sense of what I am working on.

So you might ask what is Schizoaffective Disorder? Well, I will attempt to make it easy to understand. It is part Schizophrenia and part Bipolar Disorder in my case. In some cases it is Schizophrenia mixed with other mood disorders. It is something that I have always wanted to understand a little bit better so I did some looking and it is not a very big surprise to see that there is a little bit of Schizoaffective Disorder in many people with creative genius in their blood. These people often times are anti-social. They also have problems like unstable moods and psychiatric problems. Stephen King talked about in his book On Writing “That he was addicted to alcohol and other drugs.”

Drug use is not uncommonly seen in people who have mental illness. They try to use the illicit drugs to treat their problems. This is something that we have to think about as we continue to move forward with people who have Schizoaffective Disorder or other mental illnesses and how we treat them. We need to take their work as seriously as someone else’s work. They should be respected just as much as the “normal” person.

However, since this is mostly a story about me, I have to say that it has been an adventure trying to find the meaning behind my stories as it has been in finding the stories themselves. People will often ask if a certain character means something, or if they represent something. And sometimes they do, but at the same time they might not as well. So as I have found success as a writer and creative artist who has a mental illness, there are many out there that need to be encouraged to look for themselves.