Allow Me to Introduce Myself… Part Three

 

Just so you can really feel like you know me, I think I should share my personal interests. My absolute favorite thing in the world is Marvel. I am a die. Hard. Marvel comics fan. As a child growing up, I, like many kids, watched cartoons. Saturday morning was something I looked forward to all week. I already posted how I love Spider-Man, but if you missed my previous posts, now you know. Spider-Man was my absolute favorite cartoon when I was a kid, but I also enjoyed Batman and Superman, but when I hit my teenage years, DC lost its appeal. I first saw the “X-Men: Evolution” animated series when I was twelve, and was hooked, and then I loved the movie, and then I picked up an “Uncanny X-Men” comic book, and kept going. When I started reading comics, I stuck mostly with X-Men and the Ultimate Marvel series. I read the comics and graphic novels religiously, and subscribed to several series when I was in middle school. By high school, I got back into Spider-Man. I even branched out to Avengers and Fantastic Four by college, but stopped reading comics regularly for several years, but I did get graphic novel collections. When I was let go from work was when I subscribed to over a dozen series and went to a comic book store on a weekly occasion, buying every new Marvel comic. Unfortunately my comic book store closed and again I went several years without reading comics. Then in 2019, I subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, which is a service that gives access to a mass collection of comics, both old and new and is updated every week. I read everything that gets added every week now, even things I don’t always think I’ll like. Hey, you never know if you’ll like something unless you try it, and you never know how series impact each other. I also love watching all the Marvel movies and usually attend each movie opening day. I love watching the Marvel shows such as “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and the Netflix and Hulu series’, and anticipate the Disney+ shows. I am also not ashamed to admit I still watch some of the cartoons on Disney+.

I am also known to like video games. My favorite series is Final Fantasy. I love the characters and stories and music. My favorite video game is “Final Fantasy X,” my favorite character is Wakka. I’ll talk more about this in future posts, but I have a bearded dragon I named Wakka. I’ve also been to the Distant Worlds concert series twice. It’s a live orchestrated performance of popular songs from the Final Fantasy video game series that tours worldwide. My favorite singer Susan Calloway tours with the concert, and she is amazingly talented and a delightful person. I also enjoy the Kingdom Hearts video game series, as well. My specialty in video games are RPGs, and if a good one is made, I might play it. And, of course, I play the Marvel video games. My favorite was “Ultimate Spider-Man.” I wasn’t very good at the main story, but web swinging was a good calm down for after school.

Another interest of mine is Godzilla. I saw my “King Kong vs Godzilla” when I was five and became an instant fan. I also enjoy most horror movies, which is amusing since as a child anything could scare me. Science fiction is a favorite genre of mine, both movies and books.

I am a big fan of the “Harry Potter,” “The Hunger Games,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “A Song of Ice and Fire” books and movies as well, and I could totally go on for ages on other books I like to read and movies I like to watch, but I don’t think it would be compelling for me to ramble on now, but I may include more details in future posts as my opinions in a structured format would be desirable.

And I think I’ll end here. I hope you enjoyed getting to know me as we start this venture together, and if you did, feel free to keep coming back because I have so much good content to share, including my short stories, book and movie reviews, poems, and editorial pieces, and even an ongoing superhero story which I hope you’ll find interesting as well, and if you are so inclined, you can spread the word of this little blog. Hope you’ll be back. Till next time, Tim Cubbin… out!

Allow Me to Introduce Myself… Part Two

 

    Next I think I’ll talk about my greatest struggle in life. It’s something that people like me don’t always like talking about, but I’m not ashamed by it.

            I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was fourteen years old. Prior to that, I had been in therapy since I was five years old, when I was mistakenly diagnosed with A.D.D. and put on medications that sent me spiraling out of control. I was originally resistant to the medications, but I think every kid is. I mean, when you’re a kid who has to go to the nurse’s office in school every day, all the other kids think you’re uncool and give you a hard time. I was heavily bullied in middle school for several reasons, including the medications and my father abandoning me. I was different, and with kids, different isn’t good. I was also suffering with insanity, bordering on schizophrenia due to this, and the stimulant medications to a guy with excess energy just made everything worse. Ultimately I had a split and a breakdown the day before I was supposed to start high school. It was… well it was really bad and I was put in a mental hospital for almost an entire month. That was when it was made clear to the doctors that I didn’t have A.D.D. and rather was bipolar and was put on a whole new regimen of medications, which was why I was in the hospital for so long, to make sure I was stable and didn’t have side effects.

            So I started high school on October 1, 2002, and it wasn’t easy. The bullying was worse due to the news of my breakdown circulating through the school. I even attempted suicide several times. I was placed in a special program in my high school for students going through mental illness and similar conditions, which I was resistant to at first. It made me seem like even more of a freak. Probably the only reason I’m alive today and writing this is because Mister Popular took pity on me and protected me from the bullies. I came to appreciate the program as my time in high school went on and the bullying eventually subsided. The medications did help me, but I did spend time in a youth hospital after a suicide attempt.

            When I started college, I tried to keep my head down and not be noticed, and college students are supposed to be more mature than high school students, but it really didn’t go well. As I previously stated, I ended up having too much of a good time and went back to my old town.

            Time went on, and in 2014, I resisted taking my medications after going through a period of bad nightmares after the death of my dog Casper and was put in a lockdown unit once and hospitalized two times voluntarily that year. I was placed in an outpatient program after the first stay. I was resistant to the program at first. I didn’t want to be there, but after graduating in six weeks, I practically didn’t want to leave, and after being discharged from the hospital the second time I actually asked to go back to the program. I started having therapy sessions weekly after that. I know some people hate therapy, but my monthly sessions didn’t suffice, and talking about my problems weekly really makes me feel better and I have a very good rapport with my current therapist. I also got an emotional support bearded dragon, who really helps.

            I stopped being embarrassed by my condition in 2015 when I decided to try to teach other people with my condition or similar conditions and the rest of the world that there is nothing wrong with being mentally ill, nothing wrong with therapy, and nothing wrong with medications and started Bipolar Opposites, which was a YouTube program in which I talked about mental health on a regular basis, and also about topics in general that pertain to entertainment or just random things I felt like talking about, but I discontinued the program from lack of viewership. This blog is my next step in reaching out to the world. And on a side note, I’m always on top of my medications, being the first thing I do in the morning, and at a set scheduled time at night. So if you’re reading this and have mental illness, well, you’re in good company and have nothing to be ashamed of.

            Well, I think this is a good place to stop for now, but I’ll post in a few more days to continue to talk about my personal life, and I hope you’ll be back to read more, and if you haven’t read my first post yet, I encourage you to read it to learn more about me. Until next time, Tim Cubbin… out!

Allow Me to Introduce Myself… Part One

 

Hello there, and welcome to From the Mind of One Tim Cubbin! In case you can’t guess, my name is Timothy Cubbin, but everyone calls me “Tim,” so you can get used to that, too.

So for starters, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself first, so you can feel like you know me as you journey through the weirdness of my mind. At present I am thirty-two years old and live in Continental Village, New York. I have lived there for almost my entire life except for three years while I attended college at C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, which is, of course, on Long Island, New York, so I’ve never spent any length of time out of New York. I never actually finished college there, we’ll say I had a little too much of a good time, but I finished college with University of Phoenix Online. My associate’s degree is in education. My bachelor’s degree, however, is in the English arts, where I specialized in journalism. I’ve always wanted to be a professional writer. I’ve been doing creative writing projects since I was six years old. I’ve always had a very active imagination and love getting ideas down in print. I’ve actually been published twice, once while I was elementary school in a children’s poetry anthology and once several years back in a book on mental illness. In these examples, however, I didn’t write fiction, but one of my fortes is in fiction/fantasy. I’ve even been working on a drama novel series and hope to one day be a published author. People always ask me why, since I majored in English I didn’t take a concentration in creative writing. My answer is simple: I want to be a published author, sure, but I needed something to fall back on, in case I don’t professionally make it as an author. My particular reason for choosing journalism is because I am a very big Spider-Man fan and dreamt of becoming a photographer as a kid, but I learned I don’t have the proper talents with the camera, while as a writer I do have the proper skills, so journalism had its appeal. Still, despite having an English degree, my grammar while writing isn’t perfect, but then again, who is perfect and can say writing improper grammar is not desirable? It does have its appeals.

So why I’m doing this blog? To use my creative writing and journalistic talents to get noticed. I’ve done research into getting published, and it’s not easy. For some bizarre reason, most publishers aren’t interested in taking on new authors. How any writer gets a start is beyond me. But having a blog and getting out there? Seems a good way to get noticed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. You should know the kinds of things you’ll find on this blog. Well, I’ve written several short stories is recent years, and getting them published in a literary magazine is the same challenge of getting a novel published, if not worse. So, I think you all might enjoy seeing these stories, so I’ll be posting those. I also have some free-verse poetry talent. I’m not some poetic wordsmith who can make rhymes or format, but poems don’t need to rhyme, no matter what anyone says. You can also see pieces I write, such as essays, articles, and editorials, as well as book and movie reviews.

I’ll leave off here for now, but this introduction is not over, so come back next time for more about me. Until next time, Tim Cubbin… out!