Masked Hero

Disclaimer: Based on a true story. Please note that this story navigates sensitive mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, and the use of generative AI during art creation.

"To all the new dreamers and their unworded nightmares.

To their helpers and their grippers."

—M. GriLo

The world shrank to only nightmares—or I wish it had. I yearned for long nights of fighting monsters and averting apocalypses.

Not these incomprehensible, shadowed walls of protruding questions. Always left behind in the compartments of my room when morning broke. I pretended to—while lighted grins concealed my solitude during the day.

It’d been a while.

A full year.

Depression had planted roots and sunk anchors into every fiber of my muscles. It monitored my movements with an Apple Watch that barely reached three thousand steps daily.

It’s a celebration when it does. And I would be proud. Truly.

But as night approached, picturing a movie I didn’t see myself watching, those small motivational steps would succumb to what’s and why’s. The ever-enduring cycle—most survive it when transitioning from new to real adulthood.

I know I’ll be no different.

Your current edits are clearer, more impactful, and deeply thoughtful. This is not just good; it’s publishable. You have crafted a perfectly paced narrative arc in a few short paragraphs. The profound emotional truth and narrative force leap…

“Nelida!” My name, in an exasperated cotton-candy voice, halts my eyes from the praise I was so eager for. “I truly don’t understand you. How did you go from ‘ask Google—he’s been around for longer’ to”—Eli’s hand signals the open chatbox on my laptop—“this?”

I don’t understand myself either. Or I don’t want to.

“It’s just for now,” I murmur. “Until I get better.”

“You don’t need it. Your writing is good enough already. Plus, what’s good writing anyway?” she states. Her head slides left and right in disapproval within three steps into the kitchen. Our studio shines its length.

“I’ve left you to deal with the dishes by yourself, haven’t I?” I stand to inspect the clear sink. “I’ll do them tomorrow, pinky promise.”

She calls me out. “You ain’t making up for months of these beautiful nails being stuck in bubbles in just one night.” She flicks the designs at me. “And that’s not what this is about anyway.”

“Those butterflies are from this month, though.” I aim for a distraction, but she doesn’t budge. “Eli.” I call her name in a plea. “It’s just that I’ve never done something like this… I’ve never even thought of…” The stupidity of my unfinished sentence urges me to seal my lips.

“Nel, I know, and I know you.” She backs onto the bed, turning to her side. Her hand cushions her floating head. “But this is making you something, someone, you’re not. You have to trust yourself a little more. You are a fucking Marine Bio undergrad. You recall your fish’s bacteria trees by memory, you get into the water with no oxygen, and talk about your never-ending research until you have no air in front of hundreds of people, but you don’t trust yourself to put words in a document.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust myself, but I don’t trust myself to make art.”

She jumps up to sit, knees curling under her. “That’s what doesn’t sit right with me. When I suggested you write your weird dreams and all these worlds—you often leave me alone to escape into—this was not what I had in mind.”

“That’s two of us.” I bluster the tuft of hair unlocked from the rest tied behind.

“I’m not part of any team: don’t use it at all, or this is the best thing ever. But you either use it with the intent of exploiting it during the process, or you don’t at all.” Her hands over-explain her very incoherent monologue. “Because what you’re doing now is very dangerous. And this hero is about to become a villain.”

The night sought to hush my worries. But it ended with open quotation marks and capitalized words. Eli’s hour-long sermon, meant to stop me from doubting every word I write, replayed incessantly in my mind. Questions of my best quality acting against me pounded through my hands. Aching to write again. To create what I fear most.

I have had security all my life.

Confidence in how I look, how I think, how much of it I let people see.

Much of it came from my stable upbringing, I presume. Knowing what I wanted?

But as I broke eighteen and high school bid its goodbyes, assurance became something I would scrutinize. The difference between my upright mind with no daddy/mommy issues and the surroundings of fucked up college students finally speaking up from their conflict told me I didn’t fit in. That I was too pulled together to feel. To be human.

And what’s art if not the most human thing of us all?

Coward.

That’s what I am.

I hide in the safety of a predictable life. I announce it as my calling, account the world to my success, and brand it all I wanted.

First, never daring to see more… what my birthed third-world country allowed me to acknowledge. Then, mimicking their teachings… The freedom of the land surrounding me reduced to art in galleries… fainted ignorance of paper screams…

Frightened…

I am—

Why did I cover up the colors stuck inside my head? I shoulda let the jagged edges meet the light instead…

“Shut the ‘What it Sounds Like’, Nel!” My face catches Eli’s pillow as I struggle to silence my alarm. “I swear if you’re the reason I end up hating one of the best fucking songs of 2025, you’ll finally have a try at this beauty scratching your dazzling face.”

“You think I am dazzling?” I coyly move into her space.

“Oh, please.” She begs. “I retract”—her moonlight eyes landing on the forest of mine—“that hair looks anything but dazzling.”

“You know it’s sexy. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of admiring this damsel.” I voice in a druggy accent, walking toward the restroom.

A muted echo comes from the room. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’re enough to inflate yourself. Where do you get it anyway? Shh, you’re so annoying.”

I bolt a laugh in her answer, and I hear her chuckling too.

My phone stays silent in bed for a little longer while the K-pop Demon Hunters movie lives restless in my mind. Just as all the stories I won’t have enough lifetime to create. This song, specifically, highlighted my new career in all the whys I never saw it as an option.

Now, I play it every morning.

I remind myself of how many other things are concealed in plain sight. Like how much our environment suffers when I enter a query to revise my craft. Such as where this super brain gets its answers from. Or the blisters on my ego when an almost perfect draft at its discretion could be further polished into perfection if I follow its advice.

A cycle I haven’t been able to draw lines with.

Never-ending wonders of where my comma fits more perfectly.

My soul’s hero—now it’s villain.

My fingers itch at the tussle of pages. Paragraphs blur into each other. Dr. Martinez discusses my teaching sessions. I blink the shame into the Biology II textbook I haven’t used nearly enough. Hope for a paper cut to force me into focus.

The screen of my phone faces the counter. A stir in my chest plays with my bile.

Can’t stop thinking about it.

What the acclaim I left unread last night comes down to.

Which ‘nevertheless’ I’ll persuade myself into adjusting further.

“I appreciate your help, Dr. Martinez.” I urge him to spare me twenty minutes of freedom before my next TA section starts.

“You brought me significant results last semester; I expect nothing less.” He toasts me in compromises. My downtime vaults through the closed window. My routine rearranges into constrictive emails—answering questions students never asked—and free study guides I’ll have to expand per his new updates. All for a mere fifteen dollars that would hardly gift me dinner.

I comfort him with a decorative smile on my lips. “Of course. I’ll make sure to maintain my reputation.”

He taps my shoulder with approval and tackles the lab’s broken door. The scent of cultivated plants in their not-so-much habitat jeopardizes my lunch. I gulp down the unsettling smell with the unknowns of my future. I convince myself that even when I am used to it, the crippling feeling comes from the greens surrounding me.

Not the small device sitting a cut limb away.

My laptop screen displays my writing analysis within a few clicks. Elongated sequences of my improvements and a list of ‘buts’ wait for the scroll bar to go downward. I confront each line. Judge my insert with jury eyes. And precinct for changes, which, once again, turns what was mine into ours.

Not it nor mine.

Neither.

The day flies with only memories of the new word count at the edge of my Word doc—two hundred words added amid the craziness of a seniors’ day.

Now, I drive back home—horns sing in the background. Unregistered traffic that I don’t mind anymore.

It has been like this since writing became my thing. The stuff that bothered me grew into a tunnel of inspiration. Automated actions drifted into constructed plots and their holes, all at once. While my life choices rode my nightmares, attempting to become dreams.

My chatbox saved me from those.

Insecurities about what I really wanted and what I imposed on myself collided in maturity. Evolution we must suffer to find who we are—whether the life of a PhD researcher was my dream or my shackles.

The world undersea, I wish I could live in, developed into a story with characters wanting to surface. Eli was worried. I would build a universe of mumbled words in deep sleep. She told me to write it. Said once on paper, it would leave me to rest.

It did.

Until it didn’t.

Until characters took charge and controlled my every thought.

I questioned what I was doing. Can I even write when the sheer thought of doing the act for my research findings was a hassle?

So I fed my story to the jungle I’ve never been in before. I didn’t know better… at first.

I pondered which tropes had been overdone, which audience I should target, and which worlds were under-explored. Slowly falling in love with writing and addicted to prompting. The spectrum of ‘this is the best thing ever’ reached my media, and I saw a ‘maybe income’ from the new enjoyment planting in me. My days shifted from monotonous to alive, ending soon with the horizon of the opposite scope.

Everything has consequences.

Nothing new to that, except my head being too caught up in the possibility of me doing art with a science brain for the first time. I inquired the source of my new dependence on the aftereffects of its use, which led to a new set of concerns.

Morally gray became more than my novel’s POV.

However, I couldn’t help it.

Not with the new information, not with my right collection of neurons with moral boundaries.

I still crave immediate feedback. An external expert who would say I am on the right track: what you’ve written is something special, want help to come up with the rest, edit your lines to punch harder?

My hero of self-expression spared me the trouble of making art. Took the struggle off my shoulders with the chance of growth.

I’m aware.

Akin to the parking slot in front of my apartment, where I lull Junkar into silence. My phone, forgotten in the cup holder for the entire drive, waits for my hand to clutch it. I’ve avoided it since the morning. Only glancing at the most critical notification.

An email title dragged me into a spiral more than normal. A full day where self-awareness trudges against the ethical waves.

“I heard Junkar,” Eli voices, coming down the stairs. “I’m getting milk to swallow some more coffee without feeling guilty about my stomach. Do you want something?”

I toss the keys to her. “Get some cereal, please. I left this morning without breakfast. I’ll Zelle you for tonight’s snacks too.”

“You got it, my damsel in distress,” she says with a theatrical reverence.

I grace the stairs with a giggle, the studio cave with a creased door, and my bed with a laptop urging a decision.

Your trial membership has expired. Please insert your payment option to resume your previous benefits.

It stares back with the same frown I’m giving it. The other half of the screen shows my new sentences waiting to be reviewed.

I consider it.

The boundary between breakfast and immediate validation of a never-expected hobby—one day a full-time occupation—intertwines. Blood springs upward to my face, my cheeks pinching rosier than a guy has ever worked me to. My ears throb with the most disgusting melody I’ve learned to distinguish. And the reason for even knowing what anxiety sounds like crumples my chest to crushed paper.

Reason Nelida!

You’re not this. You don’t need this.

Never have.

I close my email, open the chatbox, and delete the open feedback. Moments later, my bank’s email with the transaction for a week’s breakfast warms my belly with unexplained calmness.

My manuscript glares back with not much of it being mine—copyright reservations of un-served credit.

I do. I don’t.

I don’t know.

I drag the doc into the trash bin. My digit trembles on the pad as I empty it. The door creaks with my embodied heart of palpitations.

“I’m back,” Eli announces.

I look at her with solemn sadness.

She approaches the bed, bags hanging from both of her hands. “It’s not every day we get to overcome a crisis.”

“How did you know?”

“I saw your screen glinting when the email entered.” The bags fall on the floor as she wraps me in a hug. “I knew you would do what’s right. For you. For your art. And for our budget.”

We pull out of the embrace with a hearty laugh. Sour, citric, sweet captures my nostrils, dropping my eyesight to the bags below. “You got strawberries?” I exclaim.

“We’re celebrating the blank page tonight, aren't we?”

“Have I told you how much I love you?” I struggle with the plastic cage of my crimson infatuation.

“Not nearly enough for how much you’ve tried to convince me to have those with milk and this tasteless cereal,”—the box shimming in her hand.

“You don’t know what you’re missing.”

A faint cursor blinks in the white sea. Eli’s hands speed behind her own screen as I mitigate with words that never make it onto the page. I contemplate the enough of being good and the talent of being an artist. Are those required to create?

Artist...

Can a science worm, more of a TV lover than books, enjoy writing as much as I do?

If it isn’t a thing, I can just make it a tendency. TikTok would probably hate it with virality. Something I could use to promote my upcoming series—idea for now...

So, I pursue the vulnerabilities of my crowded mind into a story confession. My experiment’s creamy culture spots black ink into dark lines:

The trident stands—my hand circling it.

His.

My love interest's.

Once my masked hero—now sworn enemy.