For Years, I’ve Been Building a Universe in My Head

I think I was building worlds before I knew that was something people could actually do.

When I was little, I used to make comics for myself. I would watch movies and think about how I would change the ending, what I wished had happened instead, or what the story would feel like if I could actually see myself in it.

Sometimes I loved what I was watching. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I just wanted to feel like somebody in that world could look like me, think like me, or exist without being reduced to the same stereotype I had already seen a hundred times.

I’m mixed, and when I was growing up watching superhero movies, I didn’t always see people who looked like me in ways that felt normal or expansive. I didn’t need every story to be about culture or identity. I just wanted to see someone who looked like me and was allowed to be complicated, powerful, weird, funny, important, or completely ordinary.

So I started drawing my own versions.

At first, they were just mine.

Then one of my siblings found one of the comics I was making and started reading it.

Then came the questions.

And somehow that turned into a tiny series I was making for my siblings.

I had a school notebook, and I would draw stories into it. It was superhero-themed because I loved superheroes, but I wanted the characters to feel like people my siblings could actually relate to. I wanted them to see themselves in the story and not feel like background characters in somebody else’s world.

They kept reading.

They would tell me they wished the world was real.

They wished they could live there.

I still remember that.

Before I knew what any of this was called

Stories were always how my brain worked.

My siblings used to ask me to tell them bedtime stories because they liked mine more than the books.

They would close their eyes while I talked and later tell me they could actually see everything happening.

Sometimes they would challenge me by giving me two random objects and telling me to make a story out of them.

And I would.

Two random things could turn into characters, a conflict, a setting, an entire little world.

They would say things like, “I would watch this as a movie,” or, “This should be a series.”

Sometimes I would read a book and then tell them the story back, except I would accidentally start expanding it in my own head. I would describe things differently, imagine extra scenes, or change how something played out. Then they would read the actual book and tell me they liked how I had told it.

Looking back, that tells me a lot.

I was always a storyteller.

I just didn’t have a word for what kind.

I wanted to write. I wanted to draw. I wanted to decide how the scene looked. I wanted to create the characters, build the world, figure out the story, imagine how it moved, and think about what the audience would feel.

I didn’t know what job title that was supposed to be.

I just knew I wanted to do all of it.

When creativity stopped feeling like mine

Art used to be the easiest thing in the world for me to love.

When Christmas came around, I asked for art supplies.

I entered contests. My school entered me into contests. I painted, drew, experimented, and made things constantly.

I remember pieces I wish I still had.

A pastel Eiffel Tower. Mount Rushmore. Paintings and drawings that I can still picture even though I don’t have them anymore.

A lot of that work disappeared.

Some of it was kept by school because it looked good for the school. Some of my art was thrown away at home. Sometimes the thing I loved became something people expected from me instead of something I got to own.

I became “the artist,” but not always in a way that felt good.

People knew I could make things, so I was constantly asked to make things.

And eventually, creating stopped feeling like the place I went to feel free.

It started feeling like another demand.

By junior year, I wanted nothing to do with art, superheroes, or the identity people had attached to me.

So I cut it off.

I tried to move toward something more practical.

I went to college. I considered interior design. Then psychology. I kept trying to find something that sounded more realistic, more stable, more like a life that would make sense on paper.

But every so often, I would still doodle.

And every so often, the universe would come back.

The world kept following me

Even when I wasn’t actively creating, I kept having the same thought.

What if there were somewhere completely different from here?

Not just another city. Not just another country.

Another universe.

One I would actually want to live in.

I would think about old stories I never finished.

Characters I had forgotten about.

Ideas that felt unfinished.

I didn’t realize how much of that was still sitting inside me.

Then, in November 2025, I reached a point in my life where I felt like I had lost almost everything again.

I was sitting in my apartment on a couch I had managed to buy after having to start over.

I wasn’t in college anymore.

I was barely surviving.

I was dealing with harassment at work, a stalking ex, and the feeling that I had no real support system around me.

And I remember thinking:

I would scroll online and see people who were incredible at music, acting, science, nursing, design, all kinds of things.

And at that point, I genuinely felt like I had nothing.

Like I was just existing in the background of my own life.

So I started replaying my life in my head.

I asked myself something really simple:

Not what was useful.

Not what was practical.

Not what somebody else praised me for.

What actually gave me joy?

And I remembered drawing.

I remembered the comics.

I remembered my siblings asking what happened next.

I remembered telling bedtime stories.

I remembered how much I loved imagining things that didn’t exist yet.

It felt like I had uncovered something I had buried.

So I grabbed a small notebook and some random paper and decided to see if I could still do it.

I drew a tiny comic.

And I liked it.

I remember thinking:

Then another question came right after it.

Rewatching superheroes and remembering myself

I started thinking about Spider-Man. Deadpool. Marvel. All the things I had loved.

There had been periods growing up when I wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of it because my household was extremely religious, so I decided I was going to go back and watch the movies I had seen and the ones I had missed.

I started watching Marvel in order.

And while I watched, I doodled.

Then I noticed something.

I was smiling.

I was laughing.

I was enjoying myself.

And because of everything happening in my real life and the world around me, I kept having ridiculous thoughts like:

And that old childhood thought came back.

What if I made a universe I would actually want to live in?

So I started asking questions.

If I could create an entire universe from scratch, what would it look like?

What would people value?

How would people live?

What kinds of worlds would exist?

What would I keep from Earth?

What would I throw away completely?

At first, it was almost like another version of a city or an Earth-like world.

Then I thought:

And that was basically the end of any attempt to keep it small.

One place became multiple realms.

Then came histories.

Governments.

Places without governments.

Cultures.

Languages.

Species.

Technology.

Magic.

Systems.

Characters.

My mind started moving faster than my hand could keep up.

The first hero

My first character is still one of the closest to me because of where he came from.

I was watching superhero movies while I was building everything, and I remember thinking about how I always joked that I wished I could be Spider-Man.

But obviously, there is no radioactive spider waiting around to bite me.

Then I thought about the idea that anybody can wear the mask.

And that stayed with me.

What makes somebody a hero if they don’t have powers?

That became the foundation for my first hero.

He is completely powerless.

And still, he becomes one of the most important and strongest people in the universe.

Not because he was born special.

Not because he was rich.

Not because somebody handed him everything he needed.

He studies.

He pays attention.

He sees what other people can do and asks how it works.

He builds.

He experiments.

He finds things that were thrown away. He learns from public resources. He figures out how to create tools from what he has.

If his best friend has a power, he might study that power and build technology inspired by it.

He makes himself capable.

That character became very important to me because he represents one of the things I wanted the universe to say from the beginning:

Building a world where people are allowed to exist

Representation became part of the universe for the same reason it mattered to me as a child.

I kept seeing people online say things like:

And I knew that feeling.

So I started writing down a rule for my own world.

In this universe, you can be Black, white, mixed, green, human, fairy, robot, religious, nonreligious, gay, straight, a single parent, part of an adoptive family, or something that doesn’t even exist on Earth.

And you still get to just be a person.

That doesn’t mean those identities are meaningless.

It means they don’t have to be treated like a spectacle every time they appear.

A couple can be two men raising a child, and their entire storyline does not have to revolve around everybody reacting to the fact that they are gay.

A woman can wear clothing connected to her faith and simply be sitting in a park living her life.

A family can look different from another family and still just be a family.

People can exist beside each other without every difference becoming a conflict.

That matters to me.

I wanted to imagine what a world might look like if people were not constantly being divided over race, gender, sexuality, religion, and identity.

Not because differences disappear.

Because people are allowed to have them without being punished for existing.

It is not a perfect universe

At the same time, I never wanted this to become a world where everybody holds hands and nothing bad happens.

There are villains.

There are demon lords.

There are people who want power.

There are dangerous realms, political conflicts, betrayals, disasters, monsters, wars, mysteries, and characters who make terrible decisions.

There is darkness.

There is grief.

There is chaos.

The difference is that the central conflicts do not always have to be the same ones Earth keeps repeating.

Maybe a demon lord is trying to conquer a realm.

Maybe an ancient force has returned.

Maybe somebody has built something they never should have built.

Maybe two worlds are colliding.

Maybe somebody simply wants power.

Those conflicts can be huge without requiring the story to constantly recreate every prejudice that already exists here.

I wanted room for something else.

A universe that keeps expanding

The funny part is that I originally thought I was just making one world.

Then that became realms.

Then histories.

Then languages.

Then characters who had entire lives before I even reached the story I wanted to tell.

And I kept thinking:

That question is probably the reason the universe became what it is.

I like thinking beyond what already exists.

What if something we call impossible is only impossible because we have never seen it?

What if another universe exists somewhere?

What if imagination is the beginning of creation?

What if the worlds inside people’s heads matter even before anybody else can see them?

I think creativity gives us permission to ask questions that reality does not always answer.

And sometimes, that is enough to make life feel bigger.

Why I came back

For a long time, I thought I had lost the part of myself that made art.

I thought burnout had taken it.

I thought life had taken it.

But I don’t think creativity actually disappeared.

I think I stopped giving it somewhere to go.

Now I know that storytelling is not something I happened to enjoy as a child.

It is one of the most consistent things about me.

It is the thing my siblings asked me for.

The thing I did without being taught.

The thing that kept coming back even when I tried to choose something else.

The thing I reached for when I needed a reason to feel excited about being alive again.

I still don’t know exactly what every part of this universe will become.

Animation.

Comics.

Games.

Films.

Something I haven’t thought of yet.

That uncertainty does not scare me the way it used to.

I think it might be the best part.

Because there is still so much left to build.

So much left to draw.

So much left to write.

So many people I haven’t created yet.

So many places I haven’t visited yet, even if right now they only exist somewhere inside my head.

And maybe that is what Emma Rose Studio is for.

A home for all of it while it is still becoming.