Charles P. Wiggins the Third Turns Out to Be a Stress Eater

To read earlier installments of Charles P. Wiggins the third, click here.

Once upon a time there was Charles.

He was a simple man. Kind. Humble. A real stand-up fellow.

He lived a normal life, basically drama free and productive (insofar as any stick figure’s live can be productive, that is).

But something was missing.

All Charles’s life he’d used college as his penultimate goal: the one place where his potential would be filled, his future realized, his dreams come true.

And it’s true that earning that degree was a gratifying experience; and he did learn a lot throughout it all. But still he found himself, upon graduation, just the tiniest bit lost. Unsettled. Confused. Without the regular deadlines of finals and semesters’ end, he felt there was so very little left to shoot for.

Even worse was that college didn’t really illuminate his purpose in life like he’d always pictured it would.

It taught him that he liked to write (especially that he liked to write about how stressful college was), but once he left with his degree his life just seemed so dull. Inspiration, once so everywhere, fled. His notebooks sat dustier daily, their empty lines a constant reminder of how little he actually was.

He knew he wanted to write—knew he needed to write—something that would change the world. He could picture his book. He could picture the cover, the design, the perfect way it would convert to e-reader form… He just couldn’t picture what it would say.

He began to worry. As the days trudged on, and his life remained stagnant, he stressed over the unwritten words. Over his unpublished and unpublishable life.

He couldn’t sleep. The ceiling fan mocked him.