In 2000, I created a website called The Beautiful Dreams Company. It was primarily a venue to display my artwork and eventually became an art project in itself. This was a difficult time for me. I struggled with mental illness and was in the midst of a long depressive episode and had become agoraphobic. I was powerless, suicidal, and drowning. I also, unfortunately, was dragging my fiance down with me. After a year of this difficult, painful situation, she asked me to leave. Lacking other options, I was forced to move in with my parents hundreds of miles away. Within days, at the lowest point of my life, she cheated on me. I was crushed, completely gutted, and had to go through treatment for PTSD. I used my website to work through the pain I was going through. Through artwork and autobiographical writing, I shed a lot of light on the darkest time in my life. Sharing my heartbreak, mental illness, and unfortunate circumstances with the public was, admittedly, not a healthy way to deal with any of it. The website gradually became a compendium of my life. It also, improbably, became popular. I'm sure that the trainwreck aspect was attractive to most visitors but I also gained hundreds of loyal followers. I spent hours each day responding to emails.
While most of the feedback I received was positive, this is still the internet. There were trolls that would anonymously hurl insults and people that harshly criticized my acts of character assassination, my lack of resources and struggles with mental illness, and my artistic abilities. The mature way to respond to this is to review the feedback to determine if there is any useful, constructive criticism to work with, or to brush it off entirely and do what's best for me. I, of course, did not do that. I took continuous umbrage at the affront to my dignity and complained loudly to anyone that would listen about the scourge of cyberbullying that had entered my life. A friend forced me to confront my own egotism by pointing out that I wanted everyone to love me and that I would never feel enough love. It was the wisest, most perceptive criticism I've ever received and it forced me to reappraise my outlook and how I was using my website. Over time, I moved away from working through my emotional turmoil on my website and instead just tried to share the person behind the artwork.
I had spent years compulsively creating, constantly adding content to the website, and redesigning the look and layout. I was, in many ways, trying to write my way out of a black hole. As I became a healthier person, I began to slow my creative pace until I would only focus on a single project at a time and then spend months completing it. I started to reap the rewards of intensive therapy by returning to the workforce, cultivating positive relationships with others, and slowly regaining control of my life. As a result, I found myself prioritizing responsibilities over my website. Eventually, I moved out of my parents' home, completed therapy, and then moved to Austin, TX. I found a new sense of purpose and joy, got married, started a better life. In the course of that, I retired Beautiful Dreams Company and created this website in its place. The original purpose was to share most of my artwork (including many things I'd held back in the hopes of monetizing at some point in the future) and to provide insight on mental illness, addiction, and recovery. As time passed, I stopped working on the website entirely. It held in stasis for about seven years.
The rebirth of the site is a result of continued growth on my part. I'm getting a tech degree (data management & analytics) and have finally learned proper HTML & CSS coding. I decided to improve the site, take it to a level that I lacked the technical skills to approach, and sort of finalize much of the content available here. I hope you enjoy what you find here and that the site provides that rare, unexpected internet offering: An engrossing experience that causes you to happily lose track of time.
Josh Campbell created this website to share his artwork. Though I rarely create artwork anymore, I feel weird about abandoning years of creative work. At one time I hoped to make a full-time income from my artwork and I kept much of the work here private to preserve monetary potential. I no longer have any expectation of that so I am now sharing the bulk of my work completely free. If you would like to use any of the material here (whether staging a play, filming a script, or simply incorporating my work into your own), I am happy to grant you a creative commons license in exchange for attribution and a nominal fee. Currently, I am divorced, live in Austin, TX, and am a student. I received a paralegal degree in 2017 and am now pursuing a tech degree (data management & analytics) with the goal of working in legal data consulting and creating AI to automate legal services.
You may contact the webmaster at josh@arecoverydocument.com.