A long time ago I fell in love with a few things that helped me survive my dysfunctional family upbringing:

• Star Wars

• The Lord of the Rings

With The Lord of the Rings, I learned that writing can transport you to any time or place and make you feel anything you have the imagination to dream up.

And while watching Star Wars, I learned that movies can also help you escape and experience life in ways that we might never have thought possible.

Back in 1981, my friends and I fell in love with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I was 10-years-old, was lucky enough to see the first Star Wars in the theater and couldn’t believe that the second film was even better than the first.

At 10-years-old, I knew how Luke felt when he learned that Darth Vader was his father. You see, I saw myself as Luke Skywalker in my own story. I came from nothing, but I would be the hero in my family who would rise up, go to college, become successful, and cast off the shackles of all the fear, anger, and abuse that I had survived. In my mind, my father was Darth Vader. He was evil incarnate. He did things to my mother that I could never say speak out loud.

So, when I saw Darth Vader facing off with Luke Skywalker, I understood intimately how a son would need to vanquish his father and to grow up to be good—a hero.

Over the years, I realized that my childlike view of the story of what happened between my father and mother wasn’t the whole story. Decades later, I was able to hear my father’s side of the story.

Not that it excused him of the unspeakable things he did to my mother, but I realized that he had his own demons to deal with.

He had been drafted to fight in the Vietnam War and was wounded in battle. If I remember correctly, he earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

After my parents divorced, I needed to find a way to overcome and rise above what I had lived through. That’s where Star Wars comes in. After seeing the first and second movies as much as I could (this was before VCR), my friends and I decided to make our own Star Wars movie.

My Uncle owned a Super 8 video camera, and he was kind enough to let my friends and I borrow it so we could make our movie. So over the course of about two weeks, during the summer of 1981, my friends and I planned the movie, made props, directed, and shot the film.

The film was 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, and it didn’t come out great. All our hopes of the stop animation looking good didn’t really come out. But back in 1981, we had no way of seeing the results of what we shot on film. Scenes of cardboard laser blasts being animated from the bottom of a shot to the top where we had our Star Wars action figures just didn’t work. Instead of smooth animation, the film looked jumpy (we had no tripod, so shot everything by hand) and didn’t pan out.

But it was our film.

We saved our allowance money and the five of us all chipped in to buy all the materials we needed to make our movie. When we finished filming it, we sent it off to be developed and around a week later we got the film back, but the only way we could watch it was by playing it on my uncle’s film projector. Super 8 had no audio, so we improvised by playing a cassette tape of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

At 10, I knew that I could use my imagination to create anything I could dream up. And the act of creation helped me to heal.

Creation equaled healing.

Fast forward 44 years later and I’ve written 18 novels and 6 non-fiction books. And I’m currently writing a sequel to my last novel.

I learned a long time ago that we all have limited time on this planet. If I want to share and spread joy, then I need to create.

Earlier today, I came home from my early morning run and found an interesting video on YouTube. The title is “One Hour of Dancing Mon Mothma.”

If you’re not a Star Wars fan, you only need to know this: Mon Mothma becomes the leader of the good guys in the early Star Wars movies. In a new Disney+ show, she’s super stressed out because her world is falling apart. The bad guys are taking over the galaxy and she’s doing everything she can to resist the evil empire.

But it’s at her daughter’s wedding that she throws her inhibitions to the wind and dances with abandon.

Lately, I’ve felt overwhelmed with my life. Someone close to me is dealing with a major health issue, one child is graduating college, another is heading off to college, another family member is dealing with a different and more complicated health issue, and my wife and I are approaching a major anniversary.

Everything is going 100 mph around me and there’s too much happening.

I can’t stop change. I can’t stop the world from burning apart. I can’t do anything except take care of myself and share my words.

This one hour clip of a woman dancing to some sci-fi dance music might seem odd and weird.

I get it. I do.

But I suggest that you look at a few minutes and ask yourself:

When was the last time you had a really good time and relaxed?

Let your hair down (without any alcohol) and just enjoyed yourself without fear, shame, or embarrassment.

What if you could rise up, cast off your inhibitions, and show your true self to the world?

Maybe an act of faith like dancing with abandon is something we all need right now.

I know I sure do.