There’s something both thrilling and terrifying about trying to bring a dream to life—especially when that dream involves starting your own business. For me, it’s a deeply personal and creative endeavor, one rooted in storytelling, artistry, and adult-themed gaming content. I’ve spent years imagining what this project could become. I’ve laid out sourcebooks, sketched out mechanics, worldbuilding lore, and even envisioned the types of illustrations that would bring it all to life. But as with so many creative projects, the vision is the easy part. The real challenge? Funding.
Starting a business from scratch isn’t just about passion. It’s about resources. And when you’re bootstrapping, every decision becomes a balance between what’s necessary and what’s possible. I’ve had to navigate not only the costs of creating a product—writing, editing, illustration, marketing—but also the costs of forming the business itself: registration fees, professional services, and a platform to actually share the work.
There’s this common idea that if you’re determined and the project is good enough, the money will follow. But that’s not the reality for most of us. Grants and loans tend to favor more conventional ventures. Crowdfunding is a gamble that requires a large and active fanbase before you even launch. And personal savings? That can only stretch so far before you’re making choices between paying for groceries or commissioning another piece of art.
Every step of the way, I’ve asked myself whether it’s worth it. Whether I’m chasing something too niche, too risky, too outside the mainstream. But I keep coming back to the same answer: yes, it is worth it. Not because it’s easy, but because it speaks to something I believe in. I want to create spaces where people feel seen, where fantasy and identity can meet in authentic and affirming ways.
I’m still in the early stages—lining up my structure, scouting for collaborators, and planning out ways to generate steady content. I’ve committed to using a monthly subscription platform to slowly build a following and earn enough to commission the assets I need. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. But it’s mine.
If you’re also in the middle of starting something big with not enough money and a heart full of hope, I see you. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. But it’s not impossible.
We create because we must—and we fight to build something lasting because someone out there is waiting to see what only we can offer.
The Legacy I Hope to Leave Behind
By Katherine Walter
On July 1, 2025
In reflection
Image: ChatGPT
Legacy is not built all at once. It takes shape over time—quietly, unevenly—through the choices we make, the truths we speak, and the lives we touch. I don’t imagine mine will be written in bold headlines or etched into stone. But I hope it will be felt in subtler, more enduring ways. In the freedom someone claims because I once stood up. In the insight sparked by something I taught or wrote. In the love that lingers in the spaces I leave behind.
I’ve lived many chapters in this life—some of them linear, others far more tangled. I began as a student of anthropology, drawn to the study of culture, meaning, and human complexity. It taught me to listen deeply, to question what seems natural, and to honor what is often ignored or devalued. Anthropology gave me not just tools for understanding others—it gave me a way to understand myself. As a transgender woman, as a spiritual seeker, as someone shaped by forces both seen and hidden, I learned to situate my life within broader currents of history and identity. That perspective never left me.
Eventually, I put my education into service in a different way—as a SNAP program specialist with the USDA. There, I saw how policy lives not in abstract theories but in the faces of people trying to feed their families. I worked at the intersection of administration and survival. It gave me a profound respect for the dignity of everyday life, and a deepened sense of duty to advocate for those so often silenced by red tape and economic cruelty. That role grounded me in the real: in food, in need, in systems and the people caught within them.
But even before all of that, I served my country in uniform. I am a U.S. Navy veteran. I served as a submariner and fought in Desert Storm. It was a life of discipline, of structure, of submerged tension—both literal and emotional. That chapter gave me a close relationship with mortality, with silence, with sacrifice. And later, it gave me the courage to live my truth. Because once you’ve survived war, you learn how little time there really is for pretending.
Though my time teaching in a classroom was brief, it was profoundly meaningful. Education, I believe, is one of the most radical forms of love and hope. I did not stay long enough to become a fixture, but I hope I was a spark. I hope that somewhere, a student remembers me not as perfect, but as present. As someone who saw them clearly, challenged them to think differently, and held space for who they were becoming.
Throughout it all, I’ve remained a writer, a creator, a witness. I write not just to tell stories, but to make space—for desire, for defiance, for complex and beautiful lives that rarely make it into the mainstream. I write for those on the margins, for the ones building new worlds from the ruins of the old, and for the future selves who need proof that we were here.
If I am remembered, I hope it is as someone who lived with fierce honesty. Who loved without shame. Who fought for justice, even when she was exhausted. Who stood in her womanhood and her queerness not as burdens, but as blessings.
I hope my legacy is not one of perfection, but of permission. Permission to live. To change. To desire. To dream beyond the roles assigned at birth or by circumstance. I hope I leave behind courage in those who need it. Gentleness in those taught to harden. Fire in those told to shrink.
And if some future soul—browsing an archive, reading a quote, hearing a story—finds a piece of me and thinks, “Because she lived, I feel less alone,” then that is all the immortality I will ever need.