Who is M.J.Miello?

M.J.Miello is a psychologist and writer who was raised on Staten Island, New York. He has a Ph.D. from St. John’s University in clinical psychology and has worked in numerous clinical settings before opening his own psychotherapy practice in Northern Westchester.   

But Michael was not always the illustrious and profound, unpublished, amateur writer he is today. Shortly after he was born in Brooklyn, his parents, joined the waves of Brooklynites, fleeing to Staten Island, seeking the freedom to invent their own mis-pronunciations for Italian words. At age four, he began to work as a full-time child laborer. Michael’s primary responsibilities included inhaling saw dust, cleaning rusty nails, and holding small pieces of wood steady while they were being cut with an electric saw. On his days off from work, Michael was permitted to attend school. His early education consisted mainly of wearing brown plaid, making illustrations of the Stations of the Cross, and having nuns teach him to sing in Italian. Classmates recall him as being the least memorable person in his elementary school.

Despite such accolades, Michael sought an escape from the parochial school system. He attended Staten Island Technical High School, an experimental NSA program for the training of next-generation cyber-espionage operatives. Like all Staten Island Tech students, he learned to speak the fictional Star Trek language of Klingon (although the school persists in publicly maintaining that they teach a language named "Russian"). During this time, Michael began to find his unique voice—combining his two primary attributes: an absurdist sense of humor and crippling social anxiety. Michael’s first creative efforts included drawing superhero comics, playing roleplaying games, and writing over one thousand poems that have since been classified by the Library of Congress as an act of literary terrorism, placing him on a federal no-rhyme list.

In college, Michael took the advice of the many people who had been telling him to look into psychological treatment, becoming a psychology major. Here he read the great works of escapist science-fiction fantasy known as ‘psychodynamic theory’. It came as a profound realization that, like Freud and Jung, he could, one day, write about the human condition with no obligation to pay any heed to reality at all. 

As graduation approached and adulthood loomed, Michael realized he had no marketable skills. As a measure of last resort, he took the path of most resistance and landed himself in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. He quickly learned to avoid working on his dissertation by penning short fantasy stories (usually featuring tricksters) while staying overlong in coffee shops. His interests expanded to include technology, artificial intelligence, and dystopian worlds. One evening in 1999, he envisioned a future where a young woman complained to her virtual therapist about her boyfriend’s addiction to an immersive on-line game. He wrote the words, “Annie sat on Dr. Freud’s couch,” beginning the literary adventure he remains on to this day.

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Can I stop writing in the third person now?