I have lived my life as a fantasy. It was the way I coped, the way I escaped, the way I survived.
When I was a kid, I had imaginary friends and was always living out adventures in worlds created (and usually populated) by characters or actors I saw in movies or on TV. I rode Falkor with Atreyu, I saught horror movie creatures with The Monster Squad, I rambled with Sloth and the Goonies. It was easier than being the awkward, fat, tall kid playing by herself on the playground.
As I got older, I not only created worlds and friends to escape to, I replayed the torturous moments of my everyday life and rewrote them to have a storybook result. I fancied myself a writer (more like a storyteller with the stories roaming in my head but never making their way to paper). Ultimately, though, I couldn't even control my created reality well enough to make outcomes worthy of record.
The only times I didn't escape was when I couldn't - when my reality was so overwhelming and encroaching that there was no way out, even in my mind. This only happened when I was sick. When my body couldn't provide the energy to support my mind.
The duality of my mind, though, was that I was also starkly aware of the reality of my life - my family, my social surroundings, my physcial being. I guess I had to be in order to repaint it so vividly and differently. I always thought I was some special kind of crazy - I was so good at making up the good stuff, I wondered if I was making up the bad, too, since no one else seemed to notice the same things. As I've grown up, I've realized I didn't make the bad up - I was just the only one willing to see it.
I don't know how I would have made it without my "other life." I couldn't ignore my reality like everyone else so I had to escape how I could. It always makes me think of Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia when she talks about how sometimes someone's greatest strength may be perceived by others as an extreme weakness.
It's had its impact on my life. I do still have this unrealistic expectation of myself - who I should be, where I should be in life. I'm realizing, though, that I'm actually closer to that desired version of myself than I used to think. I'm realizing, too, how useless the fantasies are now. I can't make my life be what I envision - at least not in those wonderful ways. If I could, it would have been better before now. I am happier with where I am in my life than I have been before - in ways that I never imagined for myself.
I am afraid to lose the fantasy, the imagination, the creativity. It was my friend when I had no others. If I lose it, do I become less human? Do I become less myself?
As painful as they were in so many ways, I sometimes miss the days of running around and losing myself in the creation of my mind - the adventures, the places, the friends - that were more real to me than the real world around me.
