Horses

I’ve created a world in my head, and I take it out and play with it sometimes.

This isn’t the fake personal scenario world where I go ‘he said, she said’ until I hurt my own feelings, no, this is a much broader realm, and a much healthier pastime.

I created it many years ago because I wanted to contribute to the genre of literature that I have enjoyed for my entire life. Fantasy.

It’s escapism, and it’s wonderful. This form of escapism has never hampered my ability to inhabit and navigate the ‘real world’. To the contrary, I find that it has enriched my life to the degree that it makes the drudge bearable, or even enjoyable.

I like Tolkein’s thoughts on the matter: “Yes, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, do we not consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we are partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.”

I love that. I love it so much, it makes me want to burst.

Fantasy isn’t always about magic and monsters, it’s about imagination, and creativity, and persistence. Something I was taught in early recovery was to “act as if”. That means that, when your life sucks, and you’re a disaster, and it’s too much to expect that you will be able to make a positive or noticeable change right away, you can act as if you could, you can imagine yourself as the type of person that can do better, and that makes a difference. Imagine how hard it must have been for Viktor Frankl to imagine a man who could find meaning instead of bitterness, and live in a compassionate world while struggling to survive a Nazi extermination camp. That’s a powerful vision.

But I like magic and monsters.

There are so many things that I don’t know or care about in this world, that I find it easier, and more satisfying, to have entirely created one of my very own. So I get to be God, but there are still rules and consequences. Take horses for an example. I don’t care about horses at all, so I don’t know about horses, so I don’t want to write about horses and have all the weird horse fanatics jump all over me for writing horses wrong. So there are no horses in my world, problem solved, right? Wrong. There are heavy consequences for not having horses in one’s domain; transportation, warfare, agriculture, and trade have to be way different than how we generally understand them. Do I want to research cultures that grew up without horses, or do I just want to create methodologies and technologies to fill the gaps created by the nonexistence of our primary beast of burden off the top of my head? Where does the magic come from, and what is it’s nature? Is it granted by gods, or is it some wild and accidental function of the mind? What if the unchecked expansion of human populations never happened, and why did they not? How will all the things be governed?

As usual, coming up with solutions to these problems raises more and more questions, and sometimes I have to just answer with, “well....because” so I can move on, because I have to move on; this is why Thought Collector exists. I don’t get to say all of the things that I need to say to all the people in my life that need to hear them, but I still need to say them because they’re heavy, and they’re too much for me to hold, so what you read here is, quite simply, a love letter, a letting go of fear, and all that’s ever held me back, because I have a vision of something so much better.

It’s a fantasy.

I’m ok with that.