Writer Wander 024 - Not-So Healthy Escapism

In which Wander copes with his Maladaptive Daydreaming...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Rider Wander twenty-four. I am not a healthy escapist. So I'm recording this episode. I just got back in my car after arriving in my house because I knew that I had to record this, and I had to get the idea immediately. Because it's one of those breakthroughs that you reach while you're driving, which obviously, while you're driving, you're not really in a position to really take advantage of it. But sometimes I feel that there are ideas that you have to get to because if you don't, you are just gonna lose them. And uh, you know, frankly, I don't want to be doing this right now. My my neck kind of hurts, and I want to lay my head down for a while. But uh, I need to get this to paper because I just had this profound realization, and it's right in the title. I am not a healthy escapist, right? And what what am I talking about? As you have no doubt, as you absolutely know by now, we are a channel that is heavily uh a podcast that is heavily invested in the fantasy genre. We're writing a fantasy novel, of course. So a lot of the preoccupations that come with that said genre also come with that channel, and part of those things, right, there is a very real critique that goes against the fantasy genre, which is this idea that fantasy is a merely escapist genre that doesn't serve to inform anything about the real world. And you know, this is a very surface-level critique. Obviously, it is, right? You know, anyone who's read a few fantasy books here and there, or or a lot of the classic books, they they know that these are books that despite taking place in fantastical worlds and despite having elements of taking you away from this current world into another world, these are books that use that technique to allow us to reflect on the realities of this world, whether through mythic language or through allegorical language that allows us to represent things that are going on directly, or by mythic appeals that appeal more so to the subconscious, to more abstract notions of human existence that are universal across all times and all cultures. That's the healthy escapism that it is a response to. But the existence of a healthy escapism means that there is also an unhealthy escapist. And you know, just today I was thinking that in a very real sense, I think that I am, and I have been for a while, this kind of unhealthy escapist. Now, what does this mean? Does this mean that everything I write is purposeless drivel that has nothing to contribute to the real world? Well, I can't be the judge of that, it would have to be whoever ends up reading what I read. But at least when I wrote those things, that was not my intention. I I did want to produce something that was meaningful to people, right? I did want to make something that was meaningful to people. However, I'm sorry, I paused because I'm you know my my dog is is like she's you know she's like staring at me from like she's staring at me from like the gate of my house because I'm parked in front of it. She's like, what the hell are you doing? It's hilarious, it's hilarious. Um but besides the point, right, that that unhealthy escapism, there is a very real strand of that that exists within me, and honestly, it's it's kind of scary. It's kind of scary, right? Um, I have both tendencies within me, so this kind of can tie back into I think it's like episode 21, the one where I was playing Minecraft and I was you know talking about this this cut internal conflict, this internal division that exists within myself, which is you know, there's a version of myself that just wants to, you know, not do anything, that just wants to chill, that that just wants to, you know, enjoy life and be very laid back and not care about anything. And there's another version of myself that is very much on top of things, that is very much, you know, constantly, constantly willing and constantly fighting to you know to get ahead and to you know to do to do something, to create something of value, a purpose. And those two poles are very real aspects that exist within myself. And following up on that on that point, right, there is also a version of myself that wants to do the healthy escapism that helps the the human cause, and there is another version of myself that wants to do that unhealthy escapism that's just about running away, that's just about literally disappearing, going to a place where no one recognizes who you are, no one knows who you are, no one knows that you exist, and being able to completely redefine yourself and become a completely different person. And I think that there are, you know, there are a lot of things that I've done in my life that are indicative of this. I think that there's like even a term for it. I think it's like maladaptive daydreaming, right? And you to give you an example, ever since I was a kid, and I still do this to this day, whenever I'd be walking around and I saw like a pe a strand of paper, a little piece of paper crumpled up on the ground, I could not resist the urge to pick it up. Nine times out of ten, it was somebody's receipt. But every now and then you would find little you know notes of of something, right? It they never made sense. I think the most recent one was when I when I went running a while back, and in the place I go running, there was a scrap of paper. I picked it up, and there was just like a random sequence of numbers written on it. In hindsight, it's it's kind of creepy, but a part of me, and this is the thought I've always had when I did this, was like, you know, what if I stumbled upon this thing? You know, what if I stumbled upon this thing and it had some special message for myself? And one of the common fantasies I had is that, you know, what if this was like a treasure map that would lead me to a portal that takes me to some other dimension, some fantastical world of meaning and adventure and purpose that oftentimes seems to be the exact opposite of the you know the kind of life that we have. You know, again, one of the themes of this podcast is this this idea that you will have good days and you will have bad days, right? You'll have some days in which your your life, your world will seem more colorful than others. And conversely, you will have other days where it seems that the world is completely drained of color, where the world is just this dark, scary place with nothing to to experience. And in Rider Wander, we obviously endeavor to bring ourselves into that mindset of always keeping the world colorful. But sometimes when you do that, it creates like an unhealthy aversion to the you know to the difficult realities of this life, to you know, the the very difficult realities that make us just want to disappear, to leave, to find the other world, to pick up that little scrap of paper that's on the wayside while you're walking around and and ask yourself, what if? What if there was something to this? What if this is part of a big plot where I will start to act in some drama that will change the course of history through some strange strange means, you know, these these are these are very real thoughts. Another thing I I used to do, and again I still do to a lesser extent, I um one of the things I did is that I would pace around for hours in my in my room alone, constantly thinking up of you know scenarios and stories to tell myself. You know, I was like seven years old, I was thinking of like scenarios in which I I was a hero, in which I was fighting against uh great villains and uh going on journeys with with close friends where I had magical powers and whatnot. You know, these were these were entire worlds I concocted in my head that are gone now because in a very real sense, they're like oral culture that was never transmitted orally. They are they're not oral culture, be precisely because they were not transmitted orally, but rather it's sort of like a mental culture, mental because it only ever existed in my head. And that makes you wonder that there's like this very cool term that you might not be aware of, it's called paracosm, and it's this term that refers to fantasy worlds that are constructed by young children, and it's very interesting because I think that there's an entire field of study dedicated to understanding the different paracosms of um various authors, right? So they're mainly famous because a lot of famous authors had paracosms. I think C.S. Lewis had paracosms, the the the Bronte sisters, for those of you who like them. They also had paracosms, which is like imaginary fantasy worlds that you know they would come up with as children, and they're very notable for the level of detail that they have, despite being a world that is constructed by a very young person, a very young individual, and that that is absolutely fascinating, right? But imagine this, right? Similar to that little scrap of paper I found on on the ground, how many paracosms exist that we simply will not know because the you know the person never decided to publish anything? How how many hidden mystical worlds exist that no one has decided to bring to light because they've just maintained it inside, and it's always served the primary purpose of you know, I don't know, some form of escape from their daily toils, their their daily sufferings, to go into a different place, uh, a different land. Right? These are all things to to consider. And I had multiple renditions of the same paracosum when I used to uh when I used to spin around in my room and and lose myself in you know in these characters I created. Some of them were fictional characters, others were friends and and family that I I projected into these positions of loyal companions where we would go on journeys and and do things and you know go to exist in a world of mystical and poetic meeting where great dramas and great feats of heroism were to be had, and all of that is lost, all of that is lost in the mental ruins of a childhood mind that was no longer stimulated. At one point I I stopped spinning around, and I think that the most poetic thing to say would be that I I stopped that around the time that I started writing around the age of 15, but I think I probably started a few uh stopped a few years before that, and writing was sort of like a more mature revival of that primal instinct that existed within myself to constantly fantasize and to maladaptively daydream and to lose myself in a place that was not my own, right? But it if it was when I started writing that I stopped, because again, I I don't quite remember. I still spin around, but I just do that to think about the plots of my current novels. I I don't I don't just do that to idly come up with power fantasies to to entertain myself, but I I think it's very poetic because uh one of the fascinating things that I remember when um I was taking a a medieval literature class in university, and uh the professor of that class she she was trained in the Icelandic and Norse sagas, and one of the things she said is that you know, and this is true, the myths that are recorded are in all likelihood the very last version of those myths that were ever told, because those myths were stories that were probably handed down for generations upon generations, but usually around the time that those stories are written down, rather than passed down verbally, it is around the time where those stories are being lost, so they are written down with the intent to preserve them, but in the act of preserving them, you're sort of killing the stories because you're creating a canonical version of the story that can no longer be altered, that can no longer have additions placed upon it. You know, we were talking about you know, these North sagas, they they were probably and really any mythic cycle, they were probably constantly added to. There were probably like people, you know, coming up with like cool stories to add into the cycle, or maybe you know, maybe they were like hiking somewhere and they saw a cool mountain and thought, oh yeah, the great hero went to this cool mountain at this point of his adventure, and that's just a thing that he did. But once you write it down, once the story is canonized, once it is killed in ink, there's nothing that can be done. That's it, that's the last version of the story, mentally speaking, because it is no longer an oral culture, it is a written culture, it is a written culture that is no longer contained to a particular experience of somebody relaying the story to another person, it is contained in unchanging, broadly speaking, letters. That is more so the case today, you know. We can enter a whole dialogue as to how this reflects on modern cultures with fandoms and whatnot, but you know, I don't want to talk about that right now. But again, I'm I'm not I'm not a healthy escapist. I you know, I have this strong urge to just leave. And I think that's part of the reason why I like elves and their folklore a lot. I used to I used to have an aversion to traditional fam fantasy races, to be completely honest with you, which is very funny considering that I've spent a good chunk of this podcast up until now and in prior episodes defending the usage of traditional fantasy races. But, you know, I used to have an aversion to them. I used to purposefully write stories that were human-centric and purposefully avoid these other fantasy races, not even because I had a genuine desire to create something new, but because it, you know, it felt like it was the cool thing to ignore these uh mythic backdrops that existed and to be more to be more unique and whatnot. But once I read The Lord of the Rings, I I didn't grow up with The Lord of the Rings, by the way. I I read it in my early 20s. So um for those of you who might be listening to all of my episodes and think that I'm like I'm like some fanboy who's you know who's blinded by nostalgia, I did not grow up with the Lord of the Rings. I I read it very late in my life, actually, comp compared to when most people read it. And again, what what's fascinating, what's fascinating about the elves, after I read The Lord of the Rings, it the elves just clicked for me, like the whole thing, this idea of eternity, these creatures that whose conception of time is completely distinct from from human beings. And then when when I read these books called the Fabled Landbooks, ooh, I need I need to make an episode about that because I love those books, and it seems nobody knows about it. You know, that that's a pretty cool thing to include in the next installment of the obscure things that mean a lot to me because I need to talk about that series, it is it is very good. I've only read like two of the volumes, but they're excellent, and I have a third, but I haven't gotten around to that one yet. But the first one I read was about elves and fairies, and one of the things that's fascinating about elves and fairies, and that has enraptured me is that they they are creatures that exist in between things, right? Elves in particular, they exist, they are said in the mythology to exist between dusk and and dawn, which are like the intermediate states of the day. Dawn is just as the sun is rising, dusk is just as the sun is setting, and in you know, they exist in the margins of our own defined worlds, the elves escape definition because they are in that sense quasi-divine beings, they are a step below gods, right? So, again, their conception of time is different because of that, and again, you see this in a lot of the myths where you have like these, you know, elven maidens uh tricking young knights and you know young bachelors into stepping into the fairy circles with them and engaging in like this perpetual dance with the maiden, and it's like this beautiful ethereal thing, but due to the the nature of how elves perceive time, years and and centuries pass, and by the time that the human escapes the fairy circle, many years in the future has passed, and all of his friends are dead, all of the people he loved are are completely gone. And that that's completely that's just something completely fascinating and mind-blowing. Everyone that you love is is gone because you got into contact with this being that whisked you away to another to another land, and there's something so beautiful about so dreadfully beautiful about that tragic and disturbing image of being taken away from everything through no fault of your own to a certain degree. You know, if you caught me in the right state of mind, I'd tell you, hell no, I would not enter an elven fairy circle. But I can't lie, and I and I and I have to say that there are some days where I wake up, I look in the mirror, I think about how my day's been going, I think about just my life in general, and I'm like, you know, stepping into an elven fairy circle wouldn't be all that bad right now. Being whisked away into like this strange dimension between worlds, there wouldn't be something too bad about that. There's some romantic allure that exists behind that concept, and I know it's a vice. You know, I'm not here to justify this this way of thought. I know that it is it is a fault, and you know, it is a childish thing, and I am the kind of person who in the past in this podcast, like you know, I have defended, you know, these kind of of thoughts, uh, you know, childhood innocence and you know, and whimsy and wonder, and I will always defend those things. But again, when you take them to a certain extreme, where it makes you it makes you want to flee the present moment, it makes you want to turn your face away from the people who truly love you, those who really know you, that's a problem. And that's something that we we just we shouldn't want to be in. That's not a place we should want to be in. And you know, I guess in a in a final in a final note, I think that this is one of the key values that Christianity, Catholicism in particular, has granted our our civilization, right? Where you have you know you have this sense of duty to the outside world. You have, you know, these virtues, these responsibilities that command you in a loving way to go out into the world and to change it and to and to impact it, but at the same time, you still have that sense of magic and wonder and myth that that is that is part and parcel of any supernatural world. It's just that now it is oriented around the mission. You know, when you look upon the cross, when you when you gaze upon a crucifix, what do you see? On the one hand, you see a very human, dead man clinging, you know, probably dead. Yeah, most crucifixes already have Jesus dead. But you also see, and this is where you step into the heroic route, you see the supreme act of heroism, the supreme act of duty, the true myth in the truest sense. Not a myth because the events are false, but a myth because the truth contained within the Event exceed what we consider reality itself. They go they go beyond it, right? But it's a delicate balance that we are being proposed to follow under Catholicism, under Christianity. And I and I have I can't lie when I say that you know I often steer away in the direction of wanting all the magic, all the all the mystique, while ignoring that that you know that that duty that I really have to my neighbor, to the people around me, to the people in my community. You know, if if you're not if you're not religious, you know you can appeal to some sense of duty you have to the people around you, that we have to to make society better, to to make it into something worth living in, and that's why I do believe that the novelist, the storyteller, has a social purpose, right? You know, it is fundamentally selfish to make stories just because of yourself, right? Or maybe not selfish, but to to a certain extent, there is there is no there is no value if you're just doing it for yourself. And the good news is that I don't really think that there's anyone who really does it for themselves, because even people who make art that is only for their eyes, you know, at the end of the day, it is an attempt at communication, right? Because if it was only for yourself, you would not have externalized it in the way that you did through the creation of a work of art. Again, you'd you would have a mental culture like the paracosms that I had as a child, in which I was constantly spill spinning around in this self-congratulatory power fantasy that probably did me a lot of harm in the long run. That you know, that probably got me distracted from the things that mattered in my life, and uh slowed down my development as a human being because I was so wrapped up in those things, because I did not I did not sublimate the art, I did not transfig it, and that is the job of the artist, fundamentally, his role in society to keep that myth, to keep that magic, that mystique, but to transfig it into into something that can be of use to someone, an escapism that that gives. But today, at least, that's not what I had. Today I had the unhealthy escapism. Today I dreamt of you know being whisked away somewhere far away, where I was alone, where I didn't have the eyes of all the these people upon me, when I I didn't have this this silent tyranny of all the expectations that I assume people have of me, which they may or may not have, you know, the these projected duties and concerns, and there there's there's something to that. There's something to that. And it's scary, but it's scary because it's it's a fire that that sets you on, that it it it it it gives you inspiration, there's a strength to it too, but it has to be channeled. And um, you know, that's really it, guys. Um that was Ryder Wander. Don't step into a fairy circle, I guess.