A Story Two Decades in the Making…
Imagine this.
You’re four years old, visiting your parents’ home country for the first time you can actually remember. Mom and Dad go to a marriage conference, and you’re staying with a family friend — Rose — for your very first sleepover. You and Rose get along instantly. You play and have fun all day, loud and happy, until the sun starts to set.
“Time for bed,” Rose’s mom calls.
You get ready, climb under the blankets, and the two of you are tucked in side by side.
The room goes dark. The noises outside are strange. The noises you know — the ones that mean home — are gone.
You try talking to Rose, hoping that if you keep chatting, you won’t have to fall asleep. Sleep feels… unsafe. Too quiet. Too far from anything familiar.
Rose eventually sighs. “Just go to sleep,” she whispers, already half gone.
You toss and turn for what feels like forever.
Then Rose rolls over and mumbles, “Make up a story in your head. That’s what I do.”
You start to think about familiar things, but they only make your throat tight. So you reach for something unfamiliar instead.
You picture yourself running through the woods. Something is chasing you — you can’t see it, but you know it’s close. A man’s voice growls, “You’re not getting away.”
You run and run until your legs almost give out.
Then sleep hits you like a wave.
This is how I started building my imagination.
From that point on — and honestly, even now — I have slowly built this world in my head. I’ve used it to fall asleep, to escape whatever was happening in my life, even to relate to people. If I could slip into somewhere else, or someone else, it meant I was safe.
To some people, that might sound sad or surprising. But that four-year-old girl created a coping mechanism that was healthy at first… and eventually grew into something that wasn’t.
Even now, I catch myself slipping back into that other world to escape boredom or stress — or sometimes even things I enjoy — simply because I’ve struggled to separate the fictional place I built from the real one right in front of me.
It’s strange how something so small became the thread running through my whole life. Not the story itself, but the instinct to create one.
That’s all for now.
Talk soon,
Rae
