Can't Sleep #2: Living in My Head

I am an avoider. I am honest when I say that I would much rather be anywhere else than where I usually am, whether it be school, a party, home, with a friend... usually, my environment fails to entertain or please me, and therefore I resort to digging into myself for satisfaction.

When I was in middle school, I had to live away from my parents, at my grandparents house. There, in a room cold in both spirit and temperature, I was isolated from my parents, from my friends, from all that was familiar. I began eating too much from anxiety and lack of emotion, then I gained weight and began to hate myself even more than I already did. But I did have one thing that kept me going, and that was writing.

This was the beginning of my music phases, and at 13 years old, I started liking boybands, particularly a little pop band called The Wanted, who were really obscure and insignificant, really, but I found home in them. Through their music, I found friends in an online fan base, and through the fan base I found fan fiction, which was both terrifying and intriguing to me. Fan fiction introduced me to a world of fantastic imagination, strong belief and wildly amateur narratives that took me away from the room I was trapped in, and transported me into scenarios that would never happen, with people I'd never meet.

I've done this as a kid, too. My mother was a bible enthusiast (Christianity is one of the biggest book clubs in the world), and she read it to me sometimes. I, however, was far more interested in Greek mythology, which made far more sense to me and inspired my faith in the natural world and had me talking to various deified personalities throughout the day, as a person of religion would pray to their god(s), but in the most elementary way. I remember also watching a cassette with my father one time, showing a woman being violently kidnapped and held hostage in some Russian television show, and I would wonder to myself what I would do in that situation, how I would look, what I would say. It gave me a sort of preparation, a sort of superiority and peace, for I knew what to do if it did happen, but the lady doesn't, and never will, no matter how many times I rewatch the cassette.

Even now, I live largely in my head. I fantasize about taking someone on a date to the Art Institute in Chicago during math class. I plan out a conversation I might have with my friends when I see them next, or their friends when they decide to spontaneously introduce me to them. Hell, sometimes I even talk aloud to an imaginary talk show host when no one's home.  

The best thing about this is the fact that if I get really good at it, I can make a living off of it. I can write about it, sing about it, talk about it, draw it, sculpt it, dedicate my life to attaining it. It's the way I work.

I get scolded for this on a regular basis. A girl I fancied used to always tell me that I was missing out, that I was going to regret daydreaming during class and discussions about mundane things such as our peer's lives and celebrity drama, but I've never seemed to find myself feeling like I have to compromise the real world for the one I make inside my head. Besides, it's much harder for me, I've noticed, to do this in instances where reality is great, such as when on vacation, in a new place, when under the influence, or among good people. Not coincidentally, these moments are usually the best moments of my life, and I remember them very vividly. Hell, I remember I couldn't get myself to write about Italy while still in it. No, I had to go back home and become bored of everything else before I could teleport into another reality, the one sculpted from the memories in my mind.

I think without using this ability as a defense mechanism, I would be the most boring, emotionless being. Most of my generation are. It's depressing to be around some people because they can't be excited about anything. They just don't have the ability. Reality has desensitized them, has ravaged their imagination, making them "realists". That's the worst thing a person can be, a realist. I know of one, the same one who scolds me for living in my head, and she's miserable. Her voice is monotonous. She watches movies because she's bound by confines of reality and can't seem to make her own hypothetical plot lines, and the moves she watches are all so similar it's painful to hear her talk about them. She listens to songs about emotions instead of stories (Oasis over Blur kind of thing). She doesn't like books. Books bore her. She doesn't have the imagination for books, she needs the visuals and dialogue reenacted for her to feel and see and hear. The problem with that is other people are doing the work for you, telling you how to feel, manipulating you in the way they see fit. The thing about imagination is that there are no limits. It's the subconscious, the dream world, the world you wish to engulf yourself in. You're in control of everything, you have full liability if you screw it up and take all the credit if you make something beautiful.

Thinking of it now, maybe that's why I like it so much. It's all in my control, and because I can be held deeply responsible for everything that happens in my head (it's my sole job on this earth to know myself to the highest extent), I develop a trust in myself that I will do everything I can to succeed, and if not, I will let the fact that I've failed crush me and teach me to fear it again.