One of my artistic interests for a few years now has been the amount of “real” and the amount of “story” in any given circumstance. Obviously, we can’t get outside our own experience to ever really touch the raw reality, but there can be tremendous differences in how close we are.
For me, the interest stems from realizing how many fantasy worlds I create when I fall for a guy – I have had a stubborn tendency to like unavailable men from afar, building stories of love in my head and heart while they – most of the time – are completely unaware of their effect on me. This is, obviously, a defence mechanism: After one quite rough experience in liking another person in my twenties I wasn’t really able to let anything real in for a number of years, and to some extent I also am still processing my parents divorce from 1996, since back then I quite stubbornly decided not to.
However, in the last few years, I’ve gotten fond of trying to hang on to the real instead of the fairytales I make in my head. It’s often painful to accept, most of the times I don’t particularly like the reality – but I do know why Alice left the Wonderland. Even when the real, especially in romantic relationships, is the scariest thing, it is also something worth the attempt to make it stable. This goes also for the planet and its human-caused crisis.
To an extent, I think we all hoover in-between the land of fairies, dreams and fears, the land built from our experiences and defences, the land that can make us fall into madness or make us believe – and the embodied, which we define as real. I think both are necessary, wonderful places – but that if we constantly keep falling into rabbit holes and hoping for wonders, maybe it would do some good to stay on the ground for a while.
Queen of Wandering 