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I Live in Other Worlds Because They Don’t Hurt Like This One Does
Them’s the facts.
Have you ever felt like you were born in the wrong place or wrong time? Some people have dreams of other eras, places where they feel more comfortable in their skins, and they take it to mean there’s some facet of reincarnation involved. But I don’t have that exact problem. Rather, I feel as if I were born in a world just a little bit too normal.
Maybe that’s why I write — to reclaim the magic of some place I know I would rather be. It’s easy enough to imagine the adventures of witches and bards, of dragon eggs and whimsical spells, of warring kingdoms and glimpses of immortal love. It’s heady, the potential for all the things gone right or just a bit more fantastical.
The obvious inciting factor for this line of thinking is how I grasped onto Harry Potter back in the early 2000’s. My life resembled that of the Dursleys’ home — grating and boring — while Harry got to escape the ball-and-chain of normalcy for nine months out of the year. When age eleven passed with only a whisper of celebration, I was one of those children disappointed by the no-show of an owl and a Hogwarts letter.
Growing into adulthood, though, shouldn’t I have embraced the sad truth of reality? But more and more I escaped into books, movies, comics, the works…
