School Daze: 4th Grade and Love

She needs you like she needs her tranqs 

To tell her that the world is clean 

To promise her a definition 

Tell her where the rain will fall 

Tell her where the sun shines bright 

And tell her she can have it all 

Today. Today.

"Alice" Sisters of Mercy

As much as I love the story of Labyrinth, for all of its David-Bowie-as-the-Goblin-King goodness, I really truly loathe the message of it. There is nothing that pisses me off that the 'oh little kid with the great imagination who lives in this great fantasy world needs to grow up and stop living in dream land.' Yeah, fuck you. For some of us, the world in our heads where the safest places.  For some of us, they were how we survived.

In the identity post, I talked about how this is the age when I began to really define who I wanted to be and how I wanted my life to go. Hah. I also found that there were a lot of obstacles to this. However, I will always say the most important thing about fourth grade is that it is the time when I began to understand what I loved.

I'd always loved books and stories. I'd always liked fantasy and scifi stuff, but this is when I really began to love it as something that was a part of me. I would read as much of it as I could, devouring books like food, letting characters and places and magic legends fill me.  They regenerated parts of me that I had lost during the years before, recreating my spirit and strength and whatever other intangible bits of me had died.

I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't see this as ideal.  As I said, there is a whole fiction trope about how people shouldn't stay in fantasy land. Hmph. I think people who write that kind of thing are those darling creatures who never had to seek refuge in a foreign fictional land.  The world around them must have been a nicer place than the ones in their heads. Awesome for them.

As I stumbled along through my fourth grade year, I most often did so in my head. I would talk to my friends, but I didn't get that close to any of them because I knew I would be leaving at the end of the year. I would interact with the adults when I had to. Most of the time though, I was off some where in my mind, completely detached from the world around me. I conspired with Morgan Le Fay (who was really the protagonist of the story) and wandered through the lost cites left by the Elves when they left this world.

This is how I survived, how I really found some joy. The other things I did, the moments of shutting down and the Secret Eating, that was all about just functioning from one moment to the next. It soothed me, but it didn't make me happy. But reading and drawing and writing, these things kept me happy. Books and music made all the difference in my life. And to this day, they are the two aspects of my life that have never hurt me, never drained me, and never betrayed me. Even now, they keep me hanging on.