What is a fantasy? Brief figments that dance and collide in your head and then in bursts of grandeur, they disappear. But they leave their hooks, and you crave the intoxication of it more and more. You build cathedrals in your mind; you are a master architect. But your work is temporary; your cathedrals crumble and no one knows, so they can’t share your disappointment. The more we construct in our imagination, the more our reality erodes.
It’s not our fault. Everything in society tells us our reality isn’t enough. We follow celebrities who jet off to islands for a weekend and always look like they’ve stepped off a runway. We watch films where the protagonist sulks in the ordinary, waiting for the extraordinary to make life exciting. We look at the best versions of our peers on social media and then dissect our own lives to find the good parts to showcase to the world. We filter and we crop and we erase and we highlight and we compare and take notes and we ultimately hide, because we’ve built a version of ourselves that is someone we don’t know. And so we live in a fantasy world where we are always laughing; we are always somewhere worthwhile; we are always doing something of consequence, and we are always the envy of others. Our culture tells us to smile and wave and sit in our imaginary kingdoms where we are beloved by all who live there, which is no one because we rule alone.
Look around you. While we concern ourselves with the fictional, the world is starting to crumble. We are so wrapped up in our own desperate fairytales to be extraordinary that we dismiss the hurt around us as someone else’s irritating baggage; it’s not our problem because we are perfect. This sense of security though, its built upon insecurity. We are too scared to act scared; if we allowed ourselves to feel, then our kingdom might collapse. If we were honest, with ourselves and with others, then we’d actually have to start caring.
And would caring be so bad? Sure, you could realize that you aren’t actually the most fun, or the most attractive, or the most popular, but what a relief! If you were the “most” of anything, then everyone else would seem dull. The world, and everyone in it, is plagued by imperfection and saturated with uniqueness. The ones who recognize this are the ones who thrive.
Fantasy is inherent. It’s when creativity collides with perceived flaws; the desire to create in places that appear broken or insufficient. So often we apply this process to ourselves and make it something shallow. But what if we projected this longing, to establish and fill in places of emptiness, instead of internalizing? We can put these efforts toward something constructive, and toward something that doesn’t exist only within ourselves. We can build something real, but we have to look beyond the walls of our imaginary kingdoms.
Some of the most brilliant minds in history were expert fantasizers; individuals who used their imagination to supplement and fortify their reality. These people didn’t run in the face of overwhelming imperfection. Instead, they looked reality in its harsh eyes and saw opportunity. Overcoming an obstacle doesn’t mean we lessen its peril so that we feel more secure. It means we acknowledge the depth and height of the wall in front of us, and continue on in spite.
“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." -C.S. Lewis
