I’ve been playing make-believe for as long as I remember.
As a child, empty wooden cable reels were tea tables and carriages. The potato harvester was a castle with secret doors and chutes. A stack of roofing tiles was a rock star’s stage or a landing platform for fairies. The usual childish stuff.
Around nine to ten years old recess at school became magical. We were unicorns and pegasuses (pegasi?) and galloped through magical forests fighting evil wizards determined to harvest our magical natures for their nefarious purposes.
In middle and high school, we became people again. Heroes of stories we acted out in parks and the dunes among the sagebrush and tumbleweeds. With our wooden swords and daggers, cloaks made of black tricot, and pencil-drawn scars, we defeated evil plots and saved many a damsel. Once or twice we were even mistaken for devil worshippers by witnesses. If only they knew of all the evil we defeated in their neighborhoods.
When the ringleader of these expeditions moved away, those games ended. We began to exchange letters which sounds pretty normal until you realize that we made up a world complete with a map and characters who lived in that world. Those characters exchanged letters about their adventures. I even had one character kidnap another and send ransom notes to one of my friend’s characters.
Now I don’t get the opportunity to dress up and haunt the local parks and I’ve lost contact with that friend but I still play make-believe when I play D&D and when I write. I have lost the fun of it though. I feel trapped by the rules and it is taking the character out of the game. It is time to throw out the rulebook when I play and assume that voice and costume again. Play with my handwriting to make it someone elses.
I need to stop being the good girl who never breaks the rules of the game. I need to leave the rules behind when deciding what my character will do. Just as I need to stop worrying about if other people will “like” what I am writing and creating. And at this point in my career, those sorts of worries is liable to make everything I write pale copycats of everything I am reading.
Next time I sit down to write, I will get out my cloak and wrap myself in it. I will get a couple colored pencils and draw a few scars on my skin and make-believe a story onto the paper. And have fun doing it.
