I’ve loved Peter Pan since I was a kid. I believed that one day Peter Pan would come to my window and ask me to fly with him to Neverland. To a place where I never grow up and never come back.
The thing is, I was never afraid to grow up. Even now growing old doesn’t matter to me, I look forward to being older every year and I used to dream of the adult I’d become when I was older. I always wanted to just be set in my life, have a career and my own place to live. The fact that I couldn’t be entirely self-sufficient as a kid used to annoy me a lot.
What I was afraid of was dying. The idea that eventually everything will just stop and I won’t exist anymore. One day my life will end and that’s completely out of my control. Maybe that’s part of my problem with death, the lack of control. I have no control over when I die unless I take my own life. But even with that I have no control of what happens after. It’s all unknown and I hate not knowing things. One day everything will just stop and then what? Do I go somewhere? Do I just disappear completely and never be able to think or feel or move or anything ever again?
There is also this large part of me that has always wanted to run away. To escape. This is further evidenced by how I spend my free time now. I read to be in another person’s head, their life, to be in another place. I watch a lot of tv shows and movies for the same reasons. I constantly have my headphones in, I don’t actually remember the last time I walked from class to class without music playing in my ears. I create alternate lives for myself in my head. I like to look at celebrities on Instagram because they don’t seem as real to me. The pressures of Instagram never get to me because I don’t like to live in my own life, I like to escape so I don’t compare my life to others. I just imagine a different world and don’t think of my own.
I want to be in an imaginary world like Neverland where the motto is care-free adventure. I can imagine that in this world I want have the same problems that I have now. To think that in this world I wouldn’t have anxiety or depression or autism which is a lovely thought.
So I still keep my window open and keep my head in fiction and someday, someday maybe Peter Pan will come get me and take me away to Neverland.
