This is messy and long. Forgive me. Turns out that writing about a topic that’s been weighing on you for two decades is complicated. I want to clarify that this blog, like every blog I post on here, is just me making sense of my own thoughts and feelings. (What’s that Joan Didion quote?) I need to turn all of this chaos out here before I can sort through it, look outward, make it into something useful. But maybe, hopefully, anyone reading can recognize pieces of themselves here, too.
“I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be.” – Fernando Pessoa
It was February 2004, and my third-grade class was hard at work on Valentine’s Day crafts. We had already been asked to decorate a shoebox at home, an assignment our suburban mothers took very seriously. These would be used to collect the valentines and small, hard candies we all exchanged unenthusiastically at our class party over store-bought cupcakes and heart-shaped cookies.
But on this afternoon, our teacher had asked us to make valentines for the people we loved, wisely anticipating that most 8-year-olds wouldn’t think to do so otherwise. My friends all chattered and laughed as they carefully cut out construction paper hearts and wrote “I <3 U” to parents and siblings with washable Crayola markers.
I can’t say I remember the thought process behind this decision, but I do remember the single valentine I produced that afternoon. It apparently made such an impression that, 17 years later, friends from that class still bring it up to poke fun at me.
Spanning more than three sheets of dark purple construction paper, I had written an elaborate and alarmingly fervent love letter to Captain Jack Sparrow, in which I professed my desire for us to marry and sail away together on the high seas. Complete with grainy black and white printed photos of Jack and crude drawings of Jolly Rogers and bleeding hearts, this monstrosity that I draped over my desk like a flag certainly stuck out among the folded pink cards and pasted red hearts.
My teacher didn’t have to read past the first two sentences of my letter to realize this would be a highly inappropriate display at the following day’s party. I was asked to take down my creation and remove it from school property that afternoon.
The rejection of my project stung a little, but anger and defiance bubbled to the top. The assignment was to create a valentine for someone we loved; hadn’t I done just that? Maybe it was excessive, especially for a third-grade classroom. But I had been honest about how I felt, and I didn’t know how else to be.
Since my dad had taken me to see “Pirates of the Caribbean” the previous summer, I hadn’t stopped dreaming of saltwater, rough wood, biting winds, and adventures with Jack. (At 7 years old, it was my first PG-13 movie, and though unclear what my dad was thinking, I emerged from the theater enthralled.) I longed to stand by Jack’s side, be part of the crew, fight elitist navies, and sail into the sunset forever. After all, as a young kid with the whole world ahead of me, what could be better than an infinite horizon?
For years, pirates dominated my interests, and I couldn’t envision a future for myself that didn’t involve a ship and the sea. I took advantage of every possible opportunity to express my passion. Writing assignments, from daily journal entries to lengthy research reports, allowed me to ramble about infamous pirates, flags and symbols, and common methods of torture and punishment. Innocent family vacations aboard a Disney Cruise Line gave me a chance to sail the Caribbean and make my pilgrimage to the Flying Dutchman.
Though my inappropriate valentine eventually became a punchline among friends and family, the longing and love expressed there were real. The “Pirates” movie had resonated with deep-seated yearnings I was only beginning to understand.
Stuck inside a classroom day after day, and shackled to the same routine that would continue year after year, I was already suffocating under the weight of reality and expectations. My soul longed to explode into something boundless and incorporeal — like sparkling rays of light stretching rapturously in all directions, illuminating each speck of dust with an incandescent glow.
And when I watched Jack Sparrow escape from the British, reunite with his ship and crew, and set sail for the horizon, happier and freer than he’d ever been, I thought: Maybe this is how.
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“I choked / on such longing I couldn’t spit out. Yes, desire is so different / when God bore you hungry.” – Yves Olade
Nearly two decades later, my dreams no longer revolve around Johnny Depp and the Caribbean. But those longings to be other and elsewhere never vanished — they simply shapeshifted as they migrated from one world to the next.
Each period of my life has been defined by a fictional character or universe. It’s all I can talk about, all I can think about. Life does not pass in seasons, years, or ages but in obsessions. I swing from dream world to dream world inside my head while reality drifts by, mundane and unbearable.
Jack Sparrow was one of my first loves, and “Pirates of the Caribbean” will always hold a special place in my heart. But even earlier than pirates were wizards. At age 6, I wrote to Harry Potter at the Dursleys’ address in Surrey, and was devastated for weeks when the British post office returned my letter covered in harsh red stamps that denied the home’s existence. Later, there were periods marked by “Twilight,” “Iron Man,” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Sons of Anarchy,” “Hannibal,” “Law & Order: SVU” — the list is endless. The biggest piece of my heart and soul will always belong to Sam, Dean, Castiel, and the “Supernatural” world filled with monsters, demons, and angels. For the past few weeks, my feelings have been concentrated on “Animal Kingdom” and Pope Cody. There have been so many obsessions over so many years.
The dark, insatiable yearning at the root of my being was brought more sharply into focus with each world I visited. New shows, movies, and books unearthed longings and desires I didn’t know I had, and more precisely, didn’t know what to do with. In my dreams and fantasy worlds, I saw who and what I wanted to be — and it was so far from who I was, who I was expected to be, that it terrified me.
Friends, family, and teachers already disapproved of my obsessions. I talked about fiction too much. I cared about real life too little. So, I buried it all. I learned to lock my interests, passions, and longings deep within myself — so deep, in fact, that most of me became inaccessible to anything real.
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“If we are trapped, my heart, it is not within reality.” – John Berger
My private inner worlds have kept me company over long, lonely years of school, studying, work, and travel. I spent most of middle and high school alone in my bedroom, working on homework late into the night, with only books, restricted internet access, and my thoughts to distract me. A lifetime of health issues, my mother’s demands for academic perfection, and my lack of interest in extracurricular activities created the perfect recipe for self-isolation. Add in a toxic home environment, emotionally abusive family members, and my own severe depression, and I was primed to seek refuge and escape in worlds other than my own.
Fiction was the only place I felt safe calling home. It was where I stored my feelings and, ultimately, my entire personality (or, to be Whitmanesque, personalities). To other people, I may have seemed numb, cold, emotionless, uncaring. One boy in my class joked that I was a ghost; years later, another marveled at my lack of expressions. But hiding myself in other worlds was only ever a means of protection.
I often gravitated toward stories depicting strong relationships or found families, imagining these people accepting me and having my back the same way they had one another’s. That sense of belonging remains a mysterious type of intimacy I am ashamed to desire so viscerally. Yet, I only allow myself this desire within my stories and dreams. I struggle imagining myself belonging to anything (or anyone) real.
Fictional characters will always outmatch real people. We can know them, trust them, gaze into the depths of their minds and souls — into the human darkness that we often find so impenetrable in one another. Within the boundaries of a narrative, a character’s life will always be tragic and exciting, their flaws sympathetic, their world seen through rose-colored glasses. Perhaps most importantly, fictional characters can never leave us or hurt us (at least, not directly, not personally).
I’ve been able to count on the people in my stories to be there for me no matter what was going on in my life and no matter where I’ve been in the world — hiding out in my parents’ house, crying in my college dorm room, wandering the streets of a foreign country, staring at the blank walls of a quiet apartment in a city where I don’t know anyone. All I’ve ever had to do was open my laptop, or simply close my eyes, and I was with family. I found home in the worlds inside of me.
As long as I have these alternate worlds to fortify me, I am strong enough to survive any amount of pain, loneliness, and grief. The earth will never give way under my feet, because I can always retreat to a fictional universe until it’s safe enough to return to my own.
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“Can we endure this transcending thirst without giving in?” – Rainer Maria Rilke
Living halfway between worlds allows me to endure the reality of this one, but it also creates a dangerous divide. Physically, I am here, trying to function, pass the time, and survive. I work because I need to pay my bills so I have a place to live and food to eat. I’m just going through the motions of being a person until someone calls me out on it. But my emotional center of gravity rests firmly in my dream worlds. That’s where all my feelings and desires are trapped, clawing at something they’ll never be able to grasp. Even so, existing in those spaces — whether through reading, watching TV, or dreaming up fake scenarios in the shower — is always preferable to the emptiness of reality. I’m dealt the coup de grâce when I have to cross back over, return, let go.
Every time a story hooks me, latching onto the part of my soul that’s inaccessible to anything real, I’m overcome quickly and wholly by a longing to disappear into that universe. The longing is so overwhelming at first that I am blinded by pure physical need; choked by the twisting black vines of desire. They wrap around my chest, tighter and tighter, thorns puncturing my lungs, filling my mouth with the metallic taste of blood.
I think, surely this is the world, these are the characters that will finally be my undoing. I can’t — I won’t — survive another day in reality longing so intensely for something I’ll never have.
Today, I am suffocated by longing for a middle-aged ex-con who expresses himself through violence. Creating angry Spotify playlists, getting high most nights in a hot bath, and whacking a solid sheet of ice with a sledgehammer have all done little to quell the (blood)lust, which I disguise as rage, but which is really just the pain and bitterness of unfulfilled desire. I want to be in Oceanside. I want to be with Pope. I want to be part of the Cody family. I know none of it’s real, and I am overwhelmed with humiliation and self-hatred for still wanting it so fucking much. I want so bad I think the arteries in my chest will burst from the strain, and I think the warm gush of blood would be welcome.
Every time I fall for a new world or character, these feelings get to be too much, and I think I won’t survive.
Tragically, I always do. No matter how close my chest feels to exploding with longing, I tell myself it’ll pass. And no matter how wrecked and doomed and empty I feel in those moments of unbearably intense desire, it’s almost worse when, a few days later, the longing starts to fade, as if it were never there at all. As if I were simply delusional for a few weeks, and then, like the sun breaking through the clouds after a storm, I woke up one morning and realized I was back to being a different, more rational person.
The longing never vanishes completely, though. If you offered me a one-way ticket aboard Jack Sparrow’s ship, never to return to this life, I wouldn’t think twice. It just quietens enough that I don’t feel like I’m constantly suffocating, and can go about my daily routine without unconsciously floating off to another dimension. Maybe I even go for a few weeks without writing stories in my head to add to the ever-growing canon of my alternate lives. Then, one day, I’ll tell myself I’m stable enough to start a new show or book, and the awful, consuming cycle will begin all over again.
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“There is an aching void in my heart which I am convinced the world can never fill.” – Emily Dickinson
Although I often feel like I’m drowning in longing, if you asked me what I want (in life, for dinner, to do today) I’d be indifferent. It’s not so much that I want nothing, but that the only things I really long for are beyond the scope of what’s possible for me to have. Why bother wanting things that don’t have a prayer of filling the void?
It’s why Dean Winchester’s immunity to Famine continues to haunt me. After the Horseman rolled into town, heightening everyone’s physical desires, Dean assumed he was simply “well-fed” when he showed no signs of increased hunger. He allowed himself to drink, eat, fight, and have sex anytime, without limitations. He was always sated, so there was no need to binge now, right?
But really, Famine argued, upon close inspection of Dean’s soul, it’s quite the opposite. Those activities are all desperate and futile attempts to fill the gaping emptiness inside.
“That’s one deep, dark nothing you got there, Dean. Can’t fill it, can you? Not with food or drink. Not even with sex! Oh, you can smirk and joke, lie to your brother, lie to yourself, but not to me. I can see inside you, Dean. I can see how broken you are. How defeated. You can’t win and you know it. But you just keep fighting. Just keep going through the motions. You’re not hungry, Dean, because inside, you’re already dead.”
Though I’ve recently enacted a few small self-disciplinary measures, it’s never been my strong suit. I eat what I’m craving. I buy myself what I want. I sleep in, and I rest when my body is tired. I worry I’m a hedonist, but wouldn’t that involve some amount of pleasure? Physical satiety is often a temporary Band-Aid for my own deep, dark nothing, which opens like a chasm between reality and longing.
Like Dean, there is emptiness at my core. Dean’s emptiness is never explicitly explained on the show, but we could surmise that it’s the result of years of trauma, abandonment, and abuse; being forced to fight, hunt, kill, act like a machine, and serve as Daddy’s blunt instrument, all while hiding the (kind, dorky, gentle, bisexual) person he really was; and caring desperately about others, particularly with his instinctive protectiveness over his little brother, but never receiving that same love or loyalty in return.
I could recount all the situations and memories that likely stretched my own emptiness, but mostly I think it’s always been there — a vacuum created by the longings I was born with. I long for something greater, for adventure and romance and belonging, for the type of life found only in fiction. This began before I was conscious of it, and long before I could comprehend what the consequences would be. I’m not sure I’d tell a childhood version of myself to abandon her passions and obsessions, but I might warn her that they’d ruin her for anything real.
Because nothing real will ever measure up to fiction, and nothing material will ever satiate that yawning emptiness.
We can’t know for sure if the Dean of season 5 had similar hidden longings (though I believe he did). What I do know is that I’m not really indifferent. I have wants, dreams, and yearnings — I’ve just relegated them to a distant corner of my soul because I know that nothing in this world can fulfill them.
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“What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real.” – Miranda July
Deeply and wholeheartedly wanting something you know you can’t have may seem foolish. When fiction is on the other end of your longing, you’re inviting unrequited feelings, pain, and a lack of fulfillment. Why not set your sights on something attainable, as my family loves to ask. Come back to reality.
But even as kids, we know that reality is never as perfect as fiction.
In my dreams, fictional universes, and alternate lives, I can be whomever the fuck I want to be. The stakes are always high, the group always welcomes me, and I am in control of the narrative. Each day can be filled with tragedy and euphoria. Even in the mundane moments, I am comfortable, loved, and never alone — vulnerabilities my stubborn independence and pride would never allow me to want in real life.
In my dreams, I can live a thousand lives. Choose multiple paths. I can be myself without fear of judgment or critique, because the other characters in my story are figments of my imagination and I can selfishly insist on my own acceptance and belonging. I’m able to freely express the wants and desires that, here, may never see the light of day.
Opening the Pandora’s box of my want makes my blood boil with longing. It slices down to the quick of my soul, leaving me vulnerable and often horrified by what I find. My bones ache with the knowledge that my want has no solid place to land, but this is also my saving grace: No one has to bear witness to my revolting, excessive heart. I get to know these people and places so intimately, spend hours and hours imagining our adventures together, and even feel loved by these ghosts in my head — but no one ever has to know me.
Similar to the confessional of writing, exposing my wants in my dreams is a masochistic practice. I bring the hurt and humiliation on myself willingly. Why I believe I’m inherently deserving of pain is something I’m still trying to understand. I’ve known the pain of longing my entire life; maybe I’ve just grown attached to it, like a toxic, codependent relationship. Probably it’s the only way I know how to feel — alive.
I also don’t know who I am without my inner worlds. Take away those imaginary adventures, personalities, memories, and dreams, and I’m nothing. I’m back to being the quiet, hardworking, well-behaved, well-liked girl the adults in my community were always so proud of — except now I’m an adult myself, and my greatest (only) accomplishments are internal and invisible. It’s my worst nightmare, really: to be boring and a failure. The opposite of the greatness I chase in my dreams.
So yes, I would prefer to endure the pain of existing partially in a fictional world as a different version of myself rather than endure the pain of existing completely in the real world as my actual self.
Either way there is hurt, but in my dream worlds, the sensations run deeper, the hunger is stronger, and the lure of a better life leaves me breathless. Even as an 8-year-old, I sensed that nothing in this world could offer as much satisfaction as my stories. Tangible fulfillment may be forever out of reach, but attaining something never feels quite as good as desiring it, anyway.
I suppose that leaves me where I’ve always been: caught between trying to make ends meet in reality, and escaping to my dream worlds to be the person I long to be. From the outside, I’m aware it only looks like the former: me carrying out the same routine and the same monotonous work alone inside my apartment every day in silence with no goals or plans for my future. But I still need my inner lives; without their silent push and pull, I would only be me. Normal, singular, just as lost and confused as everyone else.
Could that be all it comes down to in the end? The repulsively human longing to be more?
(Still, where is the line between more and too much? And why do all my longings hurl themselves toward that distant end of the spectrum, past the horizon, where the sun is sinking beneath the waves in a bloody pool of red?)