The Stories I Told Myself

I remember the last time my mom read me a bedtime story. I was a four-year-old nugget curled next to her on the gray fabric couch, a light illuminated behind us, as she leafed through a book of fables, myths, and legends. The one she chose to read to me was about the Great Flood that populates the backstory of some religions.

What I didn't understand was how so great a power—such as one to wield the very elements themselves—could be used in so drastic a way. To little me, it seemed like a temper tantrum taken to the most extreme degree. "I'm angry, so let's make it rain for forty days and forty nights and drown all the humans out of existence!"

I scrunched my nose in distaste. "That seems stupid," I said, and right away I could tell I said the wrong thing. My mom shut the book in one great snap. And something was lost right then, in that spare comment from the mouth of a babe.

My mom didn't trust me with the stories she cherished—or the ones that were important to her—and so bedtime stories were a thing of the past.

I had to learn how to tell my own stories to quell the shadows right before I fell asleep.

My early memories were populated by Disney movies. I loved the red vivaciousness of Ariel, the calm and soothing blue of Cinderella, and the romantic gold of Belle. While my mom didn't espouse the ideals of happy endings and fairy tale weavings, I think she did something right in that she didn't exactly patrol what I viewed or consumed as a child.

My thoughts danced with princes from other worlds—anyone who might lift me up from the neighborhood where I wasn't allowed to go out and play as I saw fit—and daydreams kept me company more than any other child ever did. When I did dash by other kids at the park, they were too lost in their games with each other for me to play a part.

By nightfall when I was tucked away in bed, I spun the stories I wanted to live. I couldn't imagine fitting into the grown-up world, with all its rules and structures and seeming restraints. If I couldn't fit into the realm I found myself in, then I would make my own.

I wanted to be Snow White, the princess chased on her heels by a jealous queen yet eventually resurrected by a prince's kiss. I wished for an ethereal way of communication between animals, ever the trademark of Disney princess kindred spirits. I longed for friends like the dwarves, who would go against any threat for their dear Snow White's honor and safety.

In those moments before dreams embraced me, I knew a world where I was the center instead of just a wayward star trying to find its brightness.

You would think I left the fairy tales behind as I grew into adolescence. No, they found only more shape and grounding as I discovered new modes for the tales to be enacted. Movies beyond Disney trappings. Musicals that encased the tropes and trials in song. Anime imported from Japan and wrapped up in ever-encapsulating art and color and movement.

When sleep would find me at fifteen, I imagined whole other lands that would stay with me long past the touch of dreams. In many of my musings, I was still the heroine—sometimes the adventurer, sometimes the princess, but always the one searching for catharsis through her own inner world made real.

The world I faced every day was disappointing in its lack of excitement and acknowledgement. In those hours of being in the world outside my sanctuary, I was no one—and I could never be someone, at least from what the magazine covers and the news stories glamourized every day. Outside my bedroom, I was just a girl whose name would probably die like a flame sputtering out. I was one of many, easily misplaced, hardly missed.

It was a summer's day when I, heartbroken over my utter lack of meaning in a sprawling universe, decided to pick up a pen and write in a notebook. It doesn't matter what the story was—let's just say it starred a girl who could see ghosts and who found her own strength through that power—but the very act of putting words to paper gave me a sense of relief that felt similar to how I did right before bed, when I let my mind wander through all the doors of my imagination's labyrinth.

Dreams may have been a haven, but the stories had decided to bleed beyond their nightly confines. Soon I was flirting with the words: storyteller, artist, creator, writer.

It's been about fifteen years since the ideas that fluttered through my brain by night's end needed to have release at all hours of the day. Sometimes, when I'm having trouble sleeping, there will come to me a phrase, a fragment, even a character, and I'll turn to my handy notebook to transcribe the need-to-write-it-down-NOW thought. It can be 9 PM, 12 AM, 3 AM, doesn't matter—because the muse, as I've found, doesn't sleep.

Dreams may be mysterious, but so are ideas. The famous question that plagues every writer—"Where do you get your ideas?"—has long been the inside joke every writer grins a little cheekily at hearing. But, really—where do they come from?

I think I have my answer—somewhere between sunset and stardust, a little farther than the second star to the right, just a skip and a step away from the fairy godmother's door, but not too far into the forest that you get lost and drive wolves mad.

Fairy tales were the beginning of my journey, and I imagine they might be my end too. But that? That sounds like a story worth living.

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