Worlds

and how we travel between them

We live in several worlds at once. 

I’m working on the first in a series of fantasy novels. I’ve been working on it for a long time, longer than I ever anticipated. When you start something big, like writing a book or climbing a mountain, you often see the peak lingering up ahead, and you can see your feet below you on the ground. 

What’s between, you think, will be easy. Wrong. What’s between is unknown. You move toward the peak only to find that there are gaps you must jump, walls you must climb and boulders around which you must navigate. 

In 2014, before I began writing this novel, I learned something integral in my personal life. What’s easy is not always good; what’s hard is rarely bad. 

Writing a fantasy series is not only writing. Fantasy requires more structure, worldbuilding, theory, history, character development and grit than I ever expected. How many times has my editor come to me after a finished draft and told me to start over? 

I won’t tell you the number of times, but it isn’t just once or twice. 

Meanwhile, I go to work. I maintain a semblance of a social life. I clean my house and care for my dogs and travel. 

We live in several worlds at once. Public ones and private ones, we fight for things and we turn things over and over again in our minds and we display those things we most want to share while hiding the ones we most want to conceal. 

Our worlds exist largely in ideas which oscillate constantly. Your world at school is different from your world at home is different from your world at work. Your mind compartmentalizes school, home and work, and organizes thoughts and ideas to change your behavior according to cues. 

When you are in public, you take on a different shape than when you are in private. 

For me, learning how to be in public was difficult and noteworthy. I spent a lot of time avoiding it, feeling terrified of it, commenting on how to do it without having actually done it myself. I hid in church, or I hid behind rules, needing to be seen a certain way and requiring others to be nearly perfect before I could let them in. 

How exhausting. As you can probably imagine, after holding myself in such a straight line for so long, I eventually busted out. From behind a bartop. Where I finally began to see the shape of things and gained some perspective. 

I’ve written about how I did this, and I continue to because I don’t think I’m alone. It’s hard, after years of mental conditioning, to let yourself relax. 

There’s a scene from a movie called The Family Stone in which Luke Wilson’s character tells Sarah Jessica Parker’s character to relax. 

“You have a freak flag,” he tells her, “you just don’t fly it.”

Perplexed, I watched as her character spends the rest of the movie relaxing. It’s not pretty or glamorous. It’s messy, awkward and even a little cringey. 

You have a freak flag… what is it? For me, it’s a never-ending love of imagination. I am obsessed with the worlds people create, both in the fantasy/science fiction realm and in real life. I see the same process used in different ways.

In the end, I think we’re all world builders. I think we construct our worlds, both consciously and un-, based on what we want to be true. 

When I was a teenager, I wanted everything my family and my community believed to be true. That was safe. That was comfortable and easy to maintain. There was a set list of rules and guidelines, and whether it made sense to me or not, it needed to dictate how I made decisions and moved through life. 

Despite my adherence to a specific set of rules, the outside world made its way in with questions and concerns, as it does, and eventually I could no longer ignore them. And then, my world changed. It grew bigger. 

I began flying my freak flag, so to speak. Learning about other religions and about space somewhat did it for me. The systems contained therein, and the diversity of them, sent me to a new world in my mind. One where anything is possible, and in which it is essential to fall in love with the mystery of it all. 

Here we live, on this small planet, letting this existence play out in all its violence, evolution and intense discovery. We live in several worlds at once, and this is no small thing. The wonder that accompanies this fact, when I finally embraced it, fueled my imagination, which drives most of what I do. 

I write this column on a weekly basis because I marvel at the way people fly—or hide—their respective freak flags. I stand tableside, observing the way people behave in public and how this displays and reflects their private lives. 

Some observations reflect the aforementioned mystery, and some offer a pretty clear picture of the worlds through which they move. In either case, wonder abounds. Glimpses of other worlds can be seen through the cracks, and it becomes increasingly important for me to write this letter to you. 

I hope you find wonder this week. I hope you let the mystery be just what it is. Most importantly, I hope you let your freak flag fly.