Learning to be more present
My love for nature
Healing from escapism
The past, the present and the future
My history of zoning out
Being a chronic maladaptive daydreamer has been both a comfort and a waste of my life. I’ve been doing it since 14 and now at 24, out of toxicity, I’m desiring to live in the present. It’s not as easy as it sounds, with 10 years of dissociative practice, after about an hour of focus, my default is dissociating. It takes me to a different place, a place I can choose what happens. My imaginings often reflect key ideas in my life I am avoid thinking of consciously.
However, I’m beginning to connect with this moment, how I feel and what makes me happy. Not supplementing the day with maladaptive daydreaming is a new season I’m looking forward to.
My body isn’t used to being present. Neurobiology has shown that new things makes us uncomfortable. Since we are alive, and our body seeks staying alive, it will credit the past and prefer repetition. But I’m at a place now where it helps me to remember that it is supposed to feel different if I am doing something new. I’m more content with where I am, and the idea that I am secure in my new rented place makes me feel more at ease. I think I also need to remember that I can make things work, and my present is something I am capable of creating.
Being present didn’t feel safe for a long time, and daydreaming was, adaptive for me. Now that I am happy, and in emotional safety, I find it maladaptive. It prevents me from making my life beautiful and now it no longer has to protect me. I accept what it did for me. I do not shame myself for adapting for this purpose and I think being in touch with the why behind maladaptive behaviours is the biggest help. De-shaming these things, as reasonable strategies for what life dealt me, has been a relief. Things serve a purpose, but now I have a new purpose, thriving not escaping. I want to live in this life.
Trying something new
Going to the cinema for the first time by myself was so good. I got a hot chocolate and made my way to the screen and felt so refreshed after. I released something that night. Hamnet really moved me and brought up many sad events on my mind. Crying in a room with strangers is somehow normal in the cinema, which I love, as it reminds me how vulnerability can exist in the public sphere.
It was such a captivating movie, I felt connected to each character, Agnes the most. Her untamed fierce existence was a burning emblem of femininity, which is raw, true and deeply connected to the natural world. I feel like nature is the only antidote to a city and technological society, not that I don’t appreciate those things, but as humans, we need the natural world. I feel like I forget that I am a mammal, I am born from the earth.
That’s why I love the scene in Hamnet when Agnes gives birth in nature, by a tree and I really felt like she was not alone. There is a sense of being that nature has, in a very unapologetic way, existing because it can. It is very defiant in an age of having to explain why people deserve to exist freely. It reminds me that people have decided that they own land – in some counties, you own your house but not the land it is on. No one owns land. Land is a gift, in which we are all home. The land doesn’t discriminate.
It’s odd that the cinema is helping me connect to nature. I think that being isolated requires a bridge back to reality.
I’m going to the cinema again soon, to have two and a half hours of uninterrupted presence, of losing myself in another’s story and of feeling on the cusp of living. It takes the control out of the stories I typically have in daydreaming.
Sometimes I feel so disconnected from nature. I smelt a honey suckle tree for the first time as a child on the way to school as it was hanging down a wall. I remember being struck by how sweet and perfect it smelt. It shocked me because I had an association with scent and perfume, more than scent and nature. It strikes me that so much we credit humans for, is nature. These beautiful things exist, yet we try and own their existence those they exist adjacent to us. So many herbal remedies exist, and vitamins are extracted from them but they seem to have lost their respect.
I remember when I had a picture saved on Pinterest of a twinkling sea, as if little shards of starlight were emanating from the ocean. When I went to Ecuador, I actually saw that same scene. It was exactly like the picture, which I didn’t realise could experience into real life.
A disconnect in order to connect
I realised post-depression that I actually needed photographs to get me to connect with reality. For so long I was looking at other people’s lives. But when I looked at beautiful photos it reminded me that beauty exists. Beauty exists in moments, in still moments that can be captured. But those moments can also be experienced. I began to translate my pause, looking at a photo, when I would venture out of the house, and experientially I realised that beauty, and special pictures are not from a camera but from real life. I took control of the camera that is my eyes, deciding that the scenes which are breathtaking, came to be so that I could see them.
When I catch myself in moments of consciousness I try and look around, and look at the beauty I see, or a nice smell or something to remind me that this world has beauty. I have beauty inside me too. Last night, I noticed a full moon. Behind jagged tree branches, the cold light of the moon, on a dark navy background felt ethereal. And I realised that the associations of darkness and night used in films and books, of evil and danger, are not themes I have to associate the night sky with. In fact, the full moon is incredibly symbolic for women. The moon in general, having a 28-day cycle matches the female hormonal cycle. As opposed to the 24-hour cycle of the sun. this is why women are represented by the moon. You can rewrite the cultural symbols in your mind, and choose what nature means in your eyes.
I am close with nature and trying to connect more to it. It’s natural prowess and self-esteem makes me feel like life makes a little bit more sense. Nature grows, nature has purpose. I forget I am nature sometimes. I feel like I am go back and forth between the things I know to be healthy and connecting and those which I have done for most of my life.