To All The Stories I've Loved Before
I'm no stranger to this-- a couple days ago, I would have been caught just as red handed and blue faced as all the rest when Ginny and Georgia aired on Netflix about a week or so ago.
I've always looked at writing-- at stories as our own magical method of escape, a real enough way to ditch the world around us, to leave what could be a world so full of sadness and problems and thoughts bigger than our little bodies that take up the most amount of space and to create a better one- to visit another world or dimension, even if it was just for a little while. Even if we could only escape into it for a couple hours, because we'd know in the end that we'd have a place when we go back.
It is told that our childhoods are the origin for our love of books and movies. That all those years ago when we used to sit on our tiny toddler beds with those big doe eyes and ear-to-ear smiles while we watch those classic tales unfold - furthermore witnessing them painted out in front of us, dancing across our screens in little pixelated images that could easily enough be considered magic to our innocent eyes. Whether from the illustrations plastered on our children books or whether our parents flipped on the old "magic boxes" to let us discover for ourselves the land of Disney's "Cinderella", or adaption's of it. Those fairytales were told to settle us in, to gather up bunches of feelings for safety and joy and allow us to cozy on into it. Meant to whisk our little minds off to sleep so we could dream of the myths and madness we'd witnessed.
How brilliant is it to know that we are some of the only species capable of tapping into our brain's "dream box" to such a degree, to have a built in ability to stretch our imagination so far and so wide that we are able to manufacture worlds far bigger and brighter than the ones we are boxed into. Even more amazing, the only tools needed to be able to make it possible is to do something that is just instinct; to think. Given a pen or pencil and you can let it all out.
The only difference is that as we grow older and become more aware, we are struck with tiny stinging bolts of lightening that hit over our body-- those bolts of lightening are the realization that those stories were built off of lies, white lies that were made to shield us from the truth of it. Kids aren't supposed to know trauma, nor that most times-- there are no second chances, or do-overs, or miracles to count on. We don't have fairy godmothers to turn our pumpkins into a carriage. Children are supposed to be isolated from those cold hard facts, and perhaps that's why as we grow older-- we find comfort in those trivial aspects. For as we grow older, the words we find around us develop also. Suddenly we are no longer in a world full of fairy's and boys who never grow up, but in a world that embraces the hardships, a world where we now know that pain and sadness are second nature as well. So we begin to resonate to the characters, learn the ability to close our eyes and place our bodies into theirs. To travel through their words, to a place we've never seen before through eyes like theirs. These stories suddenly become the embodiment of all the pain and mess that we now know and crave to escape, they become the answers to all the tiresome questions that we were never warned or eased into when we were younger. They become where we try to claw our way into, fighting tooth and nail to find a structure.
Suddenly we become stuck on TV shows like The Vampire Diaries or movies such as To All The Boys I've Loved Before, that speak of love and horror-- that introduce a whole world of fiction, such as vampires and werewolves and fights of evil and good. We learn superheroes, that suddenly shape away our morals, society's morals and they become lessons. Suddenly we can find inspiration in authors like John Greene, who write stories that can pull apart your heart strings and leave you a blubbering mess of tears and heartache-- but also passion, and the sting because we now know that life cannot always be strung into euphemisms, to be dulled down out of fear of offending anybody and going "too far in". These stories that remind us no longer of the white lies we were given to shield us, but to do the vast opposite. To remind us the beauty of realism. We learn of J.R.R Tolkien who tapped so far in that he designed languages and maps and character's that lit fires in you. Or we can be spooked to our cores from authors such as Shirley Jackson and Stephen King.
Samwise Gamgee said it the best, I'd say, "It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?" These books, and movies take pieces from us and leave bigger ones in return. We learn from them, we grow with them.
It is scientifically proven that there is a connection between tales and the part of our brain that is responsible for our compassion and empathy, that tells that stories that we can relate with-- whether in the form of pixels on a screen or words spilled out on a page; our brain lets out an increased level of "oxytocin" which is hormones that play roles in social bonding and has even been referred to as "the love hormone" as weird as it sounds. However, this proves that our brains react to these stories in ways that will have us spending hours and hours "binge-watching" Greys Anatomy, or replaying Netflix's adaption of Shirley Jackson's, "The Haunting of Hill House" on replay.
As we grow older and develop and learn lessons, the stories around us grow up to match. It is these stories that kept me company in the darkest of times and drew me comfort.
by Lys.