His response? "I think this is just your coping mechanism from trauma." I haven't stopped thinking about it since because it has opened my eyes. Ever since I was a young girl, probably around six or seven, I've been escaping into my own mind to seek a soothing self-expression, comfort, love, and a sense of understanding: both of myself and the world around me. For a long time, that felt like a positive thing. I was a creative, expressive child. I drew, I painted, I danced constantly, creating a world that felt completely natural. I didn't see any of it as a problem. It was just who I was. What I didn't fully understand back then was the extent of what I was actually doing. There's a term for it: maladaptive daydreaming. And for me, it was as natural as breathing. The zoning out and stepping into a world that was fair, ugly yet beautiful, colourful and expressive. A world that **understood** me. Because the real world was often filled with people who didn't (to say the least, abusive family members and later on abusive relationships), and that caused me a great deal of trauma throughout my childhood, teenage years, and early twenties. That creativity became my escape from everything I wasn’t ready to face yet. Though my late teens were marked by drug abuse and self-harm, art was always the thing I returned to. It was my comfort, my language, my way of expressing what I had no other words for. And unlike self-destruction, it gave something back. The artists who inspired me most were ones who understood pain and transformed it into some beautiful pieces that I also longed to create. Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tracey Emin. People who looked at the darkest parts of human experience and made something extraordinary out of them. That moved me deeply back then and it It still does now. This inner world has been with me every single day for as long as I can remember. I rarely feel completely grounded or at ease in this reality, maybe for a year or two here and there, but outside of that, I've mostly been living inside my head, trying to make something out of whatever I find there. I was fired from nearly every conventional job I held. Waitressing, office work in marketing, bar work. I just couldn't make peace with the idea that this is what I was going to do for the rest of my human life. So I used my creativity and whatever resilience I had to build something of my own: my own art business (although I rarely sold anything), photographing for companies, making things by hand, selling vintage clothes and now, art direction. A world of my own, where creativity and passion were the whole point. And as beautiful as that is, it comes with pain. As an adult with real responsibilities like bills, food, taxes, family, relationships, all the things that hold a life together, the gap between my inner world and the one I actually have to navigate becomes genuinely hard to manage. Even now, I find myself constantly drifting toward fantasies: where my art could take me, what my life could look like, who I could become, instead of focusing on the steps I actually need to take to get there. The fact that I work from home, alone, without a partner or children, only makes it worse at times. The daydreaming soothes me and gives me purpose. It's only recently that I've allowed myself to really look at this honestly. The escape, the fantasy, the retreating into my own mind: it is a coping mechanism. It's how I gave myself the comfort, understanding, and grace that I simply wasn't given when I was young. And acknowledging that has been... a lot. I genuinely believe that a vivid imagination is a beautiful thing. I love meeting people who think that way, who build strange worlds in their minds, who create. It gives me a real sense of belonging, because it confirms that there might be something beyond what's right in front of us. What complicates it is that that's not all life is. Bills exist. Responsibilities exist. And the longer we use fantasy as a place to hide from that reality rather than a place to create within it, the harder things become. There's a specific kind of pain and dissapointment that comes with maladaptive daydreaming that doesn't get talked about enough. When you finally surface from your inner world and come back to real life, real people, the ordinary and often mundane realit, none of it measures up to what you've built in your head. And that fucking hurts. And what's worse, you start creating expectations of people based on versions of them that only exist in your mind. Raise a hand if you’ve ever put on a rose coloured lenses when it comes to your relationships. I have, and it was heartbreaking because when they inevitably show you who they really are, the disappointment is real, even though it was you who created the scenario in the first place. That's not their failure. It's the projection. I struggle with expecting people to behave the way they would in my fantasy world. I know that. It's a selfish thing which I’ve been working on, especially to do with the matters of the heart. It's a kind of self-inflicted pain and while I have nothing but compassion for anyone who escapes this way, because they must have had good reason to, I also know that at some point we have to choose to come back. Especially when real life catches up to us. The other thing maladaptive daydreaming does is make you feel profoundly alienated. Even surrounded by people you love, when they can't quite follow where your mind goes, it creates a loneliness that's hard to explain. That's why I think it matters so much to find even just a few people who are genuinely curious about your inner world, people who want to explore it with you, maybe even create something alongside you. Because we're not alone in this, even when it feels that way. But I'll be honest with myself, and with you: you can never truly escape life's pain or its responsibilities by escaping into fantasy. The pain of everyday life will catch up. The imagination is a gift: one of the most powerful ones we have, especially in art, in creation, in expression. But it won't pay the bills, repair the relationships, or solve the problems quietly building in the background. The longer we escape, the deeper the hole gets. And one day it becomes very hard to climb out. I'm learning that. Slowly, but surely.