My favorite place in my hometown is a jagged red rock I have to scramble up to, and when I get to the top I have to brace myself against the wind to keep my balance standing thirty feet above the ground. Then I walk to the edge, lie on my back and hang my head. Looking at the world this way, upside down and larger, somehow, puts things into perspective for me.
“I don’t live in a world that is solely mine. I live in this world but I see it upside down and while everyone worries about things falling from the sky, I’m happy to simply have a column against which I can lean.” -Matteo di Pascale & Alessandra Mazzuccelli, The Hanged Man or The Overturned World
I’ve always loved stories. I have a vivid memory of the first time I played hooky, fooling my mother and my preschool teachers so that I could go home and finish watching The Lion King. I’ve come to realize that stories are how we make sense of the world, and how we find and create meaning within a universe we are hardly beginning to understand.
I guess being born in 1997 puts me near the forefront of “gen z,” and I will say that I believe generational cohorts have as much scientific validity as the Meyers Briggs personality test, but I also agree with something my dad told me when I was in high school. He pointed out that the oldest of each generation sets the tone for that cohort.
I have no idea what those kids are doing on TikTok or what “singing in cursive” could even mean, but I have been so proud to see the increase in community involvement and direct action organized by young people in recent years. I have also felt useful, fulfilled and everything we don’t get out of our minimum wage jobs, from my own participation in social causes I believe in.
Being young has never been a painless thing. But today’s young people have a burden on our shoulders that was prematurely shrugged off by our parents, our grandparents, and before then, never experienced in human memory. I question the feasibility of my starting a family based on political, economic and environmental concerns, and I also receive conflicting messages in many forms that everything is fine, it’s not actually that bad, and just calm down, would you?
It’s exhausting. It’s confusing. It’s overwhelming. The first books I loved were The Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. I loved and envied the ability to transport into a fictional world, while the ordinary world remained suspended in time. Jack and Annie, asshole explorers extraordinaire, used the fictional worlds to work out real world problems, and as I read about their adventures, I learned to do the same.
It’s another way to invert your perspective for a moment. In a story, reality is flipped, time is paused, and you are safe to detach in order to scrutinize your life as it is. You can’t always do that while you’re right in the middle of it, can you?
