Pretend As A Method Of Coping

[Ava Jarvis]

Totally and please have a safe morning / day. ;)

I'm mostly posing these questions in the typical fashio...

Thanks too. :hug:

 

[The Albatross]

"...Father's Day it'll get worse. Thanksgiving will disembowel me, an Christmas feels like tactical nuke strikes" Anticipatory stress and fortune telling are not your friend Ava... you have a month or so to Father's day and several to thanksgiving. What strategies and challenges can you to make this year different than your previous ones?

Personally it isn't a surprise that you set yourself off when you indulged in this type of thinking style.

 

[Bigray79]

:hug:

It was a bad day. It's gonna be a streak of bad days. I never recover from being triggered on...

I can relate to how your feel I call them "dates" my mum got cancer when i was 14 and passed away when 17 it's been 20 years this year.
Each and every date i cry. I try be strong but have come to realize at times it feels like i got the call she died it's ok to break down crying or just sit and think. Try not put expectations on how you'll be if need stay in bed and process at own speed. My heart goes out to you. I find turning up family events really late so half people left doesn't seem so full on.

 

[Whyteferret]

Heh. I have tried sleeping through the holidays but it doesn't work.

And even though I have great.....

Yeah. That's one of the really bad things about us isolating so much.
I wish we could meet in real life a few times before the holidays.
We could Skype or Face time. Not the same as being with someone right there but it might help some of the loneliness. Is there a way to do a group Skype? It might help others during the holidays as well

Anyway, just rambling on with stupid ideas.

 

[Ava Jarvis]

Yeah. That's one of the really bad things about us isolating so much.
I wish we could meet in rea...

Not stupid idea at all. It is totally possible to do group chats in Skype.

 

[Changing4Best]

I have a creative imagination, so I would just pretend in my mind, without the help of any game. I am an artist, so I guess my creativity is such that I don't need any other creation to pretend with but life itself. Does that make any sense?

 

[Deleted member 29920]

It actually helps short term, sometimes I pretend I'm Link from the Zelda games on a quest :p

 

[Kintsugi]

I think "playing pretend" can be a form of escapism and avoidance, for sure, but I think more often for me it has been a form of processing.

I stopped "playing pretend" when I was about twelve in favor of writing instead. It seemed like an equal alternative that would have the socially acceptable staying power I needed to continue using "playing pretend" as a coping mechanism.

I have learned a lot about myself through the earlier stories I told. I wrote so perpetually when I was between 12 and 16 that I have several vast universes to look back on, hundreds upon hundreds of pages of my adolescent mind both distorted and clarified through the lens of the fantastic and the creative.

All of my characters always had absent fathers and deeply flawed mothers. They all played with the murkiness of good and evil. They always had villains who were misguided heroes, people who fell into terrible circumstance before becoming cruel and sadistic people. There was usually an older male mentor somewhere to guide my protagonist.

These themes have led me to understand what I was working through at the time better. I didn't have many trusted peers or adults in my life, so when I had a problem, I would write about meeting with all of my favorite characters in a room, and "we" would talk out the problems I was having.

Many of my characters are still close to my heart, the unfinished ones still looking for their perfect narrative arc (not least of all, my dear Simon, who has become my alias). I always used my story telling to soothe my insomnia, ever since I was about seven, and I still do. I lay in bed and illustrate the details of my character. I play with setting. I imagine vignettes, just as I would write them on paper, trying out different plots and character groupings. It helps me to escape the thoughts that keep me awake, but it also helps me process what I've dealt with in my day, week, year--injecting the turmoil in my head somewhere I can control and manipulate it into something productive.

I find it supremely comforting, and I've devoted my life to taking such "escapism" and turning it into Serious Business. Junot Diaz talks about how he began writing to offer young men who were like him (nerdy Dominican-Americans) a reflection in media, something that they could look to outside of themselves and say, Yes, that's me too. I have always hoped, ever since I began writing, that I could offer someone else the same comfort I received from seeing characters like me in books and movies. I want a troubled kid to read what I write and be touched and enlivened by my work, the way I have been touched an enlivened by the work of others.

I still feel massively helped in my journey by fantastical media, especially children's media. The first time I watched Rise of the Guardians, I was 22 and at my parents' house for a month. All of my symptoms were kicking hard. I was, after all, back at their house for the first time in years, and I was perpetually reminded of everything that made me feel I may never visit again, terrified every moment my brother would come. I watched Rise of the Guardians something like four times in three days. I kept repeating Jack Frost's line again and again, and I sometimes still do: "Don't be scared. Let's have some fun instead."

 

[Ronin]

I think "playing pretend" can be a form of escapism and avoidance, for sure, but I think more often for me it has been a form of processing.

This.

Also being actually in touch with feelings. I can process without emotion just fine, but apparently imagination & creativity don't work the same way without emotions, as with them.