A Journey Through the Fantasy of My Mind

When I was a child, I was immensely bored with the banalities life had to offer.

Not to betray my superiority complex, but my brain functions differently than the typical wavelength of time and space. Minutes crawl from the perspective of my brain, which works about five times the speed of the average brain, I’ve estimated.

That doesn’t mean I’m five times as smart as the average person. That just means, if I’m forced to pay attention to something for ten minutes, nearly an hour of time has gone by in my head once the minutes have completed themselves. If I’m not intensely focused, I’ll miss a conversation because the person addressing me is speaking too slowly. By the time a week has passed, I’ve gone through a lifetime of change.

I often feel as if I’m trapped in a Narnian cycle. The Chronicles of Narnia is an allegorical fantasy conceived by C. S. Lewis about a group of children who teleport to the alternate world of Narnia through a wardrobe, or through magic, and no matter how much time they spend in Narnia, no time has passed by the time they return in person. Narnian time does not work parallel to Earth’s space time continuum. A year on Earth may be thousands of years in Narnia. A week on Earth may be seventy in Narnia. I feel as if my mind is in Narnia and my body is trapped on earth.

For as long as I remember, I’ve tried to escape the earth by writing stories. The worlds in my stories didn’t look too different from earth. Humans were born and had blood and oxygen pumping through their brains. They ate and defecated and died and cried and laughed and loved. But they were all under my control. I could create a character who perfectly replicated me, except his life was perfect and people adored him, or maybe his life was filled with physical turmoil to justify the emotional turmoil I felt in my head.

I was a very troubled child who took everything personally. Heaven forbid one of my friends have other friends because I’d be consumed with jealousy and insecurity that my friend would now prefer her other friends to me. I can remember going into deep depressive episodes as early as nine years old, because my friends would choose to spend time with other friends over me. When I grew older, my emotions developed into romances. I would spend years pining after a crush I’d only known for a week and would never see again. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, panicking that my partners were flirting with other people.

As it was, my partners were flirting with other people, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

I want to be a rockstar. That’s not true. I want to be a doctor, or a counselor, of sorts, where I’m paid to mansplain to newly diagnosed individuals their genetic disorders and where they can find treatment. I love people. I’m fascinated by the human form and the human mind and the human soul.

I want to finish college and then move across the country to complete graduate school and get either a master’s or PhD. While I study higher education, I’ll intern at the firms where I plan to work, until I eventually reach achieve the title I want. After working at this firm for a few years, I’ll transfer to a different career, where I’d need to take a fitness test and a truth detector test before I am initiated into this particular bureau. Then I’d pursue the rest of my dream, which is to have greater control over the injustice in the world.

I’m often annoyed when people in my life ask me if I want to switch my major. It’s downright patronizing, as if they believe my current suicidality and detestation for school is because I don’t like my major and I’m not pursuing my dream. As if I haven’t been mentally ill and self-destructive all my life. I really only started to notice it by seventeen years old when my illness spiraled into wanting my life to be over.

I’m firmly grounded in reality, but the more mentally ill I get, the more I have time synchronizing all the finer aspects of my brain so I can fashion into words who I am.

Who am I?

I know who I am.

I’m someone who enjoys the things I do with a passion. Unless the depression cannibalizes my special interests.

I’m someone who lives for others because it’s easier than to live for myself. I’ve always been this way.

I’m someone who has grown up being taught that God wants me to live for Him and for others and not for myself. I’ve been told to deny myself, take up my cross, and follow Him. I don’t know how to live for myself. I couldn’t live for myself if I tried.

I don’t realize I’ve been hurt until hours or months or years later. And by the time I do, the damage takes longer to repair than it did to create the damage.

I’m someone who chooses logic over emotions. Yet my logic is dictated by my irrational, emotional thoughts.

I’m someone who has grown up rooting for the villains and relating to monsters. Sometimes it scares me, but my fear of the monster inside me fascinates me.

When I was sixteen, I was obsessed with the fact that I might be a teratophile. A teratophile is someone attracted to monsters and deformities.

When I was eleven, I was obsessed with the idea that I might be autistic. Now I think I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Likely both, and maybe ADHD. Add depression and anxiety to that, and you’ve basically created the chemical formula that encompasses my mind. I probably won’t pursue any diagnoses because they all cost money and psychiatrists aren’t always the most reliable or consistent. If I walked into a psychiatrist’s office asking to get diagnosed with OCD, ADHD, and autism, I’d probably walk out with even more diagnoses in the span of five minutes. Because the psychiatrist would look at all my symptoms from the perspective of, “He probably has OCD.” Sunk-cost fallacy. I could be using that word wrong.

When I attended my first and only real rock concert, I coveted the position of Awsten Knight on stage. I wanted to be him, bounding and dancing and screaming my guts out onstage, and having the audience scream my lyrics back to me.

I don’t know how musicians gain the notoriety they do. I’ve been composing songs all my life, the earliest being a strange piece called “Let’s Be Serious” that I composed acapella on my 2013 iPad with my sister. And it stuck so permanently that both of us can sing the song by heart over a decade later.

I’ve been publishing songs since 2022, and I’ve been uploading them to Spotify since April of 2024. I attend open mic nights and perform my songs with either my or a borrowed acoustic guitar. I’ll be getting an electric guitar and amplifier soon.

I want to perform for a large audience and be discovered by an agent like an old school pop singer.

I don’t really want fame. I want to be heard.

I think that’s what all celebrities wanted from the beginning.

My grandfather knows I’m suicidal, and he has a lot of misunderstood ideas about how to fix me. He thinks I should learn how to control my own destiny, however that’s supposed to work. I can’t even control my own grades in uni. I can’t control how I spend my time. Obviously, I can and I should and I need to take responsibility for my own actions, but my renegade mind is so hard to control; it’s so exhausting to manage and I’m already so tired all the time.

He pointed out that I create a lot of things. Name roughly any artistic endeavor and I’ve done it. Sewing, drawing, painting, writing, photographing, filming, singing, composing. And my grandfather told me, “I don’t think a depressed person could do that.”

Hahahahahaha. You make me laugh, Saba, you really do.

All the best artists are people tormented by depression, anxiety, delusions of grandeur, paranoia, lack of motivation, etc.

To be clear, I’m not trying to glorify any of these horrible conditions that I wish nobody had, and I’m not saying one needs to be plagued by any of them in order to be a good artist. I’m just saying that pain creates art.

That tends to be something either a non-mentally ill person, or a veteran of mental illness, says. I’d rather create art without pain. But what can you do? I wish I could disappear.

I want to be discovered by an agent or invited to tour onstage and perform my music. I want to hear my songs on the radio and watch people analyze my lyrics on social media and be invited to answer questions about my inspiration for my songs.

I have childlike fantasies and delusions of grandeur. I crave attention just to feel normal.

I’m sure this is what a normal person thinks like, isn’t it?

I’m going to go home to compose a song. I have lyrics written down, the first song for my upcoming eleventh album. I’ll shave my hair and dye it, and while I wait for my hair to absorb the dye, I’ll record my song on the guitar.

I’ll publish it and then lip sync to it on Instagram, and then I’ll lip sync my other songs on Instagram in order to boost my music.

Maybe I can even make a small payment to boost my music.

I wonder how musicians go viral or get famous? I’m interested in a couple of artists my age—namely, Um Jennifer? and Sofia Isella. Sofia Isella got to tour Europe and open for a Tom Odell concert. She got to meet Taylor Swift.

Reading this, I feel selfish and envious of other people’s lives, and I wonder, shouldn’t I learn to be more content with my own life? Wouldn’t I be happier?

My ex-boyfriend says I should learn how to impress myself instead of other people. That’s impossible. My standards for everyone else are in hell, in the nether, in the Netherlands, if you will (inside joke), but for myself they’re sky-high. You might even say they’re in Norway.

I may be a bit of a Europhile.

That’s not entirely true. I impress myself frequently and randomly, like when I identified and picked up a gopher snake in the wild. I was so proud of myself for picking it up without fear, and my jaw dropped, as if I was watching my tiny lake-soaked self picking up this snake that’s as long as I am tall.

I’ll impress myself with songs I write. And then I’ll listen to them on repeat.

It wears off after a few days. Maybe that’s longer than normal. I don’t think most people spend more than ten minutes being amused and impressed by something.

Just as time seems to crawl for me, so do my emotions. Except, what should be minor reactions to insignificant events balloon into meltdowns that last for days on end.

One time I sobbed because my sister took a shower before me. I wanted to take a shower first so that I could go to bed early so that I would fall asleep before she did, so I wouldn’t hear her cracking her knuckles from the bunk above mine.

OCD or autism, which is it? Or both?

Are labels overrated? I love labeling and organizing things. I’ll create my own terms for patterns I notice in order to bring more sense to the world through my eyes.

I often feel like an alien living in a world that doesn’t make sense to me. Everyone around me seems to have instinct when it comes to normal things like independence, communication, processing, will to live, sex. The way their human body works. How to walk normally. I can’t even walk normally. I supronate. That means I favor the outer edges of my feet.

I have this recurring fantasy of being a decently known rock singer and playing at a rock festival, where I meet a cute girl who performs before me, and I write a song about her, and I play it publicly at the next festival we both attend. And she’s touched by the time and effort I put into thinking about her, and we get to know each other, and it turns out we have a lot in common, and we end up dating.

I know better. I know that celebrity relationships are short-lived and performative.

I have another dream to disappear from society and live in a cabin in Colorado, where I don’t have to interact with anyone ever again except through niche forums on the internet, and I’m never disappointed by anyone around me, and I’m never brought to shame in a society I have to break myself in order to fit into.

I visited my great uncle this week, and he revels in being not-like-other-guys. “School makes you normal. It takes away you’re uniqueness. I like being unique. Who wants to be normal?” Just ask us if we’ve ever seen you without your stupid hat, already.

Uniqueness is isolating. The best I can become is a character that people know and celebrate, but even that’s heartbreakingly isolating in its own way.

I’ve been told by multiple people who’ve rejected me or broken up with me that I’m a character, I’m a special person, people are drawn to me. I hate it so much. I’m an avatar that people see themselves in. I’m a conduit of emotional validation. I’m a figment of “I see myself in you.” I just want to be a real human being who can talk and walk and breathe and interact with the world like a normal human being. I want a normal life. I want connection. I want independence and codependence.