Stories

I spent the first twenty-some years of my life reading nothing but fantasy books. And then I stopped.

Some of my warmest memories are the hours I spent aimlessly wandering a bus stop bookstore between my university town and my hometown. Disjointed years of neither the former nor the latter ever really feeling like a place of my own — four months here, four months there — but knowing that, at least while I was in a room full of stories, I was halfway home.

But the years went by and the stories stayed the same. Reality didn’t. The sameness that had brought me so much comfort no longer made me feel, frankly, anything. I’d read a back-cover blurb of yet another angry orphan boy on yet another journey to save humanity from yet another apocalyptic evil. Who cares, man. I had debates to win, jobs to land, businesses to start. I had no time to read others’ stories while I was trying to write my own.

So I fled from the colourful lands of fantasy books and turned to the concrete tones of real life. Rabbit holes of hot takes; black and white building blocks for a black and white life. This is the right way to think about nutrition. This is the right way to build wealth. This is the right way to think about relationships. My formative years were spent with strange characters in strange worlds, so I made sure to spend my normative years in known realities.

Unsurprisingly, in a life where black is black and white is white and grey doesn’t exist, I ran into a new kind of sameness. Suddenly I was spending all of my time ingesting the same permutations of reality from all of the same permutations of people. I’d find myself reading an essay from yet another thinkboi on yet another tirade to free us all from yet another ~legacy institution~. Familiar echoes of who cares.

For better or for worse, I’m a pretty myopic person. If others live life on the surface where they can glide to and fro, I choose to trap myself in rabbit holes of my own creation. But this was one of those times where even I knew to zoom out for the whole picture. The black and whites of non-fiction reading drew the outline of an incredible life, but fantasy books brought my life colour. If the former taught me what to do, then the latter taught me to think about why I do it. Instead of learning from what has been, it’s learning from what could be.

It’s the classic mark of a midwit to dismiss fantasy books as frivolous. Of course they don’t have tangible lessons. Their teachings aren’t outlined in neat and tidy end-of-chapter takeaways — they’re in the accidental epiphanies you have when living someone else’s life. Living for a week as Ivan Ilyach taught me more about vanity purchases than any book on personal finance; a few months as Musashi instilled lessons on discipline far more deeply than Jocko Willink’s yelling could; a thousand pages as Kvothe taught me more about stoking a reputation than any Twitter cancellation has; and three books as Darrow reminded me how fragile friendships can be, particularly in the middle of a yearlong hiatus from many of my own.

And therein lies the magic of losing yourself in a story. When you commit to living in someone else’s world for a week, a month, or years — I’m looking at you, Wheel Of Time — you get to feel every choice, every triumph, every failure, every hindsight, and every foresight as though it was your own. You get to sit with a decision from beginning to end. What would my life be like if I only spent money on impressing other people? What would my life be like if I dedicated the entirety of my existence on becoming the greatest ever martial artist? And then, at the end of it all, am I happy with what I’ve wrought? Readers live a thousand lives, realists live just one.

Fantasy, as a genre, has a childish reputation. Rightfully so. It’s been fifty years since Tolkien, and authors still somehow believe that they can be the one to successfully remix the beats of his stories. But when it hits, it hits. We’re a year into a quarantine that has taken away many of the lessons that you stumble across just by living a normal life. So in the absence of that, there’s nothing like spending some time living as someone else.  

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