I dreamt of flying away to Neverland - A story on how escapism became survival

I was a lonely child. A child who felt lost.

So, when the 1988 Peter Pan animation was played in front of me, suddenly, a world where I felt entirely alone turned vibrant and hopeful. I had something to wish for, something to believe in... and that gave me purpose.

I was special. And every time the pain cut me, I knew that I'd find solace in looking at the stars. I believed that Peter Pan would come and save me, that I'd feel safe in Neverland.

I could survive through my experiences at the time because I knew that every night would be an opportunity, a possibility to fly away.

But eventually the wishing turned to begging, sobbing at the night sky.

'Why wouldn't Peter Pan come for me?' I'd cry, wondering if what the bullies had told me was true. That I took up too much space.

That I wasn't enough.

The pain I felt turned inward. Depression began to hit me.

I see now that my dependence on the fairytale of Peter Pan was a result of a variation of traumas and painful experiences.

At age nine, as an example, I fractured my femur bone and nearly died, and then a little older, I was bullied, alongside my grandmother passing away from cancer.

There were also other circumstances which made my childhood more difficult. I was an undiagnosed autistic girl.

I will always remember when I asked my mother, "Why am I different?". I don't think she understood how important that question was to me, how much I yearned for an answer.

She said, "You're not different."

But I felt like I was. And I knew she had lied. Why had she lied to me?

I just wanted someone to help me see that I was never too much, I was imperfect, but beautifully so.

The bullying intensified, and I moved schools, hoping for a fresh start. But the thing about Captain Hook is that he was persistent in the fairytale of Peter Pan, and so, even despite a fresh start, the depression returned.

During my GSCE's, I hit rock bottom. At the age of 15, I was taken to London and admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

I don't blame the tree that is my pain, but the roots underneath the soil. It wasn't a question about telling that little girl to grow up. But to understand why she felt the need to seek escape in the first place.

So often, we look at the surface level of the symptoms and remove them only to find that there are more growing deep below. If we focused on the why first, we would understand that I was hanging onto hope. And when that childhood fantasy became reality, that hope died.

Now, I'm not saying we should let children rely on fairy tales as a way to cope, but we do need to consider the causes. If the teachers in my school had stopped the bullying early enough, maybe the tree wouldn't have grown.

Years later, I was officially diagnosed with autism, but the shocking thing is, I was also diagnosed as a child; they just never continued the assessment, and it was forgotten about, swept aside. For a short while, I was even on the SEN register at my school, a register of children with special educational needs who needed support, but then, with funding cuts... they took me off the register.

This story still matters to me. It is a story of how pain creates survival and how we as humans hold onto whatever hope we can find in darkness. We believe in things outside ourselves.

I realise now that my current interest in spirituality is another example of how this fascination with there being more beyond this world has followed me. And I recognise that in society, even things like religion and at its worst extreme views can be linked to believing as a way to cope.

I would like to end this by mentioning how escapism is becoming more and more deeply rooted in our modern world, with character roleplaying sites on the rise. The issue is not the sites themselves. We should be looking at the why, the reason why so many people are turning towards believing in these stories wholeheartedly.

In a fairytale, the villain is often recognised and fought with swords, but the reality is sometimes the villain is beneath the surface.