I had agreed with my friend (click here to remember what I said..) Besides, it seemed self-centered to immerse oneself in make-believe worlds when time could be spent on finding practical solutions to real-world problems, or rather than even painting a problem through a fictional scenario, such as if one wanted to capture the dreaded reality of homelessness, why create characters living out the situation instead of finding real life subjects to explain their feelings, and day-to-day life experience?. While I took such an approach wayyy too far, I was harboring dread at living in a mundane, practical world, attempting to face life as it “was” rather than how I’d like it to be, trying to be as objective as possible, all while feeling helpless. I was being conditioned to, and choosing, to prefer what I thought at the time was pure rationale, doubting everything, above all myself, out of fear of being delusional (the irony, right?), and distancing myself from even wanting to tell or hear fictional stories; although like my friend, that separation from what I truly wanted.. felt so real. Expressions alluding to the power of story all sounded cliche to me, unless it was a “real” one, why not just exchange ideas, and cold, hard objective facts? Why don’t we even take it further and be literal to exclude any use of the metaphor, and when discussing stories, why not prefer non-fiction, real human stories versus fictional ones?

Engaging in imagination was like an escape and denial of reality.

Yet I was being called to investigate, examine, explore characters and fictional element– an invitation summoning me from deep within, through an impulse as if it had a life of its own. How could I understand the full-extent of reality by denouncing the feelings within me that are just as real though concealed (albeit not in this physical reality)? At first it felt silly to create dialogue between my characters, as it just felt like only me talking, merely using my characters as puppets to get a point across that I could easily instead just say outright “THIS IS HOW I FEEL OR VIEW A SITUATION, AND I DON’T NEED TO USE A FICTIONAL CHARACTER TO CONVEY THIS”. It just felt plain silly to ascribe a separate life to characters as if they were real, despite it being said by many that fiction expresses truths of life experiences that plain facts cannot–yet this still didn’t make sense to me.

I found out that with time, and many challenging attempts at writing the following Teahouse sci-fi “myth” that imagination can lead one to discover there being much more to reality than we think and that characters are more like self-inspectors, helping us investigate our complex, buried emotions and thoughts, acting out in scenarios that can shed light on angles in our own lives or that of others we may not have considered before, which in turn provide perspective on how to lead our lives more meaningfully. The fact that those characters stem from the single mind of a writer, prove that they still have basis in physical reality for they emanate from the mind of someone who “exists” or has at some point “existed”, demonstrating some part of what constitutes as “human nature/human thought”–or at least proof of what came out of the mind of one person within the collective.

By reimagining my own life stories and incorporating fantastical elements as I reframed them, I better understood the link between my inner and outer world, in turn who I am by integrating what I felt inside with the external circumstances of reality, which by extension helped me fulfill mission of the Teahouse for myself which is to examine who we are. Though the common scientific community’s narrative for the past few centuries is that we are mere biological organisms conditioned by sociological factors, there have been many thinkers, particularly Carl Jung, who were astounded by a strange phenomena called the psyche–one’s inner world in which there are characters, dreams, and stories brimming with life that can explain more about a person than factual, biographical accounts and even represent patterns in the collective mind.

What if we were to blend the imaginary, inner forces within us that are packed with so much feeling, with an external, objective reality to discover what’s real for ourselves, and in turn answer who we are? It may not be a conventionally scientific, philosophical, or ontological approach in terms of tackling the notion of existence, but still establishes greater meaning for ourselves when leading our daily lives–and while the idea of Meaning being real or inherent, is a different subject, it is addressed throughout the following myth.

I wanted the reader to be able to interact with the story, to make it feel “real” and like a multi-dimensional experience. and to share their own stories.