Healing by fantasy

on restoring our relationship with play

“Do you ever imagine what it would be like to be covered in fur?” I ask the eleven year old.

“It’s really hard.”

“But do you try? Like I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to have a tail.”

“Oh, I’ve been doing that for years!”

We started playing Dungeons & Dragons last summer, learning the game through weekly one-shot sessions with a 16-year-old Dungeon Master, an astounding storyteller who kept blowing us away with his memory, patience and flexibility. 

Photo by Carlos Felipe Ramírez Mesa on Unsplas

Photo by Carlos Felipe Ramírez Mesa on Unsplash

I remember being fascinated by D&D as a tween but not really knowing what it was about. A good evangelical 90s kid growing up at the height of the Satanic panic, I felt certain it would be classified among things “not allowed”. And, anyway, it seemed that only boys played. 

Seeking out a DM who could help us learn was, in part, an attempt to re-write my inner narrative around permission and even gender. Healing by fantasy, if you will. Nine months on, my kids have been playing with their friends and I’ve been invited to join my first game with other adults, hence trying to imagine the tail. 

I come away from our conversation inspired by how seriously my young person takes role playing - the sheer attentiveness with which enjoyment is treated. In the shower, I look at my arms and imagine my black scales glistening, my body long and wiry but visibly strong. I am preparing to play as a dragonborn.

This is one of the ways I’ve been actively trying to find my way back to play. Instinctively I know it’s the stuff my soul is crying out for. Love me enough to let me do something truly frivolous. Trust the universe enough to do something as vulnerable as imagining aloud and sharing a collective experience without the goal of productivity.

The wiring runs deep for me on productivity. It’s not just about playing a game that isn’t leading to a measurable outcome. I feel it surface while I’m playing, whenever performativity takes the place of full immersion. I become more concerned about whether I’m “doing it right” in other players’ eyes than just being in the world we’re dreaming up together. It can also surface when I’m on my own, playfully making music or even doing a puzzle! I’ve spent a hell of a lot of my life wondering and worrying whether I’m doing something the right way when there’s no. one. looking.

I’m sure this conditioning comes from lots of places and since adults often need to relearn how to play, your reasons might be different to mine. For me, it’s one of my hang ups from growing up in fundamentalist evangelicalism. I was encouraged, cautioned, to come at every experience in life with an agenda. Everything in life was constantly weighed. Was it bringing me closer to God or luring me further away? Every experience was either edifying or destructive. Every person was either a fellow soldier in Christ or someone I had to save (the ulterior motives implicit here make my stomach turn). Nothing could simply be enjoyed. No one simply known and laughed with. Everything was subject to analysis.

This is admittedly on the more extreme end of things (and maybe I was more sensitive to the messaging than others) but lots of us seem to struggle with prioritising play because it’s not productive. That’s unsurprising because coercive schooling and parenting are also obsessed with measuring everything we do. It’s colonial. It’s capitalist. Whatever we want to connect it to, it’s pervasive.

The outcome is that we devalue play in our own lives, which has the knock-on effect of devaluing play in our children’s lives. We’ve lost our own grasp of our own need for fun and joy to the extent that we often interpret the phrase “play is learning” as a call to take the lessons we think children should learn and turn them into rather dreary games.

It may be that the problem is exacerbated as young people get older when the play of tweens and teens can look a lot more like the things that we would do if we would only allow ourselves to play. We may not fancy playing Barbies anymore but would get a lot out of messing about on a guitar or fighting our way through Zelda. 

In the style of feeling the next generation should have a rubbish time just because we did, we tell them that they should be doing better things, prioritising the things we think will make money in the future. Or that if they’re playing, it needs to be turned into something measurable to be valuable. Similarly, childhood and adolescence are only valuable insofar as they prepare us for “successful” adulthood. 

Could learning to play for its own sake then be about returning to our own humanity? Because reducing our younger years to mere preparation for what comes next clearly limits the experiences we allow ourselves to have at any stage of life. 

Though we could reframe and say that if you’re going to prepare for adulthood, maybe it should be one where you feel free to daydream about having a tail.