Believe it or not, you grow out of it in your seventies!

[Hazel Russman]

I shall be eighty this year. Somehow I doubt if anyone else on this forum can say that ;-). I've been a compulsive daydreamer all my life but I'm not so sure about the "maladaptive" label. Yes, for many people it has been, and I'm not challenging or dismissing the experience of anyone else here. But for me the balance has been positive on the whole.

I was a weird child (probably on the autistic spectrum though I never had a formal diagnosis) so of course the other children picked on me. And what kept me from being utterly miserable was the fact that I had my own world into which I could disappear at will. I was a compulsive reader and went through about three library books a week. When I was reading fiction, I often disapproved of the way a character had reacted to a situation. In that case, I would replace that character with one of my own who would react in a way that seemed to me more reasonable or more interesting. The result was a complete change in the plot line and sometimes it developed into a saga that went on for weeks!

I'm sure that if I had not had my "characters", I would have spent a lot of my childhood feeling lonely and I don't think that would have been an improvement.

I decided quite early on that I wanted to get a good job, so that meant I had to work at school, go to university and get some qualifications. But all the time that wasn't taken up with that project was available for my private narratives. The other girls at my school spent that time buying clothes, learning how to use makeup, and meeting boys. They wanted good jobs as well of course, but they also wanted love and marriage and children and a social life generally, and it seemed that to qualify for those things, you had to devote a lot of time to them. Or so I was always being told. I just thought it sounded like a bad bargain.

I did in fact get a job that I liked, and I saved most of the money that I earned because there wasn't much to spend it on. I lived at home with my mother and my favourite occupation didn't cost me any money! I never did marry or have children, but I haven't regretted it. I think I would have made a very bad mother.

About 20 years ago, I started a fantasy that was a bit different in that it didn't start out from somebody else's fiction. All the characters were original, which was a completely new experience for me. And it was more compulsive than anything else I had created. Every spare moment, even toilet breaks, I would dive back into that world. Over many years it grew into a novel. To this day I believe that I didn''t write it; I just let it write itself. Eventually I self-published it on lulu.com. I never made any money from it but it was a hugely satisfying experience and I still love reading it.

Funnily enough, that was my last serious fantasy, but I didn't even notice until quite recently that I wasn't fantasising any more. Now I wonder: did the act of creating an actual novel finally use up the energy or did I just grow out of it because I'm now too old to sustain such concentrated imaginative thinking?