The Den of My Creation

I found Margaret Atwood the summer before my senior year of high school. She initiated me into the world of dystopic fantasy and ever since I’ve felt more at home in the post apocalyptic worlds of my imagination than within this realm of relative comfort. 

For all my ethereal playfulness and the light I am known to emanate, I’ve been drawn into, as if part and parcel of, the darknesses of Huxley, Heller, and Hemingway. 
In The Handmaids Tale, Atwood granted me permission to explore the psycho-spiritual denials of my counterparts in society. She revealed unto me the hidden spaces of my very own psyche, differentiating me from kin and kindred. Thus began a journey of mysticism where the mystic herself is aware of the unity of all things and yet, still, always, separated from it, and from all – in her witnessed immersion within the extremes, simultaneously.

Incongruous yet circuitous, since the time I lived in a fetal position, have I been. But it was at 16, holding Offred’s hand, when I burrowed into a perspective so starkly contrasting what was expected from me that I attempted (and failed) retreat and amalgamation.
And so, ever since, have I lived one foot out the door of every minuscule, monotonous, and mysterious aspect of BEING itself, fearing the den of my creation rather than penetrating it.