Dear Reader,
I used to think that my life was boring and would make up adventures in my head as child about being an orphan and building a house in the woods to survive. When we were little our favorite game to play with our cousins always involved some form of running away from “the war”. Whether we were princesses in disguise traipsing across the kingdom to safety or revolutionary patriots trying to get a secret message across enemy lines. There was usually always a baby in tow that we had to protect too, I am not sure why that was always a requirement.
Now we laugh at how dramatic our games were. Sometimes I wish that life was so boring that we had to invent dramatic games to keep ourselves occupied. Not that my life is horrible, but sometimes the world around me seems pretty grim. Endless wars, corrupt politicians, the average person falling victim to corporate greed, and when someone tries to stand up to it all it seems like they will never win a tangible victory. When I was younger, I knew life could be hard not only personally, but in the world as a whole. Yet, somehow things always seemed to right themselves and the world moved on. What I didn’t know was that not everything went right at the same time. Yes, you might be doing well, but your friend is going through a tragedy. The party that you favor is control, but there are still policies being put in place that infringe on your freedom. You might be enjoying your day at a slow pace, but your brothers and sisters in Nigeria are being picked off like problem coyotes. You just don’t know what to do and find yourself despairing at the state of the world and also hoping that someone messages you back about their marketplace listing.
Sometimes when I find myself worrying about my situation in life, I pretend I am in one of my childhood games or books. In fact, I sometimes tell myself that 12-year-old me would love to be in my place where I have to figure out how to start my career and business over from scratch and be creative. If pretend orphan me could scrape enough money together to feed and house all 7 of her sisters, surely 27 real life me can get a business up and running. If my fictional heroes did not give up hope when all seemed for naught and kept fighting, surely, I can keep fighting for what I believe in.
As a book reader, I would often use my books to escape the boring reality of the world, as I grew older, it seemed I used books to escape the cruel realities of a broken world. In the stories, the hero won every time, even if it took a couple of books into the series to get there. I discovered with Alan Jackson that that doesn’t always happen in the real world. But at the same time, I needed those stories as a teenager and college student. I needed to have heroes that showed mental endurance, so that I could get through my education. I needed to have heroes who started with nothing and made something, so that I could believe that my ideas would make it out of my notebooks. I needed to have heroes that went to bed after a tough day believing that tomorrow was another chance to try again.
I had many of those heroes in fictional stories, but I knew many real-life stories that had those heroes too. Some of those people told me their own stories and sometimes I was the background character in those stories that I saw unfold with my own eyes, but at the time I didn’t know that I was in a story. That’s the thing that I have to keep reminding myself, that I am in the story that I will look back on fondly or maybe just be glad that I made it through some chapters. Maybe I will tell my story and inspire someone to keep going, and maybe the background characters of my story will one day realize that they were main characters keeping me going.
Sincerely,
The Rancher’s Daughter.
From the Rancher's Daughter's Desk 