I just read “Every heart a doorway” and besides loving it so dearly, I remembered you saying that this book made you sad, like it punched you in the heart. May I ask how and where it did that? (I just finished the book and just want to talk about it/hear from somebody about it, so yeah, thanks again for recommending it!)

jumpingjacktrash:

roachpatrol:

i grew up passionately, desperately fixated on classic portal fantasy: peter pan, alice in wonderland, narnia, other fairyland adventures. i was a weird little kid and i never felt human and by sixth grade i’d hit Peak Misery that here was puberty and childhood was over and no door ever opened for me and i would have to keep on being a human, and not just a human, but a human who was going to grow up to be a woman and like, have a husband and babies and a house and wear dresses. magic wasn’t real. aliens weren’t real. there was no escape from the world i’d been born into. it was like having to hold still while everyone i trusted nailed my feet to the floor. it was a really terrible year. 

every heart a doorway is the first book i ever read where i felt like the author understood that exact same misery, and had decided to spin a great little adventure on just that subject. to have had magic and to lose it, to have the gates of imagination slam closed on you again… all those kids had something i wanted so badly, and they lost it, and i can understand their grief. it made me feel better to see that grief. 

Wendy was grown up. You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.

i was, eventually, a bit like wendy darling. i decided if i was going to grow up, i’d grow up, and i managed it a bit faster than some, too. i left home at eighteen and enjoyed my independence. adulthood has given me powers and freedoms i couldn’t have imagined at eight or nine and i’ve enjoyed them thoroughly. i’ve traveled and flown and made friends and learned a lot of really wonderful things.

but no door has ever opened for me and that is i think something that will never really heal in my heart. no fairies have ever come to take me home. no cat has ever known my name, no key has ever burned in my hand. i am stranded here, making the best of things, enjoying what i can… but if i ever see sunlight shining through the back of a closet, i’m getting the fuck out.  

i kind of feel like this portal grief is a really common experience for a certain type of person. for me, i suspect it’s behind my love of villains in fiction; it made me so angry (everything made me angry) to have this idea of Escape To A Place Where You Matter dangled in front of me and know it was an illusion, that my fantasies gradually changed from being invited to the magical land, to sneaking in uninvited, to ripping a doorway of my own through sheer grubfuck rage and taking the place over.

now that i’m dad-aged, i fit myself into the mold of the magician who hides the door in his house and protects the hero-children from those who would take their importance away and force them to be nobody… but it’s not natural to me. it’s a deliberate and constant rebellion against the rage that’s still boiling down in there. the rage that wants to burn narnia to the ground for shutting me out.