I have for several years mourned my (not quite completely) lost ability to immerse myself in books. While with this came the passing of a haven of sorts, I told myself that it was really better to live in the real world. In more recent years I have also lost my ability to immerse myself in the world of the internet: reading blogs, writing blog, talking on AIM for hours on end, hardly hearing anything around me. I have told myself that that is good too, but again a certain haven has been left behind. Now with these things providing me only superficial entertainment (which is probably healthy) I find myself wondering if I have any alternate world at all now, any way to get away from the daily routine and tribulations which I find so unsatisfying of late. The answer, I think, is that each sphere of my life feels so disjointed from the rest these days that I live in an alternate universe every few hours or few days, every time I switch locations or groups of friends, every time my list of concerns shifts to bring some things into focus and allow others to fade away and seem distant. My life fails to be a cohesive whole, and therefore it manages to serve as an escape from itself.

But also, I have as rich an inner life as ever before, and my imaginings are nearly as strong as they were in my second-grade days when my daydreaming kept me too busy to complete my work. (Or perhaps they have always been this strong, but in my years of books and of internet they were pushed to the side and acknowledged less frequently.) And perhaps that is at least partially my present haven. But I am just as incapable as I always have been of transferring those imaginings into written stories, which would be a useful accomplishment, and one that could give some sense of direction to my presently disjointed and purposeless life. If only I could hone my writing skills -- or really, my imagining skills -- into something I could use to make a living! Then I would have both a haven and a purpose in one.