***
Mara’s private world was not a scientific one. Her shelf was a fantastic place where she listened to music and let her mind wander at will. The term mindwandering may imply a lack of direction, but social scholars remind us that “not all minds that wander are lost.” Mindwandering allows the self to move from one place to another—hopefully better—place, and this sort of mental mobility can set a trapped child like Mara free. As she listened to music, she pictured herself in far-off places, doing far-flung things. She got to live here, she got to live there, but when she was down off her shelf and her mind was not allowed to roam, she felt a sick sort of dread: “I had to be where I was,” Mara recalls. “I had to be me.”
When we are unable to transform reality, sometimes we cope by transforming it in our minds, becoming engrossed in daydreaming or fantasy, at least for a few moments or until another form of escape becomes possible. Many supernormal adults recall having rich fantasy lives as children. Daydreams of being an animal or a superhero are the most common, but the imaginings are as varied and diverse as children themselves. What these fantasies share is their ability to remove the child from a state of fear and helplessness and hopelessness, transporting her to a place where anything she can dream up is possible, even a happy life. After Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother died and she was sent away from her father to live with an aunt, she said, “I wished to be left alone to live in a dreamworld in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I withdrew as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, and all the time I was walking or when anyone bored me.”
An over-reliance on fantasy can be more delusional than productive, to be sure, but when used intentionally and flexibly, fantasy helps children—and adults—survive. In one study of abused children from Israel, the use of fantasy, in conjunction with other coping mechanisms, was found to be an important source of hope, one that predicted doing well in life fourteen years later. “I never knew whether I would live tomorrow, but when evening came, I used to stand near the window and imagine the lights of New York,” one of the study’s participants remembered about her childhood. “I sat for hours and imagined myself entering the great city.” Similarly, Viktor Frankl described how, during the Holocaust, he and other prisoners found their own release by fleeing to an inner world where one could go anywhere, even back home: “In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.”
Fantasy comes more easily to children than to adults but, for all ages, one of the most accessible ways to become absorbed in a world other than one’s own is through the portal of books. “Writers are often better therapists than we are,” a supervisor once said to me, and many resilient children treat themselves by reading. “I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves,” said graphic novelist Alan Moore. “And sometimes they can be really revealing.” Sometimes supernormals identify with fellow fighters who help them feel strong, too, and other times they are drawn to characters who are powerful in other ways. So it was for writer Akhil Sharma who recalls, in his memoir Family Life, how he coped after his older brother was left paralyzed and brain-injured in a swimming pool accident, an event that devastated his family: “I was always lost in a book, whether I was actually reading or imagining myself as a character. I liked books where the hero was a young man, preferably under twenty-five, who had a magical power that he discovered over the course of the book. Vanishing into books, I felt held. I had always believed that I might possess supernatural powers, like flying or maybe seeing into the future.”
What one reads depends on what one needs, and while some, like Jean Piaget, use books to stay connected with order and reality, Mara used books the same way she used music—as a way of being someone and somewhere else. The Boxcar Children were her first favorites, and she envied their adventures without parents. Mara pretended her closet shelf was her very own boxcar, and she relished spending time in a world that was the opposite of her own. “The kids had brothers and sisters to keep them company but they didn’t have any parents to worry about. And they had their own space,” she recalled. When Mara got hungry, she made like a Boxcar Child sneaking into town to steal food from a store as she tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she quietly pocketed boxes of Jell-O gelatin from the pantry. Back in her closet, Mara licked her finger and dipped it in the sugary powder, again and again, until her finger turned red and she felt warm inside. The pillows on her shelf were often grainy, as if dirtied with sand, but no one could expect an old boxcar to be spick-and-span.
***
For Mara, middle school was a series of temporary escapes. Her closet shelf was not strong enough to hold her anymore so, like many supernormal children as they age, Mara often found a way not to be home. During the week, she busied herself with activities after school, and on the weekends she slept over at friends’ houses. In the summers, she went away to camps—soccer camps, youth camps—for as long as her father would permit her to be away.
Some of her getaways were more planned than others. One afternoon, Mara had just hopped off the school bus and kicked off her shoes by the back door when she saw cookbooks strewn about, splayed open, all over the kitchen. For an instant her heart soared: It had been such a long time since her mother had made her favorites. Then Mara noticed that the pages were marked up with different-colored pens, and her mother was lying on the floor. There would be no baking today, her mother said warily. The cookbooks contained messages that she had worn herself out trying to decode.
Mara went into the bathroom and climbed out the window—the routineness with which she did so was lost on her at the time—and she walked barefoot some four blocks to a friend’s house. Her friend’s mother eyed her curiously when she opened the door and there stood Mara, uninvited and without anything on her feet. “It’s freezing!” she exclaimed. “Where are your shoes?” Mara smiled and shrugged as she entered the front hall. Her silence was automatic. She and her friend passed the afternoon playing video games, and Mara relaxed into the feeling of being in a house where nothing strange or frightening might be about to happen. When enough time had gone by that she could smell dinner cooking, and she thought her dad might be home, Mara borrowed some sneakers and walked back toward her house.
At home, Mara often spent her evenings rearranging her bedroom furniture and imagining she lived in an apartment in a high-rise, far, far away. Her light switch, she pretended, was an intercom through which she spoke with an imaginary doorman. Eventually, she moved into the basement and pretended more of the same. It would be years still until Mara would be old enough to really leave home, but in her mind she was already gone.
***
By high school, Mara’s favorite place to get away to was the public library. An institution known since ancient Egypt as the “healing-place of the soul,” the library was where Mara went to recuperate from her life. In the center of the building, in a round skylighted atrium, stood a giant globe, probably twenty feet in diameter, which rotated slowly on its tilted axis. The library was built in a two-story circle around it, and Mara liked to climb the stairs to the second floor and look down at the blue-and-green swirls as they slowly made their way around. From up there, with its whispering sounds and uniform lighting, the library was like being off in space. When she was there, Mara felt as far away as she could get.
There was a table she liked up