Make no mistake: escape is not fun and fun is not escape.
Fun and escape in the same sentence is an oxymoron. The purpose of escape is to get rid of something undesirable. There is nothing fun about having to depend upon something or someone to escape from feeling bad — especially if it makes you numb or puts your life in danger.
Conversely, fun is experienced with every one of your senses. You have to be present to have fun. You can’t be numb and truly experience fun. It requires a particular “mindset.” You can even have fun all by yourself while doing nothing at all!
Give yourself permission to begin the experience of having real fun. You may choose to do something you think is fun, playful, or even frivolous. Or, you may choose to think yourself into having fun while doing nothing at all. Remember, thinking makes it so. You may not utilize whatever you have used or done in the past to escape. Write about your experience. If you don’t have fun doing what you have chosen to do, you don’t have to do it again, but you won’t know if it is fun or not until you do it.
Since we haven’t been taught how to have fun beyond the experience of our childhood fun, most of us have become dependent upon some kind of substitute for fun. These substitutes for fun have normalized the abnormal in our attempt to satisfy our need to escape from feeling bad.
