Deborah is a writer, antique dealer, and lifelong devotee of myth and fairy tale. Her work explores the intersections of imagination, grief, and beauty, often wandering through the half-lit corridors where literature becomes a form of sanctuary.
Welcome to Wonderland Revisited, where we dig through time like curious raccoons, unearthing beauty, oddities, and forgotten stories from the past. I’m Deborah, and this is Episode 5: You Don’t Own Me — Laughter and Imagination as Resistance to Despair.
Today, we’re following the thread of creativity—not as a luxury, but as a lifeline. This episode is about sacred foolishness, kitchen-sink magic, and the art of keeping your soul intact through play, beauty, and well-timed mischief.
With Phantastes whispering wonder on one side and the memory of suffering on the other, we’ll explore how imagination refuses to be owned—even by grief. Whether it’s a story, a costume, or a joke in the dark, creation becomes resistance.
So pour a cup of tea—or, if you're feeling properly rebellious, something stronger—and let’s begin.
First I want to tell you a story. Not one with a tidy ending. Not one that promises everything will be okay. But a story stitched from real things — from memory and myth, from fairy tales and grief, from orange paint and belly laughs, from silence and survival.
Because sometimes the only way through the hard places is sideways —through story, through laughter, through a sudden moment of beauty that catches you off guard and makes you breathe again.
This episode is about that sideways path. It’s about how imagination — far from being a childish escape — becomes a lifeline. How myth and humor can steady us when everything else falls away. How a fairy tale or a ridiculous joke or a child’s innocent gaze can hold more truth than the news or the noise.
You’ll hear about Phantastes, a strange and luminous book that kept me company when I was very alone. You’ll hear about a film called Life is Beautiful — and how it dares to laugh in the face of horror.
And you’ll hear pieces of my own story, too. Not because it’s extraordinary — but because it’s real. Because maybe, in the broken and ordinary things, you’ll hear an echo of your own.
This is an episode for anyone who has ever felt buried.
Anyone who has needed light.
Anyone still becoming.
Let’s follow the thread together.
Section 2 Rituals of Grief, Acts of Defiance and Creativity as Spellwork
Grief does strange things to time. It warps it. Stretches some hours into lifetimes, and then collapses whole months into a breath. When my father died suddenly, the world seemed to skip a beat — or maybe I did. One moment he was there, cracking jokes in the kitchen and quoting movies in a voice too loud — and then he wasn’t. There was no long goodbye, no warning. Just silence where his voice used to be, still echoing with mischief.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I picked up yarn and needles and taught myself to knit. I did it badly. My scarves curled in at the edges and sagged in the middle. Dropped stitches made them resemble question marks. But I kept going — not because I needed a scarf, but because I needed to do something. The rhythm of it, the movement, the click of the needles — it was like breathing again. A little crooked, but steady.
Later, when my aunt — who had been like a second mother to me — passed away, the grief came differently. It was slower, heavier. I felt it in my arms and legs, in my bones. And so I went outside. I tore up weeds and planted flowers. I sweated and cried and shoveled dirt. I needed the physicality of it — the proof that something could grow. That I could make something beautiful bloom in a world that felt, again, like it had come undone.
This has always been my way.
Even as a child, I created imaginary worlds to cope. I read and wrote with ferocity — making up stories with wild plots and odd characters, entire landscapes with rules and histories. I'd lose myself for hours in those stories. I made dresses for my dolls out of old scraps, turned cardboard into castles, and talked to myself like Anne Shirley — because sometimes imagination is the only way through.
I hunted for treasure along the riverbank, searching for antique doorknobs and bits of porcelain, old calligraphy pen tips and rusted hinges. I didn’t know it then, but I was teaching myself how to see. How to spot the beautiful, the strange, the once-loved thing hidden in the mud. How to honor what others forgot.
Later, I would darn mourning cloaks and mend centuries-old lace. I would sketch into my journal, write poems in the margins of overdue bills, and spend hours restoring faded garments to life, one hidden stitch at a time. These weren’t hobbies. They were spells. Tiny enchantments against despair. Ways of saying: something broke — but look, I made something of the pieces.
Even my work as an antique dealer has become part of this spellwork. I spend my days rescuing forgotten things, giving them new homes and new stories. I walk through dusty estates and find glimpses of past lives — a child’s name scratched into the underside of a desk, a pressed violet hidden in a book, a half-finished embroidery tucked in a drawer. These are sacred things. They remind me that loss and beauty often sit side by side — and that we carry both.
Not all healing is soft. Sometimes it’s sharp, and strange, and messy. But through it all, I’ve learned this: making is a form of mending. Whether it's a garden or a scarf, a dress or a fairy tale — the act of creating is an act of hope.
It says: I am still here. I still believe something beautiful can be made — not in spite of the pain, but because of it.
And sometimes, making isn’t something you do alone.
In adulthood, when my life cracked open, I found myself in a women’s shelter for the first time — with my children, and not much else. It was disorienting. Humbling. Not the kind of chapter I ever imagined for myself. But even there, the spellwork continued.
We didn’t talk much about what brought us there. We were tired. But somehow, in between the exhaustion and the weight of everything unspoken, we still laughed. We told stories. We helped each other with costumes, dyed fabric in the sink, cooked together, painted decorations for the holidays, remembered birthdays.
There was a quiet kind of magic in it — not flashy or sentimental, but real. A reminder that joy doesn’t ask for perfect circumstances. It just needs a crack of space to shine through.
Those small rituals — laughter, creating, remembering that beauty still mattered — became ways of saying: I am still here. And I still believe in joy.
Even then. Even there.
Part 3: The Imaginative Armor
When everything is dark, fairy tales don’t become irrelevant — they become essential. I’ve come to think of stories as lanterns. They don’t fix the forest or erase the danger, but they help us walk through it. And when you're walking through your own dark wood — whether it's grief, poverty, loneliness, or just the fatigue of holding everything together day after day — the light of imagination is no small thing.
In Phantastes, Anodos doesn’t conquer the Fairy Land with weapons or brute strength. He travels through beauty and terror, wonder and sorrow, and it changes him. What he learns isn’t how to dominate his circumstances — it’s how to remain tender in the face of them. That’s real courage. That’s the kind of armor you can’t buy.
J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, “Fairy-stories offer not an escape from reality but a way of understanding it.” That’s exactly what Phantastes did for me. I remember during one of the hardest months of my life, I couldn’t afford anything extra. But I had Project Gutenberg — a free online library of public domain books — on my phone, and I would read Phantastes over and over again, often late at night. It was free, and it became my refuge. The words wrapped around me like a story-spun shawl. I didn’t need a perfect copy on my shelf — I just needed that light.
Sometimes I would sit in bed with my kids sleeping beside me, reading by the dim glow of my screen, trying to lose myself in faerie woods and shadowy forests. Trying to believe that somewhere in the world — or in myself — there was still beauty, still kindness, still a way forward. In those hours, George MacDonald became a companion. He didn’t give me answers, but he gave me a kind of companionship that said: you are not crazy for needing beauty to survive.
George MacDonald once said, “The best thing you can do for your fellow next to rousing his conscience is—not to give him things to think about—but to wake things up that are in him.” And that’s what fairy tales did. They woke something in me — something strong and quiet and deeply human.
It’s not that the pain vanished. But imagination gave me something solid to hold onto. And humor — strange as it sounds — became another kind of light. Like laughter shared with strangers in a shelter kitchen over “bumkins” and holiday crafts, or the ridiculous delight of trying to sew crooked scarves and calling it art. These moments weren’t a distraction from reality. They were part of what saved me in it.
We can’t always choose the losses. But we can choose what we do with our sorrow. For me, imagination became a lifeline. It helped me believe that even if the world was hard, I didn’t have to become hard. I could still play. Still wonder. Still tell stories. And that meant I could still be free.
Part 4: A Game of Survival, A Story of Love
Let me tell you another story.
Once upon a time — and I say that deliberately, because though this story is modern, it carries the soul of a fairy tale — there lived a man named Guido.
He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t tall or powerful or particularly sensible. He was a waiter in a small Italian town, a man who stumbled through life with more joy than direction. But what he had — in wild, abundant measure — was charm. That kind of sparkle-in-the-eye mischief that turns every obstacle into a setup for a punchline. Guido saw life as a playground. A stage. A story waiting to be told.
And when he saw Dora, a schoolteacher already promised to another man, he didn’t despair. He courted her with riddles and grand entrances, with orchestrated accidents and jokes whispered at just the right moment. He called her “Principessa,” and you believed him — because in his world, every woman had a crown.
And somehow, through the sheer force of delight, he won her.
They married. They had a son. The world was full of laughter.
Then, the war came.
Everything changed. The small family — Guido, Dora, and their son — were sent to a concentration camp. A place designed to extinguish hope, to reduce human beings to numbers, to erase beauty.
But Guido — Guido refused.
He didn’t fight the guards. He didn’t escape. What he did was far more powerful, and far more subversive: he told a story.
He turned the unimaginable into a game.
“We’re playing for a tank,” he told his son. “A real one. First to a thousand points wins.”
And just like that, the world of the camp — the grey walls, the shouts, the punishments — became something else. A twisted board game. A set of rules. Challenges to outwit, with points to be earned by silence, by stillness, by staying hidden. If the boy cried, he’d lose points. If he asked about his mother, Guido would give him a riddle. The father translated horror into humor. Every day was a new invention, a new chapter in the game.
It was absurd. It was impossible. And it worked.
Because children believe what they’re told — not out of stupidity, but out of trust. His son believed because his father made it believable. The stakes were high — higher than the boy could ever understand. But Guido never broke character. Not once. He never let the mask fall.
And what a mask it was: not a mask of deception, but one of protection. The mask of the storyteller, the clown, the father.
What moved me most is that he did it all without hope of reward. Guido knew where they were. He knew what was likely to happen. But he chose, day after day, to give his son a better version of the story. Not because it would change the outcome — but because it would change the meaning.
He rewrote reality with humor.
Not the shallow kind of humor — not distraction, not evasion. No. This was humor as resistance. Humor as light. Humor as an act of radical love.
Because when everything is taken from you — your home, your dignity, your name — the one thing that remains is your imagination. Your ability to spin straw into gold. To look at a cage and say, “There’s still a sky above us.”
That’s the story Life Is Beautiful tells. And it’s more than just beautiful. It’s sacred. It insists that in the face of unbearable loss, we are still human — not because we win, but because we laugh, because we love, because we create meaning where there was only void.
It reminded me of moments I’ve lived through — times of sorrow when all I had was a thread of imagination to hold onto. How sometimes laughter would burst out in the middle of grief, and it wasn’t disrespectful. It was survival.
To choose joy is not to deny the darkness.
It is to declare that the darkness does not get the final word.
And maybe this is what fairy tales were always trying to tell us. Not that dragons aren’t real — but that they can be faced. Not that pain won’t come — but that the human spirit, when cradled in wonder and humor, can walk through fire and still sing.
Guido — with his mismatched clothes and twinkling eyes — becomes one of the greatest heroes in cinema, not because he slays the monster, but because he changes the story.
And that, perhaps, is what we’re here to do.
Part 5: Myth and Healing — Why Fairy Tales Still Matter
Let’s return for a moment to Phantastes. George MacDonald’s strange, luminous fairy tale begins with the opening of a desk drawer. A simple, almost laughable gesture. But it’s that drawer — ordinary as it seems — that unlocks another world.
And isn’t that how healing works? Not all at once, not through some grand declaration, but through the smallest moments. A drawer. A word. A page. A kindness. A story.
In Phantastes, Anodos enters Fairy Land not to escape life, but to encounter it more deeply. He meets spirits of trees, shadows of doubt, knights of sorrow. He falls in love. He fails. He begins to see that the journey through this strange, symbolic world is a mirror — reflecting back all the fears and longings he carries inside himself.
There’s a moment when he lays down his life for another, thinking it will be the end — but it becomes his rebirth. His transformation. He dies to the illusion of self and awakens to something deeper. Truer.
That’s the language of myth.
Fairy tales don’t promise us escape. They don’t promise happily-ever-after in the simplistic sense. What they offer — fiercely, quietly — is a pattern. A map. A way through the thorns.
I don’t believe stories save us by making things easier. I believe they show us how to walk through the fire with our soul intact.
When I was grieving — deeply, privately, unspeakably — I didn’t want platitudes. I wanted myth. I wanted something as big and terrible and beautiful as what I was feeling. Fairy tales gave me that. They let me sit beside a sorrowing prince or a weeping mermaid or a wanderer in a haunted wood and think, “Yes. This is where I am. But they kept walking. And maybe I can too.”
The healing doesn’t come from pretending everything’s fine. It comes from seeing your pain reflected in a tale that has endured centuries — and realizing you’re not alone. Not the first. Not the last. That others have walked through dark forests with only stories to guide them, and they came out changed.
These old tales — strange and lovely as they are — don’t remove our grief. But they hold it with us. They honor it. And they remind us that transformation, real transformation, almost always looks like loss before it becomes light.
So yes, I believe in fairy tales.
Not because they keep us safe — but because they show us how to keep going. Because when the world turns grey and silent, they still speak. When everything breaks, they whisper: Begin again.
Section 6: The Thread of Imagination — Humor, Wonder, and the Sacred Fool
Let’s end not with solemnity, but with a grin.
Because if imagination can be a lifeline in grief, it can also be a joke in the middle of sorrow.
A crooked scarf you knit through tears.
A pumpkin made from a baby’s painted bum.
Yes — that’s a real thing we did. At the shelter, late one night, after the kids had finally gone to sleep, surrounded by tired laughter, glue sticks, and construction paper, someone had the absolutely brilliant idea to dip a baby’s bum in orange paint and press it onto paper. “Bum-kins,” we called them. They were ridiculous. They were adorable. They were hilarious.
We laughed until we cried.
And that’s what I mean when I say imagination saves us — not because it floats above real life, but because it rolls up its sleeves and climbs right into the mess.
It sits beside you when nothing makes sense.
It hands you a glue stick and says, “We’re doing this.”
Imagination doesn’t always show up with sparkles and stories.
Sometimes it looks like patching a ripped coat with a square of mismatched fabric.
Sometimes it’s baking a cake when the power’s gone out — or turning a tragedy into a running joke, just to make it bearable.
It lightens the unbearable, not by ignoring it, but by playing with it — by reshaping it in your own hands.
It says:
You don’t own me.
That line — that lyric from Leslie Gore’s anthem — it carries more fire than people realize.
It’s not just about love or youth.
It’s about refusing to let the world write your story for you.
"Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t tell me what to say."
There’s something sacred in that.
Especially for women who’ve been told to be quiet, to cope, to carry on without complaint.
Especially for mothers, artists, survivors — all the sacred fools who keep imagining more even when they have less.
The sacred fool, after all, is not the village idiot.
In myth, the fool is the only one who dares to walk into the enchanted forest alone.
He crosses the boundary, speaks to animals, pokes fun at kings —
and somehow, through laughter and nonsense,
he brings the truth home.
He sees what the wise pretend not to.
He asks the questions no one else will.
And he survives —
not by strength, but by surprise.
By wonder.
By play.
Laughter, like imagination, is subversive.
It lets you breathe when you’re supposed to cry.
It makes the shadows flicker.
It creates just enough room in your chest to keep going.
It lets you imagine a different ending —
or no ending at all.
Just one more step.
One more story.
One more orange “bum-kin.”
Because this is not about pretending everything is fine.
It’s not about fairy tales as sugar-coating.
It’s about fairy tales as rebellion.
It’s about humor as a kind of holy mischief.
It’s about the radical act of saying:
“You don’t get to take my joy.”
“You don’t get to tell me who I am.”
“I belong to light and laughter, too.”
So go ahead.
Make the bum-kins.
Wear the glitter.
Tell the jokes.
Be the fool who sees more than anyone else.
Epilogue: A Flower from the Ash
Let me leave you with a picture — not a moral, but a thread.
A man in a death camp tells his son the whole thing is a game.
He shields him with laughter, wraps terror in make-believe.
And somehow, even in the darkest place,
the light of imagination flickers on.
Another man, long ago, walks through a dreamlike wood —
chasing shadows, meeting spirits, failing, trying again.
He begins the journey foolish and unformed.
But he emerges changed —
not because the forest spared him,
but because it taught him to see.
In Phantastes, as in life, the real magic isn’t in escaping hardship —
it’s in meeting it with open eyes and a heart still capable of wonder.
You’ve lived through things that have tried to close you.
You’ve stood in places where it would have been easier to go numb.
But somehow — absurdly, beautifully —
you kept imagining anyway.
And that is no small thing.
That is the flower growing from the ash.
That is the sacred foolishness that dares to play in sorrow’s shadow.
That is the story within the story.
Imagination, like love, doesn’t always rescue us.
Sometimes it just stays with us —
a flicker in the cave, a whispered joke,
a painted pumpkin made from a baby’s bum.
A thread of gold in the rubble.
And when we follow that thread,
we don’t erase grief.
We transform it.
Not into happily ever after,
but into ever still becoming.
You are still becoming.
The story is still unfolding.
And even here —
especially here —
something wild and luminous may bloom.
Not in spite of the darkness,
but through it.
Thank you for listening to You Don’t Own Me: Laughter and Imagination as Resistance to Despair.
If this story left a glimmer in your lantern, I’d be ever so grateful if you’d follow, rate, or share this podcast.
Until next time—stay curious.