PLAYING ALONE

Words by Charlotte Stewart Illustration by Emily Fu

The defining feature of an only-childhood is playing alone. As the solitary offspring of my parents, I conjured for myself a rich world of make-believe, the nooks and crannies of which—depending on their content, and to a dwindling extent as I aged—I shared with my parents and no one else. In it, I was an undercover agent, teddy bear surgeon, mayor of insects, and Ken and Barbie’s marriage counsellor. Through dedicated personification efforts, I rendered from the inanimate a colourful cast of characters (read: surrogate siblings) to share this world with me. Though I was a sociable child and played happily with

the other kids at my school and in my neighbourhood, playing alone for me was just as captivating as playing with others. Beyond simple fun, it offered a form of escapism and produced a fantastical lens through which to view the world that I have carried into my adult life.

As child psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott describes, play occurs in the liminal space between inner and external reality. It is a feedback loop in which the physical world reflects into the imagination, and the imagination tinkers (literally, through the body, and figuratively, through subjective perception) with the physical world. In the time and space of play, what felt real to me shifted to include what I knew to be unreal. What I could see, feel, and experience expanded. In the steaming tea of the empty cup and the ancient stone wall of the blanket castle, I discovered the back door out from the politics of daycare, the grind of kindergarten, the tribulation of the third-grade spelling test—an alternative narrative to my parents’ fighting, separation, divorce, and continued fighting.

Much of my play included inhabiting various personas—in other words, the application of my imaginative energies towards both who “I” was and how “I” acted in the world. While usually these guises were plainly fictive (see above; see also unicorn, fairy, mermaid) I once presented myself to my father as another child, offering her as a replacement for myself. Unsurprisingly, though much to my chagrin, he did not accept this self-produced changeling, but instead insisted upon my return. My confusion and distress in this moment resonate with Winnicott’s assessment of “the precariousness of play”—that is, the danger that arises from traversing the “theoretical line” between inner and outer realities (50). The consequence here was a rejection of the subjective reality of “myself” at play, which stung powerfully despite the simultaneous loving affirmation of the objective reality of myself. It was perhaps then, at the tender age of five, that I had my first encounter with the experience of being perceived and accepted as neither who I wanted to be nor who I said I was.

Nevertheless, my play continued to involve elaborate narratives acted out by myself and extensions of myself in the form of dolls, toys, and household objects. Raggedy Anne? My most talented ballet student. Stuffed cat? My skydiving instructor. Stove door? The smiling mouth of a hot-bellied dragon. While I no longer “play” with the everyday objects around me, to this day my car, plants, bicycle, and hiking backpack all have names, a quirk that I suppose is rooted in the childhood game of creating company. Likewise, the habit of telling myself stories about the inanimate things around me has transformed into making up stories about people on the subway, in the street, and sitting in front of me in class—which, far from the melancholic efforts of a loner, feels like a mode of making the strange(r) familiar, of drawing unknown people closer to myself through fantastical empathizing. While hardly barren in the objective sense, my young social life in the realm of the subjective was made by the necessity of my only child status multifarious and rich. The imprint of this on my adult life is, I think, a large capacity and fondness for sojourns into the unreal if only to make the real a more exciting place to be in.

Further reading D.W. Winnicot, 1971. “Playing: A theoretical statement & Playing: creative activity and the search for self” in Playing and reality. New York: Basic Book Publishers.