Before we start I’d like to link a song here for you to listen to as you read along. Hope you enjoy it.
In Peter Pan, there are Lost Boys. Boys who their parents lost when they fell out of their carriages, or during a trip to the park. The story is about Lost Boys and not Lost Girls because, as Peter Pan tells it, girls are expressly too smart to fall out of their cribs and get lost. And so the Lost Boys find their way to Neverland where they deal with hardships, with never growing up and yet still being responsible and mature and self-reliant in an unkind world, and with a hierarchy in which Peter Pan plays the role of leader. But getting lost has nothing to do with smarts and I’ve made my own way to my personal Neverland, one with both lost boys and lost girls. A place in which I need to mature despite the fact that it’s a sort of capsule full of kids younger than me. Maybe it’s an opportunity to take responsibility and a chance to influence my community , who look to me just as I look to them, for the better. The place itself is isolated. No phones or laptops or contact with the outside world aside from two payphones and visiting hours during which people and friends return to my life. We are a group of about twenty, in each other’s company all day. Kids from the age of eleven to nineteen-and-a-half. Kids who, for various reasons, have to mature together and leave behind a certain naivete even as we are not yet ready to grow, like the Lost Boys, but forced to give up on a fantasy they get to keep. We all deal with daily hardships with only a short break in the wonderful and miraculous form of the “nightly walk”. Half an hour, starting at 21:30, an outdoor trip to clear our minds. And then we’re back at exactly 22:00, not a minute later. 20-odd Lost Children on an island, coming back to deal with their issues. Once again disconnected from the real world and looking for some magic to hang onto. And how can you find magic to hang onto without fairies and fairy dust? You find it in the small things. You play a game during lunch and dinner and say two positive things (that’s four a day) and so you’re forced to think of positive things during the day, keeping the magic and some joy alive without fairy dust. It’s not easy to be far from home and from everything and everyone I love, to feel lost and lonely. But I have to also be brave and strong and just like a real Lost Girl. To find myself just as each Lost Boy in Peter Pan finds their own character and knows who they are and what role they must play. I too will come out stronger, knowing who I am.