Way back in elementary school, I’d write short stories and chapter books in my free time. I’m sure none of them were good, but it wasn’t about quality – I just couldn’t stop doing it. I would write journals, poems, songs, stories, anything. In high school, I wrote a book to get through the death of my grandmother. When I was in college, I wrote a book to make peace with my mental illness.
Creativity was a cornerstone of my life. I don’t know where I’d be without it. The older I got, however, the more my creativity felt estranged from the rest of my life.
My writing was no longer advertised but kept under wraps. My dreams weren’t yelled from the rooftops, but hidden for fear of unacceptance. My creativity felt so foreign to my everyday life, and my everyday life felt so foreign while being creative. So much so, that I imagined myself transported out of ordinary life while writing. A place where I felt freer, less tied down. Sometime thereafter, I came up with a name for the place where my true creative soul lived: Otherwhere.
Prioritizing creativity got harder as I aged. My Otherwhere floated further away as my “professional” life became less creative and demanded more of my time. Once the 9-5 set in, I felt an intense pressure to separate my time between work and play, and to give the vast majority of my time to work. I felt a pressure to not dream at all, and forget about my soul in exchange for routines and profit. After all, quitting a job for a dream doesn’t look great on a resume.
The more I felt pressured to accept that my dreaming days were over, the more I wanted to challenge it. This website, The Otherwhere Collective, is the greatest challenge I’ve posed yet to that idea. The hypothesis of this project is simple: there does not need to be a schism between your soul and your daily life, and the societal rules that tell you otherwise are manufactured and optional.
Can You... Define Otherwhere?
The word “Otherwhere” means an imaginative utopia; a paradise for the creative soul. All over this website, you’ll see the phrase “Otherwhere is a place.” But physically, Otherwhere may look remarkably similar to wherever you are now.
For those who are happy with their path, getting to Otherwhere might only involve light re-prioritization and increased intentionality. Others, however, may need something more. My “Aha Moment” came when I realized that what’s considered “success” in my current career path isn’t even something I want. I felt like I put my passions on the side so I could make room for plaques, titles, and paychecks I didn’t even care about. I realized how unused my soul was in my everyday life. So I’m leaving.
Our lives deserve to be lived with intent and purpose, and this project is to prove that we can attain that purpose. Identifying with The Otherwhere Project means you’re tired of the ways, small and large, that the world tries to demean and degrade what it means to be human and be alive. Otherwhere is the place our minds go to fight the idea that our life is best lived in service to shareholders, corporations, and money. It’s a fight against the addictions and monotony that we force onto ourselves.
And don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you need to quit your job or get off your insurance plans. I’m just saying that beauty is, in many ways, a choice. We just aren’t conditioned to choose it. But we can; we just need to go to places and think of ideas that we find beautiful.
Why I started The Otherwhere Project
Once I graduated college, I felt how the “adult” world prioritizes monotony, money, and predictability over beauty. I felt intense pressure to trade my dreams, vacations, and hobbies for service to corporate America. Furthermore, I realized the boxes we’re pressured to fit into are somewhat self-imposed. Maybe, if we break out of those boxes, life will get better, not worse. We can keep our spontaneity, dreams, and hobbies by believing the unpopular idea that an imaginative, beautiful, and spontaneous life is also a productive life.
Otherwhere began for me as a small idea. A word that captured the utopian, imaginative, and playful state of my mind when I felt most alive. This project is born out of the hope that my “Otherwhere” and my can more seamlessly connect to my “normal” life.
The Otherwhere Project is a group of people who want to chronicle the ways, small and large, that they transcend the idea that life is monotony, that we cannot be both adventurous and productive, and that adulthood implies the death of child-like wonder.
My goal is to bring an alternative to content that we feel promotes fake, disingenuous, or misleading ideas of happiness and productivity. I want to prove that maybe you don’t need a 5-9 before your 9-5. Maybe you don’t need to have two dozen thermos cups with an envious logo on them. Maybe life isn’t about strict discipline, consumerism, and profit, but about stretching your lunch break by fifteen minutes because it feels better to cook and eat consciously. Maybe it’s okay to stay up later than usual because you have a short story idea and you can’t wait until morning to write it. Maybe travel is a mindset you can embed into your days, nights, and weekends, or even just decide to walk to work because driving would feel like rushing the journey.
Otherwhere is a place. A place where you can live your life more intentionally. A place where creativity and playfulness exist besides efficiency and productivity. A place where life ceases to be something that you accept and becomes something you can make.
Come find it with me.