I’ve exiled myself. Removed myself from my country, my friends, my family, so I could find out what I was truly made of.


This is the answer: I am made of dreams. Dreams, fantasies and nightmares were in the very beginning. What else do you have as a child but your imagination, your imagined future self, your imagines future life, the imagined future world – and nightmares, the worst things you can imagine.

I would write letters to my older self. Partially to ensure I would never betray my childhood dreams, partially to create a relationship with myself and avoid feeling alone in the world. There have always been versions of me across different times. To this day, I write these letters – I write them to myself, to my aged self, to the self that is a mother and to the self that isn’t. And even to my imaginary daughter. 

Those original dreams, the Ur-dreams, have set a direction for my entire life – they’ve shaped my ambitions, goals and desires and fuelled me with resilience, stubbornness and will-power. It’s an obligation to pursue them. The child has made all her future and potential selves promise to honour and fulfil her dreams and they don’t dare disappoint her.

As the dreams have been coming true, I couldn’t but ask myself – What is it that I’ve done to the reality? Have I wished things and events into existence? And if that is so, are the darkest parts of my life simply my dark fantasies come true?

And most importantly, who am I in all this? Who is the the creator of those dreams – the child or my present adult self? Am I just an executor of my own childhood dreams whose job is to ensure that all promises and dreams are delivered on? Has the child version of me dreamt that I was going to become this person? Am I a product of a little girl’s wildest dreams? 

I think I am!  This little determined girl didn’t need a genie in the bottle to make her 3 dreams come true – she made herself into a dream-come-true machine.

But hold on, where did that little girl’s wildest dreams come from? TV? Pop culture? Music? Religion? Unfulfilled needs and desires?

It is what it is – I am a product of my dreams and a dreamer of things to come. (Brace yourselves my future selves!)  The little child can’t be blamed for what she’s created or for what she’s forgotten to dream about.

To disentangle the bundle of desires, dreams, fantasies, nightmares from the reality and the truth, I need a character and that character has to go on an entire Heroine’s journey. This character is True! The True Detective who’ll uncover the truth that all the versions of herself might be afraid to see. She’s hired to work on a case that will remain forever open.

True Det.