This week: Your Happily Ever After Edited by: Kit  
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What's on your bucket list?
In real life, your happily ever after is never guaranteed. So make things happen now.
This week's Drama Newsletter is all about fiction versus reality.
Kit |
Sometimes life isn’t fair. You’d think that there would be some kind of logic to it. Justice. The fact that there isn’t is one of the most difficult things to come to terms with as we grow up, I believe.
I used to believe that if you are kind enough, work hard enough, try to live as harmless an existence as possible, everything would work out in the end. That’s the way the stories go. You may face challenges and obstacles along the way – you are bound to – but then everything will be alright. You have learned your lessons, had whatever character development you needed, and then you get your happily ever after.
Except you don’t. Not always. Not everyone, anyway.
I write this as my dad’s been diagnosed with cancer for the third time. Which was only discovered after another horrible health issue he required emergency surgery for. All that whilst he’s coming to terms with the news that he’s got early-stage dementia. He’s frightened. We’re all frightened. And it’s not fair. My dad’s a good guy. He’s a good husband to my mom. He’s a good father. He’s worked hard all of his life. Never been in trouble with the law. He’s kind, and funny, and creative, and always willing to offer people a helping hand. After his retirement he did voluntary work in a care home for the elderly. If he were a fictional character he’d now get to reap the rewards of living a good life. But he’s real, and instead of his happily ever after he gets… this.
He’s just one of the people I know who have ended up like this. And it’s not just people who have lived a full life, either – there are children who suffer, babies who suffer. No, life isn’t fair.
What do we do with that knowledge? That’s something I am trying to figure out. If being the best person I can be doesn’t guarantee me a happy ending, then what do I do? Well, I guess I’ll still be the best person I can be because the alternative doesn’t sit well with me. I wasn’t built to be a villain. I care about the impact of my actions. I mess up, I don’t always get things right, my own health issues often prevent me from doing what I want to do, but I try. I try because I don’t exist in a vacuum, and other people need me to be my best me.
It’s sobering though, isn’t it? Is this what growing up is? That realisation that the stories we tell ourselves may be comforting, but they’re not a true reflection of how existence works? We need those stories to soothe ourselves, to tell ourselves everything will be okay. Good defeats evil. Kind people win the day. Except when they don’t.
Maybe that is why there is a trend towards darker, grittier stories. I guess I don’t tend to like those for a reason. I like lighter stories, stories with happy endings, because life’s tough enough as it is. And I am not the only one – there is a counter-trend of cosy stories, for those of us whose nerves are already frayed by reality. It’s why I like to play games like Stardew Valley. In Stardew Valley you never die, your animals never die, and even though there are many secrets in the valley, in the end things will be (reasonably) okay, if you make the effort.
So, how to cope with the way that life works? As you can imagine, I’ve had a think about that recently. I thought about all the things I still want to do and then asked myself why am I not doing them? In some cases it comes down to money, and that’s fair enough. Like, I would love to go to the Silverstone Grand Prix. I would love to travel to one of the Nordic countries and pet reindeer underneath the Northern Lights. I would love to see whales breach. Those are not things I can simply make happen tomorrow. But Valtteri Bottas and Paul Ripke asked in their podcast What's Next? recently what you’d want to do if you received the news you had just three months to live (and were still in good enough shape to do what you wanted). They also asked what you would want your final meal to be. I thought immediately of visiting a castle I’ve always wanted to visit, and to finally go to a bird of prey centre and see if a barn owl wanted to sit on my arm. I was going to do that when Covid happened and what with moving countries haven’t got around to it since. And there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have my favourite meal sometime soon, because why wait?
Why wait, when you never know what’s going to happen? Hopefully everything will be fine. You’ll have your happily ever after. But there are no guarantees. That means you might as well do all those things you’ve always wanted to do, or as many of them as you can right now. You can always dream new dreams when you’re done.
Kit
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The Drama Newsletter Team
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Drama: February 04, 2026 Issue [#13579]
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