When I sat on the couch in my living room this morning to explore the delicious topics of play, healing, and creativity, something surprising happened. Even though those topic have pervaded my life and I wrote a novel that explores them, until today I hadn’t really researched the synergies between those topics.

I fired up Google and started clicking links, following my curiosity, doing searches like play and healing. About two minutes in, I suddenly started sobbing, so hard I folded double over the laptop, barely able to spare a finger-swipe to avoid tear-bombing the keyboard.

WTF?

Apparently, my tendency to be the one adult at the dinner party who opts to slide with the kids across the polished wood floor on sock feet until we get too rowdy and are sent outside to play, plus many other instances of me choosing play over restriction (perceived or actual), embodies a way humans learned and grew for most of our history as hunter-gatherers.

Did you know that if we consider a million years ago the beginning of human history, humans were hunter-gatherers for 99 percent of that time? I did not know that, not until today, after I jotted a few notes, closed my laptop, and rushed my burning-with-curiosity self to my local public library to check out Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn.

Gray wrote: “Genetically, we are all hunter-gatherers.” This makes total sense, considering the million years. “Their core social values, as described by nearly all researchers who have studied them, are autonomy (personal freedom), sharing, and equality”—applied in ways that go radically beyond ours in the modern day.

The pull I’ve followed toward play, curiosity, and creating in order to learn has always felt essential, like if I didn’t or couldn’t do those things I would shrivel up and die. I’ve often done them in spite of being told I shouldn’t or couldn’t, in spite of not making money doing them, in spite of having to do them alone or being ostracized for doing them. As if I have to play with joy so I can stay healthy.

During a hike or bike ride, I may suggest we put away the map and take turns choosing random directions at every crossroads or forking path, because getting lost is fun (even if it becomes kind of scary). An also-adult friend and I spent happy, timeless hours hunkered on the forest floor making miniature worlds—towns, paths, streams, rooms, furniture—with twigs, leaves, moss, nut shells, whatever we found nearby, telling each other stories of the worlds we created as we played. Imagine many more examples.

This preference of mine for curious inquiry can come across as disrupting weirdness and doesn’t resonate with everyone. At a garden party on a summer day, I was introduced to someone new. I probably felt awkward and uncomfortable, as I often do in such social situations, but I toughed it out and conversed. After only a few minutes, the man gave me a sideways glance of suspicion, as if I might be an extraterrestrial, and said, “You’re not from here, are you?”

So, this morning, when I connected with the hunter-gatherer culture and experienced the sudden shock of learning I’ve been deeply normal all along, something inside me healed in that moment and became whole.

Why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with writing novels and reading romance? Everything, frankly. Anything in our childhoods that stifles play and curiosity creates a wound, and our unhealed wounds directly affect our ability to love ourselves and others, to love freely, and to love unconditionally.

Radical autonomy, sharing, and equality live in our human genes. Reading (and writing) stories about overcoming old wounds to reach the truths of acceptance and inclusion ring a mega-old bell in our beings. Romance stories reach inside us to touch the place where we know we belong, as our real selves, sharing as equals. We feel the resonance of that place, the pulse and magnetism of Follow curiosity. Play. Heal the wound. Play again. Play more. Discover. Include. Love.

“Every element of the human saga requires play. We evolved through play. Our culture thrives on play. Courtship includes high theater, rituals, and ceremonies of play. Ideas are playful reverberations of the mind. Language is a playing with words until they can impersonate physical objects and abstract ideas.” —Diane Ackerman, Deep Play

In retrospect, I can see that I created the character of Grant Eastbrook in The Infinite Onion as more of a stand-in for myself than I realized as I wrote. Grant thinks he’s a major loser, defective at the core, missing the mechanisms that allow him to function productively in society. When he gives up, turns his back on society’s strictures and starts playing like a child and (reluctantly) connecting to his creativity, Grant begins to unconsciously heal the old wounds from his childhood that severely limited his adult life.

Grant’s antagonist in the story, Oliver Rossi, an imperious artist, has his own childhood wounds. The enzymatic fireworks of a reluctant romance in the deep woods of an island in the summertime surprise both men into healing.

In writing that novel, I set out to immerse myself in the joy of being an adult who plays like a child. Also, I wanted playmates, which I haven’t always found in my own life, and which I gave to Grant in the form of a band of misfit children. I wanted to watch a wounded grown-up find freedom in childish play and thereby understand that he was not broken, not really, not after all. Writing and experiencing that story really helped me (as writing always does) to mend aching places in myself as well, even though I hadn’t yet rediscovered my (our) remarkable hunter-gatherer ancestry.

If you ever feel like an alien because of what you’re curious about, or how you most like to play, or your ability to include all sorts of people, or your willingness to love the busted bits, then consider the very real possibility that those true ways of being make you successful at expressing your humanity and it’s the modern world around you that’s out of step.

Join me? Step and leap and hop however feels best at your core. As we dance together, we resuscitate the best of us all.

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Alice Archer is the author of the literary romance novels Everyday History and The Infinite Onion. You can subscribe to her newsletter to receive a free story, notification of new articles and books, and more. She also writes nonfiction for quiet people as author Grace Kerina.

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