Fifteen and incapable of collecting my thoughts amidst all the hormones and insecurities. Will I pass my test tomorrow? Am I ever going to fulfil my dream of becoming a successful writer? Will I ever make it out of this forsaken city?
By this point, I know no one is waiting around to give me answers. Not that they could, even if they wanted to. Not that I would believe them, even if they told me exactly what I wanted to hear. And although I haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that life has no rhyme or reason, that things simply happen to you, and that’s it, I still crave certainty. I need closure. Answers. Answers that aren’t biased, answers that feel like they’re meant just for me.
Perhaps for that reason – my insatiability, dissatisfaction and unyielding hard-headedness – I’ve always been a little delusional. What do you mean I just have to wait and see how it plays out? The answer has to be somewhere. I didn’t grow up hearing my mother talk about Vedic astrology, and my janam kundli only to end up believing I couldn’t locate the fate of my own life. If I wanted answers to unanswerable questions, I would find nonsensical ways to uncover hints that might lead me to one.
At the height of Year 12 exams, when school counsellors and ATAR predictions had concluded that nothing remarkable would come of my future, I was still clinging to a sliver of hope. Escape. One day. To be able to leave Perth. To get out. It was starting to feel impossible, but my delusion kept the dream alive.
On one of those days, while watching a Zoella vlog to distract myself from the pressure and weight of decisions I was making as a child, decisions that felt as though they would determine my entire future, I skipped to a random timestamp: 31 minutes and 21 seconds. An urge came over me to search the number. 3121 turned out to be a postcode: Richmond, Victoria. A year later, I would end up living about ten minutes from that suburb, studying my dream course at my university of choice, and living a life I had once deluded myself into believing I deserved, and therefore would achieve.
“These practices aren’t new, nor are they frivolous. They echo older systems of belief passed down through mothers, aunties and communities who learned early on that certainty is a luxury. For many femme, queer and migrant people, intuition and symbolism have long offered a sense of control in worlds that rarely extend it to them freely.”
From religious superstition to the human condition of simply wanting to know, we Homo sapiens are always on the lookout for meaning, for reason, for answers. In the doom-and-gloom reality of everyday life, soft delusions have become our quickest, cheapest and most accessible form of escape. Something to soften the edges, to offer hope, to carve a small doorway into the sublime within the ordinary.
I don’t believe that deluding myself or relying on the soft delusion that my life might look the way I once dreamed it would, is the reason I ended up living it. Even if it’s tempting to say I manifested it, that believing shamelessly in what I deserved somehow willed it into existence, that’s probably not true. The delusion didn’t make it happen. It simply made it easier to dream guilt-free, because the dreaming lived safely in my head.
And without that dreaming, without that gentle delusion, I might never have tried for what I truly wanted at all. The hard work and late nights, the willpower it took to make it happen, could only have come from a quiet, underlying belief that I could. Delusion, in some form, fuelled a dream that was otherwise being worn down by quantitative measures like exam marks and ATAR results. It was a non-quantifiable belief that held my hand and steadied me towards my ambitions, even when reality was not only harsh but actively demotivating.
The human condition yearns for answers. Our egos demand reason and purpose, even when we know this road of discovery leads to nothing concrete or verifiable. Still, we try relentlessly to make sense of our lives and the world around us. If there is one thing that truly signifies the equality of all beings, it is this shared absence of certainty. No matter how much money you have, how old you are, or who you are, none of us is privy to the answer to life’s most persistent question: what is the meaning of it all?
“Religious superstitions give us a sense of control over the inevitable, like avoiding cutting your nails on a Thursday because it disrupts the flow of wealth, a day dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi, the deity of prosperity. And when you see three or more of the same numbers in a row on your receipt, you have to look up what it means…”
Cue tarot TikToks, angel numbers and New Year zodiac predictions. TikTok algorithms tell us that the lack of hashtags in a prediction video means it was meant to find us, and that the Ace of Cups will appear as new relationships, deep compassion, or creative inspiration (just for you, though, so make sure to comment ‘CLAIM’). Religious superstitions give us a sense of control over the inevitable, like avoiding cutting your nails on a Thursday because it disrupts the flow of wealth, a day dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi, the deity of prosperity. And when you see three or more of the same numbers in a row on your receipt, you have to look up what it means, because if there is a one-in-a-hundred chance of something happening and it happens, luck must be the reason. And if everything happens for a reason, then surely this is noteworthy.
The word delusion comes from the Latin deludere, meaning to play. Not to deceive maliciously, but to engage in possibility. To suspend disbelief. To experiment with meaning. Seen this way, delusion is not pathology but play, a temporary shelter built from symbols and intuition, offering relief while we wait for certainty to arrive. Is this hope, or is it play? In this way, haven’t we all subscribed to soft delusions just to make it through our days?
Years earlier, at thirteen and still oblivious to the many uncertainties that would later befall me, caught in the swell of raging emotions and unsolvable predicaments, I shuffled my seventh-generation iPod Touch. The song I landed on felt like a telltale sign, an answer to the most anticipated question of the moment: Does he like me? If the answer feels unsatisfactory, I turn to the shelves of books lining my room, flicking through pages at random and landing on a sentence I convince myself might offer some clue as to what my future holds.
Oftentimes, what we call human want is, at its core, a form of need. Self-actualisation – as outlined in Maslow’s hierarchy – emerges once food and shelter are accounted for, and it can be quietly paralysing. Wanting your body to feel like home rather than something you are constantly negotiating with, correcting or apologising for. Praying to move through the world feeling safe, without having to anticipate harm, scrutiny or danger before it arrives. Believing that healing is possible, even while you are still living inside the thing that hurt you.
“Oftentimes, what we call human want is, at its core, a form of need. Self-actualisation – as outlined in Maslow’s hierarchy – emerges once food and shelter are accounted for, and it can be quietly paralysing.”
In moments like these, delusion can feel like the only viable solution if one doesn’t want to find themselves unwell or utterly depleted. Hope becomes the tree, and delusion the trunk it grows from, needing to be just as big and just as strong.
These practices aren’t new, nor are they frivolous. They echo older systems of belief passed down through mothers, aunties and communities who learned early on that certainty is a luxury. For many femme, queer and migrant people, intuition and symbolism have long offered a sense of control in worlds that rarely extend it to them freely. When institutional structures fail to make space for our futures, we build meaning elsewhere, in patterns, rituals and coincidences.
When we are so often told we can’t do something simply because we are women, or of a certain race, delusion becomes both an escape and a form of resistance. A quiet insistence that there might still be more waiting for us than we are being offered.
Believing in concepts like soulmates is one such soft but prevalent delusion. Wanting to be loved in a way that feels unmistakable and chosen, even when every experience suggests otherwise, rests on the belief that we are special and that something good should eventually come to us. But when so little good seems to exist in a world where even control over our own bodies is so often contested, negotiated or taken away, these beliefs take on a different weight.
In this context, romantic delusion is less about naïveté and more about endurance. It becomes a way of holding onto hope in a landscape that frequently feels hostile, unequal and out of our control. We imagine soulmates, choose auspicious dates to wed, and search for signs that love, too, might be written for us somewhere.
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