I’m reminded of the Gnostic myth of Sophia—the divine wisdom who fell from the pleroma into the chaos of matter. In her descent, she became fragmented, confused, alienated from the divine order. And yet, in that descent, something miraculous happened: the world as we know it began to take shape. In the act of falling apart, she birthed the very conditions for our myth-making. For our becoming.

That’s what this idea feels like to me. World-building as self-care is what Sophia might do while trying to remember herself.

Because for many of us—especially the neurodivergent, the creatively wired, the queer-coded, the spiritually unsatisfied—this world as given doesn’t fit. It was not built with us in mind. Its default settings are alien to our inner logic. The rules are arbitrary, the categories too brittle, the norms stifling. And so, like any exiled wizard or wayward wanderer, we begin to build our own world—bit by bit, like a crow collecting shiny bits for its nest.

We name things differently.
We invent new rituals.
We form new constellations out of scattered stars.
We write our own taxonomies—not for academic approval, but for soul survival.

It’s not escapism. It’s not delusion. It’s a kind of metaphysical housekeeping. When the outer world doesn’t offer shelter, the inner world rises to the occasion.

There’s a tenderness to this process. A sacred weirdness.
It’s zine-making as spellwork.
It’s Notion dashboards that feel like altars.
It’s the playlist you made for your shadow self.
It’s the handmade website where every page feels like a secret room you left ajar for fellow travellers to find.

Even our obsessions—those deep dives into micro-niches and aesthetics and alternate philosophies—aren’t just hobbies. They’re home-making instincts. Like a hermit crab seeking a better-fitting shell, we construct spaces where we can breathe. Where our full selves can stretch out and exist without apology.

And yes, it confuses people sometimes.
Why rename everything?
Why invent frameworks no one asked for?
Why spend days designing imaginary systems that no one will ever grade?

Because it’s how we stay here. How we stay sane.
Because if we don’t name the world in our own language, it starts speaking to us in someone else’s voice.
And that voice—loud, normative, impersonal—drowns out the quiet, weird music of our being.

I think of this practice as a kind of ontological jazz.
We riff on reality.
We bend symbols.
We remix sacred texts with memes and memory and myth.
We’re not just escaping—
we’re reconfiguring.

World-building as self-care is what happens when you treat identity not as a fixed fact, but as a world in the making.

It’s why we invent personas.
Why we map inner landscapes.
Why we give names to moods no language holds.

And at the core of all this building is the yearning to connect.

We don’t build to isolate. We build to bridge.
We build lighthouses out of language.
We build lore so that others might feel a flicker of recognition and whisper, “I thought I was the only one.”

This is how we connect in the world we share—by creating worlds within it.
Not to replace it, but to weave it anew.
To stitch together a tapestry where we, too, belong.

So keep building. Keep naming.
Keep writing the field guides no one asked for but someone desperately needs.

You’re not being extra.
You’re being alive.

Let this be your gentle reminder:
The worlds you build are not a distraction from life.
They are proof that you are still dreaming life into being.

That, my friend, is the deepest act of self-care I know.