Christina Garnett: Remember what the dormouse said?

Marketer Under The Influence: I think it, I think it comes down to, as a child there's this innate need to feel like you belong and that you have your people.

I grew up in a town in North Carolina, and I just from the youngest memory, I remember wanting to escape — not leave, escape.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I am fan girl at heart.

I love all things David Tennant and Neil Gaiman. I love Star Wars. I love Lord of the Rings. I love fantasy. If there's a dragon in it, I am there. I loved Flight of Dragons as a kid. It was my favorite, absolute favorite movie growing up. Um, that and Sleeping Beauty.

And so that's kind of who I've always been. I've been that kid that knew what the world could be, saw what the world was instead, and was like, fine, I'll just read all the books instead. I'll hide there. I'll hide in all of the books.

Christina Garnett: Growing up, I was very much that precocious child that was always raising her hand. I was very, like, Hermione, but if Hermione had a southern accent instead of British.

But I had a horrible kindergarten teacher.

So I was one of, the first people to be excited about school. I could not wait. And I get there, and — the best way to describe Mrs. Haynes is that she was envisioned by Roald Dahl, just this crone of a woman who kind of took the light out of my eyes when growing up.

I'm left handed, and for whatever reason of the time and just being in a southern town, um, my grandparents had to fight for me not to basically be treated like being left handed was a deformity and needed to be corrected.

And so, I kind of went from being very excited about education to being kind of confronted with the idea that I was everything that was wrong. And so, it was very hard for me as a child. I wanted to learn. I wanted to be accepted, just like every kid does.

You can see, you can look at the pictures of me and tell when I went through kindergarten because the light for my eyes kind of disappeared.

I was lucky enough that I kind of had good karma for first and second grade. I had Ms. Garland for first grade and Mr. Roseboro for second grade.

And I remember their names because they all had a very profound impact on me, for better and for worse. Mrs. Haynes because she was evil. And then Mr. Roseburn and Ms. Garland because they were just kindness incarnate.

They were lovely taught me how to read, made me see the world for all that it was and all that it could be, and that if you needed to escape, that books were such a wonderful way to arm yourself and protect yourself from a world that wasn't as good as it could be.

Christina Garnett: So, I came across Alice in Wonderland through, or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland through the movie by Disney first. I even had a little dress when I was three or four years old that was this blue little dress with a white little apron kind of detail and it was my Alice dress.

I read the book, I want to say I was like maybe eight or nine and absolutely fell in love with it.

My dad's a bit of an anglophile, so I kind of was raised on British literature and raised on like British movies and culture and stuff, so it just felt like the kind of perfect world made for me.

What was really interesting was I very much associated myself with Alice. Not just because she's the protagonist — I know that most readers, we tend to immediately cling to the protagonist if there isn't someone that's like us. Because that's our entry point. That's the main character.

But Alice is me in a lot of ways. I know that there's tons of other people who love those book and I won't claim it as my own, but a girl who is doing her best to be good, but is curious at heart, wants to be literally anywhere else from where she grew up, but there is a domineering woman who wants to punish her for just existing.

That was my life, where perfect wasn't good enough.

I think probably the best example of that was my report cards growing up. I grew up in a home where straight A's weren't good enough, so if I made an A it had to be an A. If I made an A, it was like, why don't you have straight 100's? Why aren't you absolutely perfect?

And so, Alice tries really hard in the book to follow the decorums of society. Like, she tries. And it's never good enough. She's gonna be sentenced to, like, off with her head, which is a hyper exaggerated punishment for what she's done.

I felt very much like that as a child because I grew up trying to be perfect. I didn't do drugs. I didn't sneak out. I made straight A's. You never had to worry about me. You never had to ask if my homework was done. Never had to tutor me. Like, we're fine. I'll take care of it myself. I was as close to a self service teenager as you were gonna get. So it just became very obvious growing up that it was never gonna be perfect.

And then Coraline came…

And it's very much, it's very much Neil Gaiman's version of Alice in Wonderland.

I grew up on Hammer Films, so like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are very near and dear to my heart. Like I adore them. And so, a dark version of Alice in Wonderland sounds absolutely made for me. And Neil Gaiman is my favorite writer. So, growing up reading Alice, and then being old enough, I was in college when Coraline came out, and once again, I saw myself in that story — domineering mother, complacent father, you go into the darker world,

And so, once again, hyperbolically, I felt connected. I was like, this is absolutely my story.

I think it's been really profound for my life, because I've had to kind of figure out how do I leave Wonderland. How do I reconcile? Because the life, like the life that I left is still there. Like it's still not ideal. But what can I do to find my own happiness in that world?

Christina Garnett: I know a lot of millennials who are — they don't have a parenting guidebook, they have a what-not-to-do guidebook from their parents.

And that's how I raise my children. I purposefully lead them and treat them the way that I wanted to be treated instead of how I was treated.

It's been really lovely to see like my daughter, I get to see my daughter grow up and see what I would have been like if I had been adored, if I had been taught that like, “Oh, you're curious? That's awesome.That's great. Oh, you want to do that? Do it.” And so I think it's, it's been really, it's been really lovely to see that change.

The best example of that was when I was little and in school, like I said, I was Hermione, so I could win like every single award. But I was talkative. That's the one thing I've always been is talkative in class.

I remember my mom saying, I think I was like in kindergarten or first grade, and she was like, “You're never going to get the citizenship award because they always give that to someone who's quiet and someone that everyone likes. So like, you're never getting that award. You can literally get everything else.”

And she was right. I never got it.

Know, who did get it? My daughter, who does talk in class and is lovely and brilliant and kind and funny as can be and quirky. But she got it. And that felt like the biggest win for me.

Christina Garnett: Everyone has their Alice or their Coraline. It's just: where did you hide? It could have been a video game. It could have been sports. It could have been a movie. It could have been whatever.

But escapism is an intrinsic need.

I mean, we talk about fight or flight all the time. Where is the flight when you can't leave? You're 12, you can't move. What are you gonna do? Run away? They'll just find you the next day and then your life will be even harder because they're gonna punish you on top of how they already treat you.

And so, I think when you're thinking about these books and you're thinking about whether it's a book or a movie or a musical or whatever it is, that when someone is talking about something they genuinely love and their face lights up, it's always tied to something that they use to escape. They're always, whether they realize it or not, they're showing you their safe space.

When someone's telling you what their favorite movies are or what their favorite artist is, they're giving you such a singular cheat code into what matters to them. But we treat it in such a trivial way.

Like, talk about Taylor Swift because everyone's talking about Taylor Swift this year.

There's a lot of girls who've had their heart broken who were told, “That's stupid. Why are you crying? It was just a relationship.” And then you have someone like Taylor Swift who's literally writing like arias about breakups, and elevating that as an entire process. And then it's like, “It's not stupid. It's not trivial. Even Taylor Swift can feel these feelings.”

And so you have a lot of people who put down people based off of what they love, like they're nerds or they're geeks or they're losers because they like this and that. But they've chosen that because that is what they feel connected to. That's what makes me feel safe. That's what makes me feel not alone. That's what makes me feel like I can't make my situation better, but at least I know that I am not alone in feeling that.

And that's something that I am grateful for the internet, as I feel like it's really given a voice for people to share their trauma.

In a world that won't heal them. And so, the only solace you really have is, I can't make you feel better, but I can make you feel less alone.