I Seem to be Suffering Mittyesque-ness

I seem to be suffering mittyesque-ness
Escaping real life with daydreams
Unable to cope with reality
Is my world coming apart at the seams?

I’m defined as an ineffectual person
Spending more time playing heroes in thought
Than spending more time in the real world
Or convincing others something I’m not



Don Matthews
March 2021




Walter Mitty is a fictional character in James Thurber‘s first short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty“, first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939. Thurber loosely based the character, a daydreamer, on himself. 

Mitty is a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life. In a few dozen paragraphs, he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Although the story has humorous elements, there is a darker and more significant message underlying the text, leading to a more tragic interpretation of the Mitty character. Even in his heroic daydreams, Mitty does not triumph, several fantasies being interrupted before the final one sees Mitty dying bravely in front of a firing squad. In the brief snatches of reality that punctuate Mitty’s fantasies, the reader meets well-meaning but insensitive strangers who inadvertently rob Mitty of some of his remaining dignity.