Growing up, I spent most of my time reading books. Two of my absolute favourites are by Enid Blyton: Five Run Away Together and The Secret Island. Both books are about groups of literal children — and, in the case of one group, a dog — who flee mean relatives by escaping to deserted islands.
Once there, they grow food, build homes in caves and groves of trees, and spend their days tanning in the sun and exploring the islands. Who wouldn’t want that? The idea of leaving society behind to live off the land with my closest friends appealed to me at age seven, and it definitely still appeals now.
At seven, I was kind of obsessed with the idea of living off the land. For months, I worked on building a tree fort at school during lunch hour; it was actually really cool, but the school called it a safety hazard and got rid of it. I think that most of my fascination was just a result of a desire for freedom and independence, rather than a need to escape.
Now that I’m an adult with freedom and independence, saving pictures of girls in meadows wearing pretty dresses and cute little homes in the forest to my Pinterest boards is definitely a form of escapism.
To be honest, life just feels so fast. I’m constantly scrambling to meet assignment deadlines, spending hours a day in Zoom meetings, and trying to figure out how I can maintain some semblance of a social life. That’s all aside from the constant, emotionally-crushing nightly news, which seems to play a constant loop of racist cops, increasing COVID-19 cases, and Donald Trump.
Now, in addition to all of the stress that I feel has been plaguing me for years, I’m stuck in my basement apartment with tiny windows and in small parks with grey skies. Toronto feels pretty darn drab this time of year.
The stress of a pandemic, the fact that I feel like I’m stuck on a highway with a broken-down car, and my lack of life outside mean that, now more than ever, I’m sinking into a fantasy.
My personal vision of cottagecore is this: I live — perhaps with someone I love, a dog, and some close friends — in a small house at the edge of a forest. I have a big garden where I grow vegetables and another where slightly overgrown flowers and trees wind around a path, perhaps a bench or two off to the side.
Flowers sprout from window boxes, and the windows, which are large, numerous, and segmented, are always open. The air smells like summer, and I hang our clothes to dry in the backyard. I wear a uniform of sundresses and pass my days gardening, reading, and baking pies from scratch. We go on picnics and talk about philosophy and take photos on film.
Some of this fantasy is based on happy memories: time spent with friends in the summer, when we didn’t have school to worry about and could go on adventures. Most of it, however, is kind of a manifestation of a feeling of fulfillment that I don’t feel that I’ve ever achieved.
I suppose some of this vision is attainable — maybe I could have a house like this someday, somewhere warmer than Canada, with lots of days of sun. I could plant vegetables and flowers, and I know how to bake pies from scratch. But the rest of it, the idea of a life in which I don’t need to constantly work so that I don’t starve to death, is only realistic if I marry into money — if you’re rich, call me.
Cottagecore seems to stem, for me at least, from a desire to return to simpler times when we were more self-sufficient and not constantly focused on trading our labour for needs and wants, when one’s mind was unbothered by geopolitics and the climate crisis.
There’s also a sense of expectation for this kind of life: if I could only live in my cottagecore fantasy, I would feel complete and fulfilled. The alarm bell that seems to be constantly ringing in my head would cease, leaving my mind quiet and at peace. I would finally be able to stop searching for whatever gives my life meaning. Especially as a U of T student, there is so much pressure to achieve and beat your peers.
Cottagecore seems to free us of these expectations and glorifies a world in which simply existing is good enough.
Maybe I’ll never realize my cottagecore fantasy, but maybe just having a fantasy is good enough. And who knows? Try checking in with me in five years. If I’m lucky, I’ll be living in my forest cottage and you won’t be able to find me.
