When Wonderland Broke

I was ten years old when I first stumbled into Wonderland.

Every week, our school had something called Library Period. We were given a list of books to choose from because, at that age, most of us wouldn’t have known what to pick on our own.

One afternoon, a particular cover caught my eye. There was a little girl in a blue dress, a rabbit wearing a coat, a grinning cat, a mouse and a handful of playing cards. Looking back, it seems like an ordinary children’s book cover.

To ten-year-old me, it was irresistible.

I remember being fascinated by the rabbit. Rabbits weren’t supposed to wear coats. That tiny detail was enough to make me wonder what kind of world this book belonged to. I chose it without knowing that the decision would quietly shape the next three decades of my life.

The rule in school was simple. We had one week to read the book and submit a short summary to prove we had actually read it. I was already an avid reader, so the moment I got home, I opened the book.

From the very first page, I was captivated. Alice wasn’t fearless. She spent most of the story confused, asking questions and trying to understand a world that made no sense. Yet she never stopped walking. She kept moving forward, even when she had no idea where the next path would lead.

I didn’t realise it then, but I think I recognised myself in her. Like Alice, I was trying to make sense of a world where I often felt out of place.

School was difficult for me — not because I struggled academically, but because I struggled to belong. I was talkative, curious and hopelessly enthusiastic about books. I would spend recess telling classmates about Wonderland, the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts.

Most of them weren’t interested. But that wasn’t the hardest part.

Somewhere along the way, I became an easy target. Whenever friendships fell apart, whenever someone was angry, whenever life didn’t go their way, I somehow became the person they took it out on. Looking back now, I don’t even think many of them realised how deeply their words and actions affected me.

I wasn’t physically bullied. In some ways, I think what happened was harder to explain.

Words can wound. Exclusion can wound. Being made to feel like you don’t matter can wound.

I dreaded recess. I learnt how to laugh when people laughed at me. I learnt how loneliness sounds in a classroom full of children. All I wanted was to be friends with everyone. I wasn’t trying to be popular. I simply wanted to belong!!

Somehow, it always felt as though everyone else knew the rules of a game I had never learnt to play.

Even today, although I enjoy being around people, there are moments when I still feel disconnected. Many of my classmates remained close friends long after school ended. I never really became part of that circle. Even after all these years, those memories still hurt.

Wonderland became the first place where being different didn’t feel like a flaw. Alice was different from everyone she met. The White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat — none of them were ordinary. Yet somehow, among all that madness, Alice belonged. And somehow, so did I.

I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland over and over again. Even today, in my thirties, It remains one of my favourite books, surpassed only by The Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird. Every few months, almost instinctively, I find myself opening it again. The pages have become familiar, almost like revisiting an old friend who has known every version of me.

Wonderland never grew old because I discovered something new every time I returned.

My favourite character was always Alice. But I also loved the Mad Hatter. As a child, I couldn’t explain why. I simply found him wonderfully strange and endlessly entertaining.

Looking back now, I think I finally understand. People laughed at him before they tried to understand him. I knew what that felt like.

Bullying doesn’t always leave bruises. Sometimes it leaves silence. Sometimes it is being left out of conversations. Sometimes it is watching everyone choose someone else. Sometimes it is becoming the joke without knowing why. Sometimes it is feeling tolerated rather than wanted.

Those wounds don’t appear in photographs, but they stay with you for years. Even now, decades later, certain memories from school still make my heart race. They remind me that emotional pain can settle into the body long after the events themselves have passed.

Wonderland became my refuge during those years. Every few months, I found myself returning — not because I had forgotten the story, but because I needed to remember how it made me feel. Whenever life became too heavy, I knew I could return to Alice.

In Wonderland, being different wasn’t something to hide. In fact, everyone was different. A rabbit wore a coat and worried about being late. A cat disappeared while smiling. A tea party never ended. Cards came to life. A queen solved every problem by shouting, “Off with their heads!”

Nothing made sense. And somehow, everything did.

Alice herself fascinated me for another reason. She never mocked the people she met, no matter how strange they appeared. She treated them with curiosity rather than cruelty. I admired that about her then, and I admire it even more now.

Somewhere deep inside me, I have always longed for harmony more than victory, and for peace more than being right. Looking back now, I think Wonderland wasn’t an escape from reality. It was a place that quietly told me it was okay to be different.

There was another character who stayed with me in a quieter way — the Caterpillar. As a child, I simply enjoyed his mysterious questions. As an adult, I see him differently. The Caterpillar never carried Alice. He never fought her battles or showed her the entire path ahead. He simply reminded her to keep walking and to keep searching for herself.

As I grew older, I realised there was someone else I looked to in much the same way. For me, that has always been Jesus Christ. Unlike every other person I have admired, He is the only one I believe is without fault. My Catholic faith has never promised me a life free from pain, but it has reminded me that I never have to walk through that pain alone. Like the Caterpillar, it has quietly pointed me in the right direction whenever I have lost my way. I am far from perfect. I have questioned, doubted, failed and struggled more times than I can count. Yet my faith has never removed the storms. It has simply helped me keep walking through them.

Then, in 2010, when I had just turned twenty, Tim Burton brought Alice in Wonderland to the big screen. His Alice was older and very different from the little girl I had grown up with, but I was simply happy to see Wonderland come alive on the silver screen. Six years later, Alice Through the Looking Glass was released. Ironically, it wasn’t the film that changed everything. It was what I discovered afterwards.

Like most people, I started reading articles about Lewis Carroll. I wanted to know more about the man who had created the world that had meant so much to me. Instead, I found myself tumbling down a very different rabbit hole. Article after article spoke about his relationships with children, particularly little girls. There were discussions about Alice Liddell, the child who inspired the fictional Alice. There were references to photographs he had taken, debates about Victorian attitudes towards childhood, accusations, counterarguments, historians defending him, historians questioning him.

The deeper I searched, the more confused I became. I spent hours reading. One article led to another. Another led to a discussion. A discussion led to old photographs. Photographs led to academic papers.

Before I realised it, I had followed every rabbit hole I could find. Only this time, Wonderland wasn’t waiting for me at the end. I came back gasping for breath.

What shocked me wasn’t simply the possibility that Lewis Carroll might not have been the man I had imagined. It was the realisation that my safest place suddenly felt uncertain. People often ask whether we should separate the artist from the art.

For me, that wasn’t the question. The question was much more painful. Could I separate my childhood from the person who had unknowingly shaped it? Alice had carried me through years when I felt invisible. She had sat beside me when classmates made me feel like I didn’t belong. Those wounds were never dramatic enough to make headlines. Nobody hit me. Nobody shoved me into lockers. But being excluded, laughed at, dismissed and constantly made to feel like you don’t quite belong can leave scars that stay with you long after childhood ends.

Wonderland had always been the place I escaped to when those scars hurt. Now, for the first time in my life, even Wonderland felt… complicated.

That broke me.

Not because I suddenly stopped loving Alice. And not because I had reached a final conclusion about Lewis Carroll. In truth, after years of reading, I still don’t know exactly where history ends and speculation begins. Some facts are well documented. Others are interpreted very differently by different historians. I don’t claim to have the answers.

But certainty was never what I lost. I lost innocence. For years, I had believed that Wonderland existed untouched by the imperfections of the real world. Suddenly, the real world had followed me down the rabbit hole. For a long time, I thought I had lost Wonderland. I even wondered if I should stop reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Every time I looked at the book on my shelf, I remembered the articles, the debates and the questions that had sent me spiralling down a rabbit hole of my own.

But time has a way of changing how we see things. Today, I still don’t have all the answers about Lewis Carroll. Perhaps I never will. History is rarely as simple as we would like it to be. Facts matter, but so do the limits of what we can know. I have learned to live with those unanswered questions instead of pretending they don’t exist.

What I do know is this. The comfort that Alice gave a lonely ten-year-old girl was real. The courage she inspired was real. The refuge Wonderland became during years of feeling like I didn’t belong was real. No historical discovery can rewrite those moments. When I was a child, I wasn’t reading Lewis Carroll. I was walking beside Alice.

She taught me that it was possible to keep moving even when everything around me seemed confusing. She showed me that curiosity was not a weakness, that being different wasn’t something to apologise for, and that sometimes the strangest places become the ones where we feel most at home. The Mad Hatter still reminds me that people who are misunderstood deserve kindness before judgement. The Caterpillar still reminds me to keep asking difficult questions and to keep searching for who I am. My Catholic faith continues to be that quiet voice that steadies me whenever old wounds reopen. It has never erased the pain, but it has taught me how to carry it with hope.

So, do I still love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? Yes. Not because I have ignored the uncomfortable questions surrounding its author. And not because I have found satisfying answers to all of them. I love it because it saved something in me when I needed saving.

Sometimes we spend so much time asking whether we should separate the artist from the art that we forget another question altogether. Can we honour what a story gave us without pretending its creator was perfect? I think we can.

Because stories do something remarkable. Once they are released into the world, they no longer belong only to the person who wrote them. They belong to the people who found pieces of themselves inside them. Wonderland no longer belongs only to Lewis Carroll.

Part of it belongs to every child who followed a rabbit wearing a coat, every dreamer who felt out of place, every lonely reader who found a friend in a little girl who kept walking despite not knowing where the path would lead.

It certainly belongs to the ten-year-old girl who picked up a book simply because the cover looked interesting. She didn’t know she was choosing a story that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

And if I could meet her today, I wouldn’t tell her to put the book back on the shelf.

I’d simply smile… …and let her follow the White Rabbit one more time.