We All Rise.
Along I-25 between Denver and Cheyenne, a secret, craggy, earthborn castle rises from the windswept plain. The rock formation juts up defiantly, a tiny reminder of its behemoth brethren sixty miles to the west. When you drive by, you might wonder what it is. Unless you blink. Then you probably miss it.
When I was thirteen, my father took my family to scramble on those rocks. We scampered up the steep embankment and slipped between the tight crevices guarding its entrance. We hurtled over boulders and scaled the insides of the castle walls until we stood on their crests, gazing out at the prairie beyond.
Laughing in exhilaration, my little brother and sister bound down one of the walls and into the deepest hollow. They looked up at us with huge grins, each too young then to realize how deep the pit was.
They tried jumping. They tried running up the wall. My parents asked each other if there was rope in the car. My father lay on his stomach on the edge of the pit and stretched to reach my them. My brother reached up, but the depression was too deep for their fingers to touch. Finally, my father climbed into the hole and lifted out my siblings. My mom caught their skinny arms and hauled them the rest of the way onto the ledge. Finally, my father scoped out an egress route from the bottom of the pit. With a running leap, he grasped a rocky protrusion part of the way up the side and managed to escape.
Some people call the romance genre an escape. They're right, but not because of escapism.Â
The romance genre is more than an escape. It's a hundred ways up. A thousand ways out.
Romance heroines face the same things we do--fear, loneliness, rejection, loss, hopelessness, disbelief in love, a crisis of self-worth. They run up the walls of their personal crises. They leap toward the tops of their pits. They assess every possible egress route. They search for rope. They call for help.
As we--alongside our heroines--test out connection and brave honesty and assess bad situations and search for reasons to trust and embrace self-worth, we too learn new ways to escape our own life hollows and depressions.
The romance genre teaches us a thousand escapes so that we can find the ones that work for us in real life.
Our romance heroines always win, and when we feel their wins, we're reminded to chase our own.
Because the romance genre teaches us how to escape.
Because in romance, we all rise.