Interview: Why Grow Up When You Can Glow Up? Mitchell Royel and the Art of Playful Resistance

There is a photograph — not posed, not lit for consumption — that someone snapped on what looked like an ordinary afternoon. Mitchell Royel is sitting on a sofa covered in a riot of color, face half-hidden, wearing a wonderfully absurd patchwork hat and denim overalls. Nearby, his babysitter stands apart, giving him space. The room is full of toys. The day, by all accounts, had been spent doing exactly what the scene suggests: playing. Genuinely, thoroughly, without irony, playing.

It is not a complicated image. That's what makes it complicated.

Because Mitchell Royel is a grown man. And the shame that attaches itself to a grown man spending a whole day in imaginative play — being babysat, letting someone else hold the room while he disappears into a game — is something he has spent years learning to carry, and longer learning to put down.

What follows is a conversation about that day, that room, and the ongoing fight to keep playing when the world has decided you are too old for it.

Q&A

There's a photo from a day you spent being babysat — a whole day of imaginative play. How does it feel to have that out in the world, even vaguely?

Honestly? Like exhaling. I've spent so long treating that part of my life like something to manage, something to keep just out of frame. And then there's this image — just a real moment, a real afternoon — and it's kind of a relief that it exists. Because it's true. That day happened. The play happened. And I'm tired of pretending it didn't.

Walk me through what a day like that looks like. A full day of imaginative play, with a babysitter holding the space.

It looks like absolute freedom, and it also looks like a lot of internal noise getting quiet. My babysitter takes care of the logistics — meals, time, all the grown-up scaffolding — and I just get to exist inside the game. We build things. We make up scenarios. We give voices to characters. Some of it is ridiculous. Most of it is ridiculous. But there's this point, maybe an hour in, where the shame stops broadcasting and I'm just — there. Present. Playing. That's the whole goal.

You said the shame stops broadcasting. What is it broadcasting before that?

The usual. You're too old. This is embarrassing. What would people think if they saw you right now. That loop runs pretty loudly at the start of a play day. Even when I'm with someone I completely trust — someone whose whole job, in that moment, is to make the room safe — my brain still runs the tape. It takes time to get past it. But getting past it is the point. The shame doesn't get a veto.

Why a babysitter specifically? Why not just — play on your own?

Because play on your own, when you carry this much shame around it, is incredibly hard. There's no one to anchor you. You're alone with the voice, and the voice usually wins. Having a babysitter — having someone who has said, explicitly, I'm here, I've got the day, you don't have to manage anything — changes everything. The permission isn't just symbolic. It's structural. They hold the frame so I can go inside the picture.

That's a very particular kind of trust. Not everyone in your life would understand what they're being asked to hold.

No. And finding that person — someone who doesn't flinch, who doesn't make it weird, who can hand you a toy and let you treat it as completely real without their face doing the thing — that's rare. My babysitter gets it. There's no commentary. No sideways look. They're just — present. And that presence is the whole thing. That's the entire engine.

When did you start doing this? The full play days, the babysitting arrangement?

Slowly. Carefully. I'd been doing smaller versions of it for years — bits of imaginative play here and there, preschool-level creative exercises when I was stuck, that kind of thing. But the full day, with structure and a babysitter and real commitment to it? That came later, after I'd been honest with myself about what I actually needed. Which was not sophisticated. Which was just — someone to watch the door while I played.

What does imaginative play actually look like for you? What are we talking about?

We're talking about building scenarios from nothing. Deciding a room has rules the rest of the world doesn't have. Making something up and following it all the way to the end. Sometimes it involves props. Sometimes it's entirely verbal — a story we're both inside of. Sometimes it's very simple, almost preschool simple, and those days are often the best ones. The simpler the game, the closer I get to the thing I'm actually after.

Which is?

The feeling of being completely in something. No audience management. No performing. No version of myself calculating how this looks from the outside. Just — in it. That's the thing imaginative play gives you that almost nothing else does. The self-consciousness goes offline. You stop watching yourself and start being yourself. It happens faster when someone else is in the room who you trust. And with a babysitter, by definition, you're being looked after. The watching is kind. That changes the whole equation.

You've described play days as difficult to explain to people. What do they get wrong?

They assume it's quirky. Or they assume it's therapy. Or they assume it's a creative technique — something professional and purposeful that I've dressed up in childlike clothes. And sometimes those things are true. But mostly it's simpler and stranger than any of that. I'm an adult who finds imaginative play genuinely nourishing and who needs a babysitter to access it fully because the shame is too loud to do it alone. That sentence doesn't have a comfortable box. People want there to be a box.

Have people in your life given you the look about it?

The look. Yes. I know that look well. It's the one that's trying to be kind while also telegraphing: this is a little much, don't you think? I used to fold immediately. Someone's eyebrow would go up and I'd start walking it back — making it a joke, calling it research, putting ironic distance between me and the thing I actually meant. Irony is the emergency exit. The bravery is staying in the room without using it.

How do you stay in the room?

Practice. And my babysitter. Genuinely — having someone who doesn't reach for irony, who treats the game as real because I'm treating the game as real, makes it so much easier to hold my ground when the shame flares up. If they're not flinching, I can breathe. I can keep going. It's contagious, the not-flinching. That's what a good babysitter does. Not just the logistics. The modeling.

Do you think the stigma around this is getting better?

In some directions. There's more conversation about adult play, about rest, about not building your entire identity around productivity. But the specific thing — an adult who wants to be babysat, who wants full imaginative play days, who needs that kind of care — that still lands wrong for most people. The babysat part. That word. It has a weight. People hear it and they skip straight to judgment before they've heard anything else.

What would you want them to hear instead?

That care is not childish. That needing someone to hold the frame so you can be fully present inside an experience — that's not regression. That's intelligence. The people who never need that, who are always self-sufficient, always performing adulthood without assistance — I don't think they're stronger than me. I think they're just better at pretending they don't need what I need. Which is also its own kind of loss.

Last question. That photograph — whatever people read into it — what does that day mean to you?

That day means I got there. Past the voice. Past the heat in the neck. Past the look I was pre-imagining before anyone had even looked. I was in a room with someone who had my afternoon, and I played. Really played. With the hat on and the toys out and no apology for any of it. And if someone happened to catch it in a frame — the patchwork hat, the overalls, the slightly chaotic sofa, my babysitter holding their own kind of quiet in the background — I hope what comes across is not the strangeness. I hope what comes across is how completely, embarrassingly, wonderfully worth it the whole thing was.

That photograph — whatever you read into it, whatever made you look twice — tells a simpler story than it appears to. A man in a colorful hat on a colorful sofa. Someone else in the room, facing away, giving him space. An afternoon spent inside imagination, under someone's quiet, unhurried care.

Mitchell Royel didn't build a life around play because it was easy. He built it that way because it was the truest thing he knew, and because he was stubborn enough — or honest enough, or both — to keep doing it after the world told him to stop. The babysitter holds the room. The hat goes on. The game begins again.

He's still fighting the shame. He'll say so without hesitation. But every play day is another round won — and the score, slowly, is starting to shift.