I'm as imaginative, creative, willing to fantasize, or naively capable of getting caught up in a compelling story or dream-like narrative as the next guy. There are a great many things I want to believe. That's what moves you, after all. Your genuine, unadulterated and compelling belief in your most hopeful mind's eye. It compels believers into cockpits, buildings. It makes you sappy and pliable after the hundredth re-watch of your favorite movie. It's what chills your spine and coaxes the tears over the edge after the perfect lyrics land on every overloaded sense. And, what a gift, the nature of your existence will do nearly everything it can to keep you from distinguishing troublesome “reality” from every imaginable world you might otherwise occupy.
I think I use my imagination differently. If it's most often an escape, I force mine to explore. My imagination is for running experiments, not pretending. My imagination prompts a search for what action steps I can take to bring it from abstract obscurity into lived and worked demonstrability. I feel trapped, in a sense, in my sense of reality. However I define it. Whatever peace I make with it. It's mine alone. Just like I'll be the only one who writes this. “Me” is trapped by these words, the impressions I leave, and the consequences that follow.
I force my imagination to work. I don't sit around and daydream at “random.” I watch “everything.” I let myself play like the characters on TV. I try to trap what I imagine into what seems possible. If you go about this the wrong way, very little indeed seems possible. If you refuse to trap anything, nothing really is.
We find ourselves trapped in many stories, but can't imagine acknowledging them. We trap ourselves behind big words left deliberately undefined. We trap ourselves within titles meant to do the work of what they're supposed to represent. We box ourselves in to genres quickly parsed by the algorithms more than capable of predicting what you'd like to surround yourself with next. You don't imagine you're trapped because, what else is there? We're thankful for our stories, no? We enjoy relaying our tastes and the warm familiar narratives we've built upon for generations.
Besides, doesn't “trap” make it sound like someone or something set you up? What? Do you think someone is trying to catch you? Or, maybe you take much comfort in how much every trap, humane or otherwise, is just part of your god's plan, and it's your job to fall in, not question. Whether you fall in to a pit of vipers or fall in love, fate is the wind to ride well above analysis. Why, if you're feeling or claiming you're been trapped by a story or ten, wouldn't you know it, just tell yourself a different one.
As someone claiming consciousness, I feel it is existentially imperative to identify and determine as many narratives as may constitute me as are relevant to a worthwhile existence. This is no small task. It's literally an infinite game. I'm always looking for myself. I'm looking for myself in how others conduct themselves. I'm looking for myself in how others tell stories. I'm looking for who is laughing. I'm looking at what and whether you're working. I'm listening for if you're bothering to speak at all.
It's only natural that so much of what I imagine is provoked by TV. It hasn't been until relatively recently (the last 2 years,) I've been able to do much beyond remain focused on providing myself a new floor to imagine from. Whatever you might say about how poorly my ex and I communicated, it was at least clear to me how directly my actions and motivation arose from a desire to help her. I have my latest dream, at least, a strong resemblance of it, so I'm trying to live it and create new things. Whether I'm imagining having the kinds of relationships on screen, or turning over the work to evolve what's displayed on my security cameras, the narrative is important.
I think it takes a big broken imagination to pretend you can “control the narrative.” It's the first move from someone wholly petrified by the responsibility and enormity of their individual task. It's so encapsulating a fear, we formalize it in fascist governance and are born predisposed to the psychological protection it offers. Tell me, do I look “controlled” when I'm searching my imagination in blogs? Perhaps when I'm lashing out or dissecting some forgone fight, inevitable given my disposition? Maybe I seek some kind of security in obscurity, and that's why nothing I say could possibly be understood. Easy to maintain a high-minded conception of yourself if you leave them always incapable of knowing what to criticize.
The narrative is important as long as you wish to get somewhere. Directions that take you in circles are for those that wish only to be dizzy. I wish to not only habitually redefine myself, but see it manifest in the world. I wish to remain worried if I'm fading before I'm due. I wish to imagine myself getting earned attention for doing work I believe in for people I respect...as people, if little else. I want to ride the flow that turns the work into every reason to live and spread the gospel of what's so amazing about now.
Lately, I've been feeling the squeeze, not of precious loved ones, but of what the TV stories and my own memories suggest they are supposed to represent. The TV gives you the lines, the enemy, and inconclusive conclusions. The memories get to marinate in idyllic spices and pair beautifully with wine you're prepared to drink too much of. I have a romantic imagination. It's a romance unacquainted with work and untainted by reality. I am able to recognize my imagination for what it is. It's an engine for desire, even lust. It's a place where the temptation to stop working feels altogether appropriate. It's a place betraying its own power by provoking me to call it a “trap.”
I can accept atrocity. So far, I've yet to be so traumatized that I need a permanent “escape” in some form of psychotic break or habitual chemically-induced alteration. I can talk myself into anything, but I can only work in service to so much. What I work on needs to bring about the consequences of what I deem worth doing, not what was most likely to happen whether or not I was there. That's my center and sanity. Everything I bear witness to while I write this is my work, from the stolen plush Steak N Shake claw machine animals holding up my faux insulation blankets to my tick-and-worm-free cat sleeping on my leg. If nothing else proves true, not even your impression of my view, the work to bring this picture into focus means more to me than words will ever capture.
Existence makes a lot more sense when you flirt with whatever makes up the feelings that tell you you need to. It's not the same as being carried away and horny or borrowing from tropes you're allegedly feeling regarding your offspring or insecurities. When you need to make sense of something and you need it to look and feel a certain way in order for all of the problems related to it to make sense as well, you change. You're not a default character. No one can just play you and press your buttons for predictable moves. It becomes insufferable that someone would choose to waste what you've made out of your character in service to their fantasy and ill-attended work. That they would reduce you to their mood or gossip and remain blind to the drive and work that justifies your being; it's like being invited into a suicide pact.
Then what? You rob them of their agency and reduce them to caricatures and cliches as well? You try to hold them responsible to your standards? You piss off and do your own thing? You linger, long enough for it to feel forced, on all of the things you just said meant so much to you? Try to squeeze the precious meaning and motivation for all it's worth when every new foray provokes apoplectic anxiety that perhaps nothing has made sense ever and your oft misconstrued narratives are ultimately suicidal.
My imagination is suffocated by what I don't know. I can't work with what I don't know. I can't fit a missing piece into a puzzle with an indefinite amount of pieces. I can't imagine “fixes” to undefined “problems.” I can't see the road I'm to travel if I'm stuck on a true-believer's doomed plane. What does that leave me with what I must believe about myself? What does that say about what has to be said in order for me to feel like I exist? Would I believe in me if I weren't fighting? Would I trust work I haven't done? Am I to be swept up by all manner of words. however you wish to deploy them. against the ethics and sensibilities I've decided to exist in service to embodying? I want to work, and it takes no work at all to merely exploit. Is there anything so exploited as the story we tell ourselves?
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