Taking Life with Chances

My parents had wallpaper in the guest bathroom that was covered in old-timey pictures. As I sat in there doing my business, I would create stories around them. Sometimes I was convinced they were watching me while I was in the shower.

Then there was the popcorn ceiling in my bedroom. I would stare at it for hours, watching cartoon shapes appear and act out entire shows just for me.

Hell, I even slept with one of my Barbie dolls every night for a week, convinced I’d wake up looking like her.

To this day, I’ll still find shapes, characters, and cartoons in the patterns on walls, carpet, and just about anywhere else.

I also create huge stories in my head around the most ordinary things. I’ll be walking through the grocery store with my earbuds in, picturing everyone suddenly breaking out into a choreographed dance. I’ll kill time people watching over a solo breakfast, in a park, or at the airport, creating entire backstories for complete strangers.

A teacher of mine in junior high recognized pretty quickly how vivid my imagination was. He would hand me random pictures and ask me to create stories around them, and I loved every second of it. He was my favorite teacher, and it felt like he understood me more than any other teacher I had. Maybe even more than my parents at the time.

Years later, I worked with a therapist who would ask me to create stories about the life I wanted, to paint a picture of the future I was working toward. Once again, it was something I genuinely looked forward to.

The older I get, the more I realize this isn’t something I’ve ever outgrown.

I’m actually trying to lean into it more.

Writing has become another place where that part of my brain gets to play. I think it’s also one of the reasons I love festivals so much. They’re full of creativity, characters, costumes, music, and people who aren’t afraid to be a little weird. It feels like stepping into one of the worlds my imagination would have created anyway.

Lately I’ve found myself wondering where all of this came from.

Was I simply born this way?

Or did my imagination become even bigger because of the things I experienced growing up? Was it my mind’s way of processing trauma? A way to disappear into a world where I felt safe when I didn’t always feel safe in the real one?

Maybe it’s both.

I don’t know.

I do know that I’ve spent my entire life creating stories.

Sometimes they start with wallpaper.

Sometimes they start with a popcorn ceiling.

I giggle now because apparently this is called manifestation.

Back in my day, it was just having an overly active mind.