my therapist diagnosed me with a severe case of an imaginative mind
from reflecting about my old self narrative and working towards rewriting it
My therapist diagnosed me with a severe case of an imaginative mind.
This was the first time she ever stopped me, in the middle of one of my stories. I could see it in her eyes, though.
They were not static, as they usually are. She was connecting the dots, thinking back to all of my stories, and how, for the most part, they are rooted in my imagination.
The story that sparked this happened this summer, during a late night of dancing at Wynwood, with a close friend. We were on the lookout for a spot that was free of charge, which is how we ended up at this place with red neon lights and old reggaetón songs.
I closed my eyes, felt the music, and laughed with my friend. On and on. Until someone tapped my shoulder. Daniel. He was Colombian. Paisa.
“Do you want to dance?” He said in Spanish, and I hesitated. Should I? Why? What’s next in this story? What’s going to happen when we dance, when we are done, when I put my phone to charge before I go to bed on my friend’s mattress in North Miami?
“I don’t know,” I hear myself say. I didn’t know the answer to these questions. He leaves. I think, and think, and think. Was this going to be a story?
That’s when my therapist stops me.
She says I am trying to fit a movie structure into my life experiences. She says every story is a story. What type of story am I looking for?
I look at the elephant painting on my wall in the back, reflected through my computer screen, while I ignore her square on the Zoom call.
I look at the opaque color of the wall. I look to my side, my unmade bed. My journal. All of the stories or imaginations I’ve written down.
I think about my virtual friend, how I felt things for him. How I imagined a lot of things, how I crafted things in my head that came crashing down in California this summer.
I think about the pressure I felt in my stomach when my imagination failed me.
My idealized version of the truth almost materializes and its decomposition kills me. Again, and again, and again.
My heart gets used to being torn apart, it gets used to functioning with a hole in it, and repairing itself with clandestine stitches.
But this time, while my thoughts try to leave my conscious brain, I close the door. I invite them in.
“Take a seat,” I say. Some sit down, cross their legs. Some light a cigarette, someone hits a joint, some are awkward. Trying to hide.
Regardless of their state, they materialize in front of me.
And, they get along.
Just as if they were all making fun of me.
These imaginations, deceptions, one-sided creations, almost obsessions.
Some are connected to each other, in different levels. Alexander, I think, from Space Club in Miami. He wanted to dance with me, but I didn’t. He was just a vessel of memory this summer, back to deception. Back to this other person.
I think about Batman and how much this person from months ago looked like Batman and how much fun I had thinking of telling others this person I liked looked like Batman and my favorite shoes are Batman Converse and I told him he looked like Batman and we had inside jokes and he said he’d love to hear me sing one day and he said and he wrote and he looked and he didn’t and he stopped and he left.
The door opened. An imagination was done.
I dwell in my imaginations longer than their actual duration. And it hurts me. I love generating material, getting inspired, taking risks. But, accumulating imaginations that never materialize feels fatal.
So, I stop looking around my room. Within the room of imaginations, of people from airports, from websites, from dark corners, from odd places. I look back at my therapist.
“I’ve always thought no one is ever going to like me like he never did,” I say.
The truth. The truth goes back to the only relationship I’ve ever had as a 10-year-old girl with a boy who stopped talking to me because I was too weird. After that happened, his words haunted me to craft this false narrative.
That afternoon in my Miami room, in my pajamas, with that elephant painting in the back, my journal in my bed, my therapist in front of me, I realized a hard truth.
I’ve been trying to prove again and again that I can be liked and that maybe he was wrong. Ha!
The anchor reaches the bottom of my stomach’s ocean, and it makes a hard sound.
I wake up.
I know I must do the daily work of rewriting the narrative of my self-perception. And I make the decision to do so, for the first time in my life.
Because these imaginations, the yearning behind them, it all holds meaning. I just always see impossibility in them, and of course, I dwell in any possible story.
I dwell in any possible story because any trial feels like the EUREKA!
It feels like reaching the bottom of my experiment. So, I neglect myself. I am disrespected. I make up extraordinary stories about the ordinary. I am okay with anything.
Now, I am committing to living and connecting and imagining.
But this time, imagining because it feels extraordinary. Because it is for me. I am committed to genuinely believing that I can fall in love and someone can fall in love with me because I am a unique person, just the way that I am.
With the weird, the extra, the feelings, the emotions, my personality.
I am extraordinary and deserve someone who appreciates my imaginary mind, but who doesn’t live in it.