Do me a favor? Go to your room and stand on your bed. Now--jump. Remember how fun that used to be? It's amazing how I haven't jumped on my bed for years and yet it used to be one of my favorite pastimes. Whenever I'd be taken to a new hotel, testing the bedsprings was the first thing I did. My grandmother has this room with two beds and I remember the funnest thing for me to do was jump from one bed to the other pretending I was a warrior of the Amazon scaling dangerous cliffs and barely escaping the dangerous abysses below. My grandmother also has a tapestry hanging on the wall in the same room. There is an image of a boat gliding through a silvery lake in a dark forest. In that boat are four nearly life-sized figures that belong to, on my guess, the Victorian era. There are two strapping young, aristocratic men on the left side. One is playing a mandolin as the other offers his ballads to the two women on the opposite side. The first woman is standing up so that her pink gown flushes around her in all its Victorian splendor. The lady in pink is coquettishly glancing at the young men as she turns a string of pearls through her fingers. The other young woman is wearing a lavender dress that bunched around her as she sits at the far right end of the boat. Amidst the folds of her dress is a book that has captivated her attention. The eight-year-old version of me found it odd that these women didn't seem to fully appreciate the young men's efforts to woo them. I scorned the lady in pink as she interrupted the mandolin's lyrics with the vulgar strike of pearl upon pearl. Likewise I disliked the lady in lavender who was oblivious to the music altogether as she gave her attention to the sensationalistic fiction in front of her. I distrusted these delicate ladies and I suspected that they were harboring a malicious plot against the young princes. Just around the river's bend, lurked an army of traitors waiting to capture the innocent gentlemen who, although skilled sailors, were unfamiliar with the dangers of the Amazon. I, however, was an Amazon warrior like Xena and it was up to me to save them (especially the Mandolin player whose music had reached my ears). So, night after night, I trekked across the rough terrain of the forest to follow the music. I reached the princes just in time, and although I was muddied and disheveled, they recognized me as their savior as they came to see that the ladies were their foes. In my mind, the princes stepped out of the tapestry and into my grandmother's bedroom and we relived these adventures every summer.
I can't help but smile when I think about the kind of things that ran through my mind at that age. I literally believed in everything. I lived and breathed fairytales. When I went to the beach, I swam with mermaids. Whenever my grandmother took me to the hills in the countryside and I'd see red poppies, I never picked them because I was convinced that Thumbelina was inside. My dog Moni was my faithful knight and my grandmother's chickens were my subjects. I draped bed sheets around the swing that hung from the walnut tree and I imagined that it was a carriage taking me to foreign lands. I understood the language of birds and I believed everyone else around me could too. I believed wholeheartedly that butterflies were fairies and I looked out for dragons in the vineyards. Perhaps Romania (I'm Romanian--I will explain more of this later on) was the perfect landscape for my childhood adventures. Aside from the rich cultural experience it offered me, it was also the place where my imagination was able to develop and run wild.
When I go to Romania now, though, it gets harder and harder to see the fairies and poor Moni died two years ago. I've come to see that the biggest price one pays for entering adulthood is the loss of childhood imagination. The contours of reality seem to sharpen as make-believe loses its vibrancy. When you grow up you start to realize that adults aren't always wise and responsible, there are bad people in the world, there is violence, there is greed, there is hunger, there is tragedy and, a lot of the time, there is no happy ending. I think most people experience this kind of realization when they grow up; for me it was very heartbreaking and very personal. But even so, my childlike-imagination actually survived well into my high school years. That's when I started writing a lot and my imagination still ran very wild. Maybe because I went to a small, private all-girl school, I was sheltered from the bitter realities of life for a longer time. I started learning, little by little, that there were bad things out there- but I was still able to distract myself from them and venture into my own little world. But then college happened. I entered a world where there were so many people that I couldn't keep up with the faces I was seeing and the names I was learning. I felt small and, even though I was surrounded by people, I never felt so alone and insignificant. I suppose this is quite normal, though. But then I experienced even more unromantic things. Although I had always thought about death in theory, I wasn't prepared to think about it when I started losing loved ones. I started seeing that happy marriages are a rare thing. I started seeing that actions are often fueled by interest. I started seeing people around me getting sick. I started seeing the marks of fatigue on people's faces as I learned how endlessly they have to toil to survive. I started to recognize disillusion in the tones of people's voices. I realized how prevalent and how real suffering truly is. I started noticing that I didn't see people as fairy tale characters anymore, they started to seem more and more like strangers that were broken up in hundreds of unintelligible pieces. Harsh reality has been tainting my fiction ever since.
I consider myself lucky, though, because I still have the luxury of remembering a time before the world darkened. I don't mourn the loss of the old world, however, because seeing reality has taught me how to recognize and appreciate all that is beautiful and inspiring. Even though my imagination has suffered terrible blows, I'm trying to adapt to the strange glory of adulthood. My writing, too, has suffered since it's very hard for me to use my imagination when I'm constantly being intimidated by things bigger than myself. Just five minutes of watching the news is enough to depress me and petrify my imagination. But there's a reason why tragedy and comedy exist together. Most of us are familiar with the idea that good and bad cannot exist independently of each other. The reality is that life isn't fair and life isn't always romantic. There will always be tragedy, but experiencing tragedy is part of being human. How we overcome tragedy is where the beauty comes in. And even though a lot of people seem to think there is some sort of universal determinism, I truly think that how we think plays a major part in how our existence is going to be. Henry David Thoreau once said that, "it's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see" and I couldn't agree more.
I was thinking about this the other day when I was thinking about my writing. Maybe I come off as confident or maybe even pretentious, but I'm actually very easily intimidated and very self-aware of my shortcomings. There was a brief period of time in my life when I was very confident in my ability as a writer, but I've been gradually losing that confidence every day. Before college, I thought I was a good writer. Now? I almost feel strange even calling myself a writer because I'm not sure if I deserve that title. I haven't written much aside from a few unpolished short stories, some unfinished works, and random fragments here and there. I used to think that I was talented, but then I went to college and found a whole bunch of other "writers" there that actually wrote much better than I did and who actually had books written. For someone like me, that was painfully intimidating and I even considered quitting altogether. But you know what I realized? My biggest threat was me. Sure there are a lot of talented writers in the world, sure there are a gazillion amazing books out there that might be better than anything I will ever write, sure many of my ideas have already been thought by others, sure there are ideas better than mine, sure there are many people that will say hateful things about me or my work, and (most scary) sure there are billions of people out there who won't give a shit about me or my work. But all of these things are outside of me and, even though they constantly affect me, I can learn to distance myself from them. What I can't distance myself from, however, is my own voice. If I don't believe in myself, then who will? I know I have yet to practice what I preach, but I've come to see that how I see the world and myself is, ultimately, what is going to shape my reality. If I choose to not believe in myself, then I probably won't ever do anything worthwhile...but if I can start trying to see the good in myself and in the world, then maybe (hopefully) I can aspire to find something worthwhile and meaningful. But I have to learn to think like I did when I was eight years old. I have to learn to see myself as that confident Amazon warrior that can soar over mountains and rescue princes from evil, aristocratic snobs :-). I have to learn to use my imagination again. And I don't mean to suggest imagination as a sort of escapism, but rather I think that imagination can be useful for helping people learn to see the good and beauty that is hidden in the shadows of what is tragic and difficult to understand.
Again, my argument has its imperfections...and, on most days, I'm definitely not an optimistic fortune cookie - I often suffer from bouts of low self-esteem, doubt, fear, hopelessness and general anxiety; but I'm trying to learn to find a balance. Balance is probably the key thing here since we know that life cannot be a perfect comedy, but it also can't be a perfect tragedy. I think that we need to reach a sense of balance so that we can be open to receiving and understanding whatever the heck our existence throws at us. I suppose we can look at this as something depressing, but maybe it's also a good thing. I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out. But, one thing is for sure - whenever I'll find myself in my low days, I'll try to jump on my bed.
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