Sunday Scribblings--Ideas

Behind that placid facade lies a dark secret...from latoys.com

I suppose you could say I’ve been obsessed with ideas all of my life. The heft of them, big and small, crowding my imagination like so many celestial gumdrops, to be masticated slowly and with great enjoyment.

Unfortunately, for almost as long, I have been tormented by the idea of not having enough ideas. Or not having good ones.

Where did this fear come from? Well, I suppose we could lay the blame on Barbie’s slender plastic shoulders. Barbies, in my house, were a competitive sport. Oh, as the wiser, seven-year-older sister, Punkish Middle Sister often had to be cajoled to play them with me. But it never took long. Secretly, she gloried in the chance to play out some of the nascent dramatics brewing in her own mind.

She would wait until I started spelling forth my own character’s history, and plot line. Wait until she knew my storytelling powers were spent. Then, she’d begin weaving her own Barbie’s tale, one that always seemingly put mine to shame. One that was always, in every way, better. More exciting, more enchanting, more romantic. I was spellbound by her stories, mine seeming pallid and bland by comparison. Inevitably, when I complimented her, Punkish Middle Sister would say something like, “That’s because I have an imagination.” Or something else that implied that I, alas, didn’t have much of one.

Until then, I don’t think I thought about it as having or not having an imagination—I don’t think I believed an imagination could be possessed at all, but was steeping all of us like tea bags, until only the thinnest barrier existed between us and It.

Before Barbie, I loved telling stories using any close by object as inspiration—my Mami’s curvy perfume bottles, pots and pans, the People Who Lived in the Stereo and Knew all the Words to the Songs—anything. I didn’t think to judge these stories beyond the feeling of pleasure they gave me. They were a happy mish posh of overheard (and half understood) family gossip, fairy tales, plots from old Latin soap operas, everything. But after Punkish’s remarks, I started viewing them with a more critical eye. Were they any good? They didn’t seem to have come from me, after all. Not original. Not good enough.

After a while, I stopped sharing my mediocre versions of Barbie’s adventures, and adopted whichever one my sister has concocted. My Barbies became the admiring best friends, the second bananas. My poor Barbies stopped being central in their own lives, and started hanging out on the sidelines.

But I was basically an optimistic child. I had heard a statistic claiming that people only use a small percentage of their brain’s capacity. Perhaps that was true for imagination as well! I would learn how to train my imagination until it was no longer a 70 pound weakling!

I kept lists of my ideas, judging them worthy or unworthy based on some criteria I no longer remember. Whenever I wished on a star, or blew on a dandelion puff, or prayed in church on Sunday morning, I made the same request. Please give me an imagination. Please let me have lots of ideas. Because by now I was thoroughly convinced that not only did ideas have to be creative, somehow, they also had to be plentiful. Failure on either of these fronts meant that my sister was right about me. And even back then, all I wanted was to think of myself as an artistic, as a writer.

I started reading everything I could find on creativity, on brainstorming, on imagination. My search quickly lead me into the thickets of psychology, into the forests of New Age thought, into the palaces of philosophy. These studies absolutely changed the basic ways in which I see the world, and I am the better for them. I’m grateful that I was put on that road.

And yet.

Years later, I still feel this basic lack of ideas. Perhaps I am still judging them unworthy, so swiftly that they don’t even see the light of consciousness. Rationally, I know that it doesn’t have to be a competition. I know that ideas come from all sorts of sources—from the combination of a half-remembered story and today’s newspaper headlines and a line from a poem we read last year. I know that trying to force them is pointless—that we need to be open and receptive, that desperation drowns out the voice of the Muse. And I know that my sister was only trying to bolster her own wobbly self-esteem, trying to be better than someone, and who better than her younger sister?

And yet.

Some part of my imagination remains trapped there. Still trying to come up with ideas that would impress my sister and allow her to view me as a Barbie-plotting equal.

Still trying to feel like enough.
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For more ideas about ideas, go here.