As far back as I can remember I’ve lived with one foot in imaginary places. Whenever the world around me quiets down enough for thoughts to form (and sometimes even when it doesn’t) I stitch together stories in my mind.
No two have ever been quite alike. If I don’t like the direction a story is headed I begin again from the first scene to create something better. I tell myself stories that are funny, sad, outlandish, as cliched as I could possibly make them and as unique as I dare. I tell stories as I go to sleep and pick them back up again while getting dressed or eating breakfast in the morning.
Sometimes as a kid I’d whisper the lines or scene I was working on to see if they sounded as good out in the open. It was something I was deeply ashamed of growing up, though. No one else I knew crafted stories like this or, if they did, they never talked to themselves while figuring out a particularly tricky plot point. At 11 or 12 I’d cycle through these feelings, promise to put away childish things and never do it again and then slide back into storytelling a day, week, month later. Life without story-telling was and is:
- Eating the same meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of your life.
- A vocabulary of 100 words, 90 of which are about the weather.
- Eternal February.
I assumed that other people had internal dialogues rarely if ever* and that there was something unhealthy about continuing to make up stories after puberty. Like an early bedtime or training wheels on a bike it only seemed appropriate for kids half my age and yet I had zero interest in what I thought I should be thinking about as an adolescent: clothing. makeup. boys. dating. calories.
*I’ve since learned this isn’t true!
It sounds nonsensical now but this bothered me for years. More than anything I wanted to blend in, to think the way other people thought. Being different wasn’t a perky slogan or a beat marched to with pride back then it was something to try to get rid of (or hide well) at the first opportunity.
I began to grow more comfortable in my own skin as I stopped worrying so much about the thoughts I thought were rolling around in the heads of everyone else. What mattered was this: I like telling stories and hashing them out has never hurt anyone.
If it’s weird, well, there are far more destructive things that I could be doing with my time.
Respond
Do you have any slightly eccentric habits or personality quirks that you’ve always felt a little ashamed of? How did you learn to resist the urge to compare your thoughts with how other people behave in public?
great story telling in this post. if you had only known, when you were struggling with all this, how many conversations I have had with myself …. 😉
Heh, it would have been a relief to be sure! And thanks.
Quirks? Eccentricities? Ha! My entire life is built around them. 😀
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches must be made in a very particular way or I can’t eat ’em. If I open a can or a jar and it makes/doesn’t make a sound that I expect, I throw it out because I don’t trust that it’s any good. All of our dishware must be ordered in our kitchen cabinets in a very specific way or I have to take everything out and put it all back in again.
And I talk to myself out loud quite frequently. Full conversations — questions AND answers. Sometimes utilizing different voices.
I’ve never really been ashamed of my weirdness. I merely accepted the fact that I was one strange dude.
I wish I could have been more like you when I was younger. I’m learning now, though. 🙂