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Unnamed

I have always been a creature of imagination. As a child, I would create elaborate, whimsical worlds within my head, sharing them with no one. Vivid images and meticulously detailed stories evolved in a manner only somewhat within my control. Often times, the plot set off on a course neither planned nor expected. I could, and did, lose countless waking hours on my bed, the couch, the beach, anywhere, while each story played out. Didn’t matter where I might be, I could always find a little nook to establish as my own and crawl into the movie reel within my head.

My earliest recollection of these experiences involves me as Wonderwoman, fearsome and fearless, capturing criminals and exuding power, strong but still feminine. I loved imagining myself in that shiny, starred, super-suit to such a degree that I demanded my mother find me a real-life version. My suit served me daily as I chased down bad guys and righted the world. Gradually, it became part of my identity, at once feeding my imagination and encouraging my belief that I was, in fact, a super hero. It served as my Halloween costume for two years, and would have for three but for my mother discovering my long toes poking out the feet of the shiny tights. I wept in despair the day I could no longer squeeze my growing fanny into those sparkley spankies, and despite the use of my super-strength, I could not stretch the gold, sequined belt around my waist. At my angry insistence it still fit me, my mother was resolute. It was time to throw my super-suit in the trash. I would need to choose a different costume. Desperately, and enveloped in patriotic righteousness, I threw myself onto my bed and squeezed my blurry eyes shut, recalling the many adventures my costume and I had. I lay there, scrutinizing every detail in my mind and slowly, amazingly, it dawned on me that I need not actually wear the suit in real life for the adventures to continue.

Some might call this daydreaming, but for me, the stories were often truer to me than my real life. Certainly, I had more power over the stories in my head than I did of my real life. Turning inward made me light as air, dust in the wind. My imaginings sent me anywhere in the world within a nanosecond. The uncertain, complicated and often, painful life of my human existence left far behind.

Sometimes the main character of my imaginings was an entity outside myself, a character from a recent movie or from my favorite book. More often, I became the character and the plot revolved around me. I would drop myself directly into the action and it played out of its own accord. If I was forced to interrupt the tale for some real-life event; a meal, chores, school, I would regretfully press a mental “Pause” button and temporarily place the action on hold until I could get back to it. Returning to reality often left me irritated and antsy. Nothing in my real life was quite as attractive as the yarn spinning in my mind.

Throughout my childhood, the stories were generally based on something I had recently read. Another vice of imagination is the compulsive, nearly manic need to read anything and everything I could get my hands on, the backs of cereal boxes not excluded. I was blessed to have been taught to read at the early age of three and so when I was not imagining, I was single mindedly devouring the words on pages of all kinds; novels, short stories, poetry, even news articles. As while daydreaming, I would drift off into other worlds for endless hours at a time. I still do this to some extent and it surprises me each time I drunkenly return from a reading frenzy to realize hours have passed.

Back then, I mostly read classics: fiction and realistic fiction. Little Women, Swiss Family Robinson, Nancy Drew, were some of my much-loved favorites. I would read them over and over, pages weathered and worn, imagining myself as each of the different characters. Any given day I might find myself as the heroine of a Civil War era drama, an isolated victim of a shipwreck or a celebrated Detective responsible for soothing incredible injustice. I found myself feeling what the characters felt identifying with them as if they were real. Each character’s ability to right a wrong or solve a problem somehow transcended into my real life self image. I often pictured myself playing a character when experiencing conflict in reality. `

The nature of my imaginings changed as I grew and became reflective of events and experiences in my life, rather than things I might be reading. My pre-pubescent self imagined a world where I was the social Queen Bee, adored by girls and boys alike. Peers and classmates often made up the cast of characters in these stories. Lying in bed each night, replaying the day in my head, I could easily change the outcome of any unjust social situation. Retreating within myself, I was ensconced in a world where I had never been snubbed by Marybeth; she who had newer and cooler Blookers than me or humiliated when a boy I had a crush on publicly shared a love note I furtively passed him during music class. I could turn inward in an instant and forget my awkwardness and the social cruelty that is part and parcel at that age. I didn’t learn until I was much older that my “daydreaming” was both an escape mechanism and an avoidance technique. If I lived life inside myself I needn’t deal with conflict, with other people, with insecurity and rejection; nothing could hurt me there.

There was an intense period where my developing body and dawning sexual awareness caused me some embarrassment. I come from a strong line of eastern European ancestors, who, to put it politely, were well endowed. I developed fast and young. By the time I was twelve, my assets were much larger than other girls’ my age. This lead to a variety of issues I tended to avoid, including unwanted male attention. Although some may have actually had corporal intentions, most crude innuendos and suggestions spewed by the boys in my school were initiated I am sure, much more to stroke the ego and bolster their burgeoning masculinity, than by any inclination to act on them. I am certain that other girls were having similar experiences, as is the nature of sexual development. I never really felt threatened and many of these young boys had actually become friends of mine outside of school. Yet their behavior caused me embarrassment to a great extent and I retreated even more into my own world.

It may have been my own surging hormones, or my psyche’s attempt to heal itself, but my inner world tended toward the very sexual around this time. Explicit scenes would roll through my head, chock full of color and motion. Beautifully detailed bodies, sometimes my own, engaged in erotic acts, most of which I had only read about and hadn’t yet experienced in reality. Sometimes I would replay scenes from a movie, only in much greater detail than was actually shown in the theatre. While earlier stories tended toward the slow, mute lovemaking of romance novels, they later became progressively more physical, more anatomically detailed, more intense. Slapping, sweaty figures, meshed together and arranged in impossible positions. I craved the titillation but the images in my head sometimes shamed me and I can remember feeling terribly embarrassed when having had one explicit daydream interrupted by my mother who had just arrived home unexpectedly from a rained out golf outing. I was sure she too, could see the reel playing in my head and was both humiliated and furious with her for knowing. My mother, of course, had no idea why I was irritated with her but I ended up huffing off to my room anyway, and slamming the door in her face.

Perhaps because of the stories constantly playing out in my head, or maybe it was something else, some unexplained, unseen sense of otherness, I always knew I was different from most of my peers. Early in childhood I recognized this otherness and realized that it isolated me from the carefree relationships others’ were engaging in. I was cautious and trusted no one. I felt emotions deeper, unraveled events longer and responded differently to situations than any other child I knew. I was an outsider, even at events I was hosting and though I had all the right clothes, attended the coolest parties and had a multitude of “friends”, I never really was like them. On the surface, I was a confident, attractive, smart, popular girl with a normal, in some cases, even more stable life than theirs. Inside I was someone else completely; I was every one of them, I was no one.