Your Imagination is Real (scrapped video essay script)

This was going to be a video on my channel, but I dunno, I'm just not feeling this one.

Pessimism, skepticism, doubt, closed off hearts, people aren't born with these traits. The hopelessness, depression, and fear we develop over the years of growing up are things that we learn.

It's not our natural state to be this way. But then, what is?

When we come into this world, all we know is we need to eat, survive, and love.

Those instincts, our environment, and the choices we make around them, influence the people we become throughout the years.

For many of us, the traumatizing things we experience make us numb.

For whatever reason, it’s easier to repeat the same painful, disappointing cycles over and over even when we know they’re not getting us anywhere closer to closure.

Addictions to harmful substances, hollow relationships, forced friendships, sexual overindulgence, obsessions with games, stories, drama, politics, religion. When we become so consumed in these things trying to use them fill that hole in our hearts, they only deepen it. And we know it.

When the things of this world don't work out for us, we harm ourselves. We harm others, or we do both simultaneously because we don't know what else to do. If all the things of this world we obtain with our limited strength are not enough, then what is? 

The choice to act on our impulses and fears leads us to make worse and worse decisions the further down we spiral. 

There comes a point where one must reflect on their actions and consider an alternative. 

What else can I do? I'm not happy at my dream career, I'm not happy with my countless amount of friends. I'm not happy when I’m unemployed, I'm not happy when I have no friends. 

When I have everything, I feel like I have nothing. When I have nothing, I want everything.

When you project your insecurities away from yourself, you're firing an invisible arrow that you tell yourself is flying somewhere you cannot see, or you fire it at a specific target you hope to bring down to your level. But no matter what it hits on the way, that arrow always comes back around and hurts you.

Ignorance is not strength, it's a bandage. 

You apply it to the same wounds over and over throughout the years, without accepting the fact that that bandage is only getting more frail overtime.

There is a shadow inside you, behind you, all around you, screaming and begging for you to see it. You feel it, you know it's there, but you ignore it because it's easier to continue doing the same old shit you've been doing your whole life that’s barely gotten you by. Even if doing so always puts you in the same miserable state every time.

When you lose everything you tried so hard to grasp to make you feel in control, when you sink so low that you feel like you have nothing in this world, that shadow is still there as it always has been, waiting for you to confront it, when you choose to fire that arrow of insecurity at the true source of the problem within, and take a blind leap of faith into the dark.

The thought of journeying into one's own soul can be paralyzing. Some of us might already be in a state where spontaneous action feels impossible. This is something that might be considered the “immobility response.” There is science behind this.

In psychologist Peter Levine‘s book Waking the Tiger, he talks about how the immobility response, as Physiologists call it, is something available to reptiles and mammals when faced with an overwhelming threat. 

For prey, that threat takes the form of a predator. For the tragically complex minds of humans, this state can be triggered by anything.

Usually, it's a result of some traumatic incident during developmental stages of childhood. Social pressure, abuse, an accident, a misunderstanding, for some it might even be the existential terror of being alive. Or maybe it's little things that build up overtime.

In Waking the Tiger, Levine recounts an experience he had with a woman named Nancy who was referred to him to help her deal with her crippling panic attacks. He tried relaxation training with her, but that triggered one of her episodes and he even got sucked into a panic attack of his own. 

In the heat of the moment, Levine imagined a tiger leaping towards them, and he felt like he needed to tell Nancy, “You are being attacked by a large tiger. See the tiger as it comes towards you. Run toward that tree, climb it and escape!” 

Her legs trembled in running movements as she stayed sitting down. Nancy's panic attack erupted with her repressed trauma while in this state because she had finally faced the thing that had been traumatizing her since she was only three. During a tonsillectomy, the anesthesia caused her to see terrifying hallucinations. Ever since then, Nancy had been trapped in a feeling of helplessness even far into her adulthood. 

The book says those hallucinations made her lose her sense of self and the ability to have a secure and spontaneous personality.

But miraculously enough, her meeting with Levine had been the last panic attack she ever had. She still struggled with anxiety after, but Nancy's decision to visualize her fears into a predator and to take action by running and escaping from it are what allowed her to finally have closure and move on with her life. Nancy even said that she finally felt like herself again for the first time in so long.

It wasn’t solely facing her trauma that helped Nancy to make a change, it was her decision to take action in the midst of fear, and to expel that energy through physical exertion.

The story of Nancy is an example of something powerful that is inside all of us.

Do you remember when you were a kid, spending what felt like hours daydreaming? I know I did. But for the longest time, and I mean like, the majority of my life, I had forgotten that I used to do that, or maybe it's more like I forgot the value of daydreaming.

On long car rides, I used to look out the window and imagine dinosaurs walking across the road, or grazing among the trees and fields. I got lost in these imaginary scenes that gave me a rush that nothing from the real world or any media could quite create.

Because the thing about imagination and daydreaming is they're your world coming to life. Your perfect, ideal version of how you see things. How you wish things were.

Imagining dinosaurs on long car rides kept me from being bored, yes, but I was only able to conjure these insane visuals and scenes in my mind because I was bored. I had a gameboy back then, but it made me nauseous to play when the car was moving, so all I had to keep myself entertained was my thoughts.

What do we do when we get bored today? We pull out our phones and look for something, anything. Endlessly scrolling for something to spark our interest even if it's a fleeting feeling that we try to grasp onto for as long as we can.

Our minds want to be entertained, but for some reason, when all we do is entertain ourselves with material things, it doesn't feel right.

There's an icky feeling gnawing at the backs of our minds telling us that it isn't enough. So what do we do to address this…?

We keep scrolling. 

Maybe the next thing I find will make me feel good.

Hours pass, you've been watching slop, you still feel like shit, you still need to wash a mountain of dishes and go to work in the morning… Fuck.

I've been through a rough last few years. I was stuck working shitty dead end jobs I hated, and I tried making as many friends online as possible to drown out my misery by living in Discord voice calls (i literally slept in vcs), and then I was struck by a chronic illness that to this day prevents me from working or using too much energy.

I hit the bottom. When I lost the energy to be able to do the things that distracted me from my pain, I drowned in the bottled up tears from all those years of hating my life.

Similar to Nancy, I had spent so long without a spontaneous personality. I just went along with what other people were doing, sometimes people who were manipulative, and just accepted that I had no value in this world.

But as I lay down with my disability, being consumed by my demons, I was eventually discovering, or perhaps rediscovering something by sitting with my darkness without distractions.

I had rediscovered the power of imagination.

The thing about imagination is that it's only at its strongest when you're alone with it. But when you ignore yourself and constantly stimulate with things outside of you, the only thing left alone with your imagination is your pain. And it’s harming you in the background while you ignore it chasing fleeting things.

Over the years of experiencing social pressure and things that made being alone with myself feel uncomfortable, I lost sight of the power of daydreaming. I had forgotten those moments when I was staring out of the car window, looking up at towering creatures from another world, my world, just doing their thing. Seeing stories play out in my mind that only I could imagine because they were coming from my mind.

I thought about it and I was like why did I ever forget about this?

So what if none of this is real? It's making me happy, isn't it?

Throughout my years of being a miserable teenager and adult, I jumped across many different hobbies, career options and interests, but there was one thing that I always returned to… Stories.

Imagination is influenced by our experiences, but, without us even needing to try, those stories, real or fictional, take shape all on their own in our minds. We just need to let go, be alone with our thoughts, and let it play out.

I wouldn't be sitting here today making this video if not for the stories I've been influenced by. And those stories wouldn't have been made if storytellers didn't use their imaginations to create those worlds I love.

All they had to do was trust in their core ideals, take a leap into the unknown, and discover.

Did daydreaming my own movie while listening to the Godzilla 2014 soundtrack before the film released make my problems as a teenager go away? No.

Did brainstorming ideas for Attack on Titan AMVs when I was a young adult working a miserable job where I was harassed every day make those problems go away? No.

But using my imagination in those days, even if it wasn't as strong as my childhood, brightened up the dull, dark world around me, just a little bit.

In those days, I didn't even understand the value of imagination, but it was working its magic all on its own, even without my conscious support.

It was better than nothing, and I realize now that those little flickers of light that came from my mind in my darkest moments… were the same things that gave me powerful ideas when I was little.

I believe there's a wiser version of ourselves that are withing since the day we're born. Someone who sees the brighter side of everything, and is constantly putting in the leg work trying to get our conscious minds to see that.

No matter what stage I've been in throughout my life, there has always been one constant that has gotten me through the worst of times: The stories in my mind. My stories, the ones only I can tell. That's why I'm a writer now, a hobby I had never really tried until recently. 

I want to not only continue brightening up my own uncertain life, but I hope to do for others what the stories I love have done for me. Giving people something to always return to when the road gets rough and unclear. 

As said before, ignoring your pain does you no good. But what you can do is take the things you've learned from fantasy worlds and apply them to the hardships in your real life.

Fiction is like a guiding star we can never hope to truly touch, but we can follow its light through the journey of life to take us places we never could have hoped to reach before. If I had continued to remain a hopeless, braindead zombies going through the motions waiting to die, I never would have gotten this far.

You want to know what the meaning of life is? 

There is none.

But that's the beauty of it, because… you get to decide the meaning for yourself.

It's not about being delusional and ignoring your problems. 

It's about facing both reality and your dreams, to become someone you can be proud of. Someone who can confidently say: I like me (Dale Griffith scene)

The dark pit inside of us might seem horrifying to jump into at first, but when we take that leap of faith and trust ourselves to make it through to the other side, that’s when you see it.

You see that all you need is a thought, a dream, a story, something the world tells you cannot happen, but you chase anyway. Once you stop ignoring your dreams, that’s when they become real.

That's why fantasy is so important. If you can imagine it, and it makes you happy, then it's just as real as your pain, and just as strong. 

No, it’s stronger. 

You’re stronger.