The Death of the Imagination

   A while back a friend sent me a link to an essay on Claude Cahun. It's an excerpt from The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries by Jessa Crispin. This wasn't a story with which I was familiar and I took a few days before finally setting aside some time to read it. There is much to be taken from the essay, and perhaps what jumped out at me is a minor touch of a broad message, but you cannot always choose what speaks to you.

   In the essay, the author calls suicide "the death of the imagination." I cannot explain the deadening impact of depression better than this. It is the lack of seeing a future, any future, in which the current situation has improved. It's the loss of hope, of the ability to dream of a brighter day. It is a gradual death, the death by a thousand cuts.

   For a creative person like me the loss of imagination is especially devastating. I live in a world where my head resides firmly in the clouds a good half of the time. I have to constantly remind myself to live in the here and now instead of dreaming of the potential everything around me might hold. From the blank piece of paper on my drawing board to the flashing cursor on my screen, the world is a wonderful gift being peeled back before my eyes, layer by layer. I embrace love, pain, joy, and sorrow with equal acceptance because of what it could become. I have personally witnessed the beauty that unfolds from the most mundane origins.

   I am not sure I have the words to express how the inability to imagine blinds the soul. It is because of this that I am such a huge proponent of the arts in education. It is so vital that people have the opportunity to dream of life outside their own heads. Every great accomplishment in the history of humankind has been the direct result of a vivid imagination, even occupations that are traditionally seen as highly logical. A classmate once told me that the best IT people are often artists in disguise.

   If I could go back in time and give advice to my younger self, it would be this. When you are at your lowest, dig deep inside and find that spark of imagination, that light of what life could become. Protect it. Shield it from the wind that threatens to snuff it out. There will come a time when you have what you need to make it grow, and from that spark will come a blaze that will set fire to the world.