Rabbit Holes-The key to creativity
Expanding consciousness has always been a goal of creatives. For me, doing LSD or microdosing some mushrooms doesn’t seem like a feasible option these days because I’m not seventeen years old so an acid trip would be weird. I also have some addictive tendencies so a little bit of anything has always seemed kind of pointless. I am, however, finding something that is taking me places that I haven’t been in a while and it doesn’t require any outside assistance.
I got divorced last year. With all of the trauma, angst, and emotional upheaval that came with that also came a new mindset that I can visit daily. Gone are the mornings when I start my day with a “to-do” list in my head.
I go to my perch on my front porch with my coffee and my Marlboro every morning and start to think. I usually start with some thoughts about what my day will entail and how I will make the most of it. I then change lanes, however, because this is my time and I choose to ponder something deeper than the mundanities of everyday life.
Today I’m having my first session with a therapist. I’m thinking about what we’ll talk about and how deep I’ll travel into a particular topic. I thought that he might ask me for a bit of a life story. Where am I from, what happened in my earliest years that made me who I am today, etc. I let myself travel down a rabbit hole of early experiences and become quite descriptive in those stories. I enjoy going over a story in my head and thinking about the intricate details of each one. My good friend Tom Brown describes me as the type of person who, when you ask me what time it is, I’ll tell you how to build a watch.
I’m a storyteller. I’ve been noticing more and more as I get older that this is a double-edged sword. It works for me when I have an attentive recipient or a captive audience but these situations just don’t come up much anymore. It’s made things difficult with my family and especially with my children. They have grown up in a modern society that uses sound bites and clickbait to grab people's attention and get points across in seconds rather than minutes. I’m also getting better at noticing which of my friends have the attention span to allow me the space to share with them one of my insightful anecdotes. When I see them looking away, shuffling their feet, or checking their phones, I refrain from engaging them from that point on.
It works for writers though. It worked for Hemingway, who could take a few paragraphs to describe eating a can of apricots. Hemingway was also the master of the “iceberg” style of storytelling which I’ve noticed in some of my initial essays. Touching on a subject without going into an extensive description of everything. I, just as he did, assume that the reader will figure out the symbolism on his own.
Going down this path also allows me to go beyond the “cliff notes” stories of my life and take a little more time to think about them. I’m realizing that I’ve repressed some memories from my childhood that probably played a part in my makeup later in life. I’ve had counselors ask me countless times about my father leaving when I was ten years old. “How did that make you feel?” they would say. “No clue” I would reply. “I was friggin’ ten years old.”
My memories, I thought, were pretty vague. Little tidbits of fishing with my Dad on the Yellow Dog River when I was about ten years old. When I expand on these memories I now remember them in more vivid detail.
We had to crawl through a hole in a fence to get to the secret spots where the big brook trout were. The stream was crystal clear so after a while we spotted some lunkers hanging out in a little pool. They were hanging out at a depth of about five feet and weren’t interested in our worms when we positioned them above and around them. They would swim past the crawlers and then disappear under the overhanging, grassy riverbank.
After a while, I saw my Dad lying on his stomach with his arm in the water. He was reaching under the overhang and signaling me to keep quiet. “What are you doing?” I whispered. “Rubbing their bellies” he replied.
I thought he was crazy. “You can’t catch fish with your hands,” I thought.
I continued upstream and looked for more pools. Then I remembered the time we were on Lake Michigammee and we ran out of worms. We had some hot dogs and he said that those would work for perch. I thought he was crazy then but he pulled in three or four and we ended up having a nice fish fry that night.
After an hour or two with no luck, I walked back down to where he had been and he was still on his stomach with his arm under the bank.
“Dreamer,” I thought as I approached him. I was going to walk back to the car when I saw them. Two large speckled trout were in his creel, wrapped in grass. I was looking at him in wonderment when he grimaced and with a low groan shoved his arm deep under the bank.
His face was halfway submerged in the cold stream as he clung to the sawgrass with his left hand to keep from toppling in. With one heroic move, he pulled himself out and was clutching a third brookie by the gills. He tossed it a few feet away and crawled to his feet. He gave me a little smile as if to say “That’s how you do it.”
My Dad left our family a few years later. He went to Canada and had some cool, mysterious, job with the Canadian government. I don’t think he ever paid any child support or alimony, didn’t teach me much about life or cars or anything else for that matter. He was, for all intents and purposes, kind of a dick.
Subconsciously though, he was still heroic in my eyes. I reasoned that my Mom must have been a bitch and he just had to leave. It took me many years to figure out what the truth was.
So the rabbit holes help. They are helping me get deeper into the psyche of just what it is that makes me tick. They are also allowing me to go to new places to describe details that heretofore didn’t exist for me.
Storytelling is not just a means of communication for me now. Rather, it is a tool for introspection and healing. I’m now able to untangle threads of my past and confront truths that were long buried beneath the surface.
Each trip down a rabbit hole brings more self-awareness and transformation. I’m realizing that creativity is not a product of external inspiration, but a reflection of the boundless depths within.
