We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

Ursula Le Guin

Lights off and windows shut, a tear rolls down my cheek as I tell my dear friend Rachel I think it’s time that we part ways.

For years we whispered into each others ears. We laughed together in the bathroom at some juicy middle-school drama. We hugged on icy nights when the gas heat wasn’t on, and falling asleep was hard. We asked each other questions about the day’s happenings: what was your favorite part of that song you just heard on the radio? Did you see grandma get tense when the bank teller couldn’t understand her accent? What if Shane never loves me back?

I would get upset at my dad and she would offer a different perspective, “maybe he was just stressed today because of work; tomorrow will be better,” she would posit. And it always was better.

Rachel was my compass. I trusted her with all my heart, especially in the moment of saying our goodbyes. I was in high school and feeling ready to take it on alone. Keeping up our friendship would make us emotionally dependent each other, I realized. She would become an appendage, a vestige of a relationship that we could no longer learn from. We assured each other that night that we would both be safe; she would go on to love another human being and I would go on living and building new, meaningful friendships.

As great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Ursula Le Guin

Rachel didn’t have a face, nor a body. She floated as an invisible, twin-soul above me. I understood that she was my invention, yet she would still come and go as she pleased, independent in body and mind.

A surprising 37% of children develop imaginary friends at some point (1). In my younger years, I thought people would judge me if they knew about Rachel. In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of friends’ invisible, sometimes secret relationships.

Considering how common imaginary friends are, it’s poignant that as adults we often forget about them or feel shame about them. It’s easy to make fun of ourselves for having made-up beings to talk to. We may even wince at the thought. But for some of us, these imaginary friends have guided us.

Imaginary friends have helped us make sense of our world. These inventions can help certain humans find comfort in times of loneliness or boredom, difficult transitions, and moments of low self-esteem.

Some of the most well-known fiction writers, such as Ursula Le Guin, converse with their characters in vast, fantastic worlds steeped in deep history. What better way to practice relationships and storytelling than with a universe that you invented yourself?

In contemplating imaginary friends, I asked my in-the-flesh friends about their childhood experiences. It’s a whole different sensation to dive into the intricate, varied, and wildly imaginative worlds of people’s invisible, sometimes secret relationships. I heard about an invented family of a hundred cats, a best friend twin-soul (similar to my own), fairy adventures, little beings living in the walls, superheroes, and the list goes on and on. 

Reflecting on the experience of having imaginary friends also reveals something deeper — an intimate window into someone’s inner world. By tapping into memories of our forgotten imaginary friends, we can learn a lot about our own and each other’s journeys through life.  

In this post, we will meet some of the characters that became companions and platforms for experimentation for real humans. We will explore reflections from two different A Window In readers!

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, [s]he would grow up to be an eggplant.

Ursula Le Guin

First, we meet Sarah and her two high-school aged (invisible) brothers, Dave and Charles. In juxtaposition to their mischievous company, Sarah was “the only level-headed one”. In reality, she was an only child of an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mom living in the hustle and bustle of LA. Sarah didn’t keep her brothers a secret from the adults in her life. She would go on and on about them to her parents, and they played along, shaking their heads, oh those boys!

When it came to the kids on the block, however, Sarah kept it secret. She felt like the odd one out, the solitary girl with no siblings.

“When I was growing up, a lot of people had siblings and I was like, “what’s wrong with my parents that they can’t have another kid? Why did they give me this weird lifestyle of being alone by myself?”’

She felt “weird” and isolated, and was afraid that kids her age would think she was “pathetic for wanting siblings so badly”.

As Sarah started socializing more and being involved in dance at age seven, she started interacting with humans outside her own head. She suddenly stopped talking about Dave and Charles. Her mom asked once what happened to them and Sarah, a clever little chap, explained, “they went away to college”.

She doesn’t think about her big brothers now that she’s in her mid-twenties. She reflects:

“It set me up for creating a reality in my head for what I could consider as normal, comfortable, and protected.”

Now, she uses listening to music and dancing as portals to fantastical worlds where she can explore, be comfortable, and be free.

There’s people all over these parts, and maybe beyond, who think, as you said, that nobody can be wise alone. So these people try to hold to each other.

Ursula Le Guin

After initiating this topic with another friend, Liam, our discussion flowed in a totally different direction.

Exposed to Irish folklore as a child, Liam and his (real life) siblings fashioned miniature homes, completing them with waterproof roofs, little plants in little gardens, including windows, making the designs stylish and complex. Despite never befriending a fairy in real life, he wanted to make make sure they had a place to sojourn.

The imaginative story became a family affair. His sister, Grace, joined him in the construction. His mom would put marzipan potatoes in the huts as gifts from the leprechauns on St. Patrick’s Day. 

“It felt good and right making them homes, even when we didn’t get to hang out together”.

Though he never met these fairies, they left coins, bits of thread, and acorns for him to enjoy and cherish.

We dove deep into memories of how we learned lessons in generosity from roots of tradition. Listening to Liam remember the magic of giving homes to silent creatures, sparked my own forgotten moments of cradling a butterfly with a broken wing.

Nowadays, you can find Liam hopping around Indiana, working on land restoration projects, identifying plants, creating seed libraries, and building communities that prioritize sustainable agriculture.

There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.

Ursula Le Guin

How can we use our powerful experiences with imaginary friends to summon such magic now? 

Yesterday (November 23, 2019), at my friend Eva’s memorial service, her twenty three year old brother stood bravely in front of an overflowing church of grievers and began to deliver a eulogy about none other than their beanie baby collection, the political dramas in the beanie universe, and how much this play had helped them bond and understand the world beyond their own.

This moment of intimacy that he shared with the rest of us, who didn’t know Eva’s earliest creations, lands in a tender place in my heart. Her brother summoned this magic by honoring and integrating these stories into our memory of Eva.

What if we asked each other, “Did you have imaginary friends growing up? What were some worlds that you invented?” The people I thought I knew so well sometimes bare unexpected sagas of adventure, longing, loneliness, and kinship. 

It is such a joy to remember these invisible beings who got some of us through lonely and experiential moments in our lives. These conversations elicit surprising intimacy that we can tap into by calling on our childhood imaginations. Our invisible companions not only cradled and shaped some of us, but still do in how we reflect and connect over their existence. 

Having a relationship with ourselves means not trying to confine the galaxies inside our bodies that are too vast to map out and predict. Instead, it could be about finding ways to connect, to make our own diverse realities intersect, to learn, and witness, and listen, and imagine the world beyond what we perceive to be true. After all, the most magical forces are the invisible ones. 

Thank you all for reading and sharing your heartwarming stories! Special thanks to Sarah Estrada and Liam Kelly for letting me interview you for this post! Thank you to Jason Kimball for contributing beautiful photographs to color this post! If you have any thoughts or memories, I’d love love love to discuss! ❤

Sources:

(1) https://www.journalofplay.org/sites/www.journalofplay.org/files/pdf-articles/1-1-article-taylor-imaginary-companions.pdf (this is actually a really cool paper, if you’re interested!)