I’ve been suffering lately with a condition called frozen shoulder. Basically, it’s when your shoulder muscles become paralyzed and super tight due to not using your arm properly. Mine started back in December with an injury, and the subsequent non-use of my arm led to the frozen shoulder. Contemplating frozen shoulder wandered into thinking about frozen imagination (because my mind wanders the roads less taken).
We often compare our brains to muscles, saying that if we don’t use it, we lose it. Our imaginative muscle is no different—you don’t use it, it gets all atrophied and useless. As a young writer, I had so many ideas, I couldn’t keep up with all of them. They poured out of my brain like Niagara Falls. Now, not so much.
I think I can trace it back to my daughter’s birth. Once I knew I was pregnant, I pushed the stories I had in progress to get the first draft finished before she was born. Then we had the whole infant-daze period, and then I got into editing and revising those drafts. Today, seven years later, I am still revising most of those stories, and have not embarked on a from-scratch novel. I derived my current work in progress from an idea I had many years ago, so even though the novel’s current form is completely new, the ideas and characters are not.
Truth is, I am not feeling very imaginative when it comes to story ideas. New ideas don’t crop up with the frequency they used to, and I find that my thinking within the stories is not as flexible as when I was younger. Finding fresh ways to approach topics and characters is harder for me. Maybe I am simply getting old and set in my ways—or maybe I have not exercised my imagination for so long that it’s flabby and weak.
My frozen shoulder needs physical therapy to get back to working order. It’s hard, and it hurts like heck as I stretch those muscles again. But that’s the only way to get it back—to push the limits and ask the shoulder to work again. Perhaps my frozen imagination needs some sort of therapy as well. I need to ask it to work again, and push past the comfort zones.
Maybe then my frozen imagination will thaw and my brain will feel more nimble.
So how about it, fellow writers? Any good tips for exercising my imagination muscle?
When You Realize What You Were Missing
My daughter is deaf in one ear, diagnosed at 14 months with mild/moderate loss. Got her first aid at 26 months. Took her first booth test somewhere around 3 years old. At that point, her hearing level had dropped from moderate to profound loss.
It’s hard for those of us with normal hearing to understand what profound hearing loss means. I didn’t really get an inkling until those first booth tests. I sat in the booth with my daughter, but several feet away. She wore headsets to listen to the instructor. The doctor would ask her to point to cards with pictures on them. When the doctor asked for the airplane in the good ear, my daughter pointed without hesitation.
In the bad ear…nothing. The doctor would gradually raise the volume, to the point where I, sitting a few feet away, could hear the doctor as clear as day even through the headsets, while my daughter sat unmoving, waiting for the instruction she could not hear.
That is profound hearing loss.
Still, the loss didn’t seem to impact my daughter much. She can’t localize sound, and if you talk in her bad ear she will not hear you, but those were the only major issues. She has a hearing aid for the bad ear, but has been saying for some time that it doesn’t help at all.
So we are trying out a new type of hearing aid, called a cross or crossover. This consists of a microphone on her bad ear that pipes the sound over to the good ear, so she is hearing both sides on one ear. Eventually, the brain learns to discern which sound comes from which ear, and it helps with sound localization, as well as hearing sound and speech from the bad side.
When we first put it on my daughter, her eyes got big, and she yelled, “Everything is so LOUD!” For the first time in her life, she was hearing the world as I do. She was stunned and delighted, excitement shining from her face. The funny thing was that every time we put the aid on, she started yelling instead of speaking normally. That seemed counter-intuitive, until I figured out that she probably thought she had to speak louder to be heard over her louder world–much like we yell over a TV up at high volume.
While excitement was her first reaction, a different feeling surfaced a few days later. “Mommy, I’m a little sad.” I asked her why. “Because I never realized how different I am.” I asked what she meant. “I never knew how much I couldn’t hear that everyone else could.”
Sometimes it’s hard when you finally realize what you’ve been missing.
So I whispered into her aided bad ear, “I love you.”
It piped over to her good ear.
And her smile shone out and her eyes lit up.
Maybe she realized that she’s not really missing the things that matter most.