Warning: I write this at a time in my life when I'm disappointed and disillusioned with virtually every aspect of my life and my apparent inability to offer anything of substance to this world. I have failed so fully in my attempts at so many things, at being so many things to everyone around me that I have actually managed to amaze myself. At the same time, I know absolutely that I have the strength to endure, the intelligence to achieve and the personality to charm. I know this; it is a fundamental part of who I am.

I'll bet after all that you think I'm going to write about my eternally ebullient nature, right? In actuality, I'm most enamoured with my (now obvious to you) vivid imagination. I find my youthful buoyancy waning because truthfully, as I near my forties I must admit that I've begun to wonder if my path to true career contentedness will ever make itself known. It's no longer a foregone conclusion that I will kick ass and take names this time around. And in letting that doubt in, am I sabotaging myself? Am I thumbing my nose at any good karma heading my way? Have I grown incapable of removing my rose-coloured glasses?

These questions come to me in the dark of night when I am least able to chase them away. They grab me by the neck and squeeze, eking every last drop of sleep from me, managing to frighten me more than any bogeyman under my bed or in the closet. (I sat, frozen, in a shi-shi tea room last week revisiting that exact feeling in the light of day as my own mother proceeded to tell me that I needed to finally ditch my pride and take any ol' job that paid any wage). Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.

On the other hand, a really good imagination is a lasting and valuable gift regardless of what your Grade Three, Grade Five and Grade Eight teachers will tell you and/or write on your report cards. If I could find a way to get into the minds of today's youth, that is the message I would want to get across. An imagination is something you must tend to like a garden or a relationship, it takes work. Lucky for me it's nothing strenuous or sweat-inducing or I would now posses the personality of a damp sponge. No, in order to grow as someone who can't tell a simple story that goes from A to B or hold your friends rapt as you spin tales at slumber parties, you need to immerse yourself in the zany plays your twisted mind likes to mount. Jump in and roll around, grow your stories, make them more and more outrageous. It's only after that you'll be able to approach everything with some tiny embroidery scissors and fashion your particular brand of mental topiary.

Speaking of sharp objects, a vivid imagination is also a bit of a double-edged sword. You will come up against people in your life who have settled into such a boring, surrendered, beaten existence that they will actually rise up to lash out against you and your colourful ways. Beware of those people, children, for they represent the slippery slope toward mediocrity.

So, how did this treatise on love morph back and forth into such a meandering diatribe you ask? Because I am She Who Shall Digress; I rule all with my streamofconsciousness thought patterns. I will wind my narrative flow over your head, around your back and up through your legs until you're hog-tied on the floor experiencing a vague wondering of just how in the hell you got there by reading about something as innocuous as love. That's my imagination at work and that's how I've brought you around once again to the beginning. See what I did there? You may now pass go and collect $200.

Posted at 11:12 a.m.