Poverty of the imagination.

Saving up little by little instead of pretending you're rich. You're not.

I’m deep in the throes of the world of Law of Attraction teaching at this point; after all, you can’t really ignore it if you’re a tarot reader and user of astrology.*

It’s cringe how simple the solution sometimes is when anyone tells them people in the deepest of misery: “just be like, positive and believe in the universe’s abundance, yo!”

But holy shit, it’s also like genuinely spiritually ableist to say it that way. I’ve come to realize that when you’ve been through real shit and your trauma (whether reliving or living new kinds) is here to skin you from top to bottom, you cannot will yourself to imagine. You cannot get yourself there to just “believe.”

That’s because when life comes for you, the first thing it takes from you is your imagination. Many of us lament, “life broke me by taking away my self respect, my family’s approval, my girlfriend’s love, yadda yadda!” But the first thing we need to come back to is how starved our imagination becomes, so sinisterly and subtly but consistently.

It hurt to hear Santa wasn’t real when your little Western-society-raised self was a kid, because that was probably one of the first flagship times you started to have your ability to dream sTRIPPED from you. And when I say strip, I mean unraveling in nasty little ribbons, gradually, an unspooooooling of marvel and magic and seeing the bright side of things. It was such an inconsistency in how the world had seemed until then, that you probably fixated on it. And if no one told you that other magic was real, even if Santa wasn’t, you probably saw disillusionment scaffold from there.

Soon, your hopes and your optimism were leaking out of you left and right. Your first crush rejects you. An essay you were really proud of writing was apparently sh*t according to your teacher. Maybe your parents can’t give you that toy you wanted for your birthday because they can’t afford it. You soon realize you have less and less coins in your bank of imagination. And no one taught you to replenish it.

As the days ripple and leave us, so also does our ability to easily conjure up goodness from the power of our mental space alone. Unless you make a discipline out of looking on the bright side, without anyone raining on your parade, your imagination will continue to just leak and leak until you can’t stay afloat.

It’s painful to dream, so stop being difficult and stop doing it, my mom used to tell me. She wanted me to live a simple life. Keep my head down, be a victim of society instead of a participant (my words, not hers). She thought if I got a tech job, married some ordinary stable dude without waiting for love, lived in a suburb, stayed in state for school and near our house so she could cut me fruit every other day, that that would be a “good enough life.” She told me that my activist lineage (more on that some other time) would only cost me peace of mind. My alternative views would just make me always strive for things that were simply too big to be achieved. Progress in society was a foolish thing to desire, she said. She’d seen the havoc it wreaked, and she didn’t think it was worth it.

I may have grown up relatively well to do financially, checking my own privilege, but I tend to notice my cognitive distortions revolve around my inherited poverty of the imagination. Even though my mom was doing well with money, she lived every second of her life in fear of getting her hopes up. On bad days, she scolded and beat me every time I talked about what I wanted to do if it was unrealistic by her standards. Now, when I am hit with “real life,” I do the same. As an adult, my friends joked that she was awfully overreactive about me and my unconventional career plans for a rich person. Why are my notions of grandeur so “burdensome” when she’s better off than 90% of America, so what was she genuinely worried about that money wouldn’t fish me out of?

In her eyes, her conception of how things were as a fixed variable was way more grounds for assessment than her ability to dream dynamically with me.

I’ve realized over time that, whether things are going well or not, if your imagination is well-backed up and you have a diversified portfolio of dream assets, you’ll do just fine no matter how bad things “seem.” If someone reminds you of what you have, and if that person is even yourself, you’ll always find a creative solution out of any conundrum. Objective reality is an illusion; it all comes down to how much you can muster up the ability to believe otherwise than what you fear. And man, if you don’t know how to do that, then that is truly the worst.

I think the first step to getting it back is actually to say “fuck you” to anyone who tells you it’s easy to believe. Law of Attraction teachers who go, “what if it was easy? What if it wasn’t hard?” are onto something, but as a Capricorn with a grade A stick up her ass when it comes to all things spiritual, I find that really unrealistic. It’s not easy! It’s not easy at all! Look around! We have so much terrible shit going on! If that’s the end goal, asking if it were easy as if everyone has equal imaginative abilities is terrible. Stop imbibing people’s “wisdom” that our default state as humans is to believe in things, is to let things flow.

It’s actually not. I’m the biggest proponent of nurture over nature, because nature is unconscious, but nurture is conscious, and the conscious has the bigger ability to fuck up your life than the unconscious. You can’t even access your unconscious without the conscious! So even if our default state, if we’d never been subjected to the world’s bullshit, would be to let things flow, fine. But by the time you hear that, you’re already so far away from who you were “always meant to be” if the world hadn’t fucked you up that that’ll hurt to hear.

How about instead, “we ask, ‘what is one way I think about this that would make it easier than right now?” What if we asked ourselves how to be relatively less poor, than we are at this moment?

Acknowledging you weren’t necessarily taught to believe well and invest your beliefs wisely, like actual financial assets, is the first step to getting on the right track. Because then you won’t have such a sky high standard for trying to dream what you want. You can see what you do have. And just like money, you have to make every dollar go further. Focusing on the $ you don’t have when you’re lacking it will lead to you wasting the $ you do have.

With poverty of the imagination, look at the few things that are or have gone well for you as a basis to dream again. Dream little by little. Don’t spring immediately for the big ticket items, like a partner who loves you and a soulmate relationship if you can’t even fathom going on a date when it’s been 10 years, or $800,000 in the bank when you have yet to have seen $800 consistently. Try dreaming one small step at a time. Try feeling into what it’d be like to flirt with someone. Try feeling into what it’d be like to have $200 more than you have now. Try saving up, little by little, to dream a little bit at a time.

Try focusing on rewiring the 5% proof you have and realize while yes, it could be better, also equally, it could always be so much worse. Rationing out both sides of it in gradual doses is good.

Don’t gaslight yourself by telling yourself it’s easy to dream. Society already beats it out of us every day. Just dream a little better than you did yesterday.

Whoever is listening to your struggles with a vibe of it’s easy, just do it, who hasn’t heard you tell your life story with patience and curiosity for at least 5+ years, can go eat a fat one. You get to justify why things suck, and someone should indulge you without trying to treat you like you’re stupid. They don’t have to worry about “enabling” you; they have to hear why you can’t dream to help you figure out how to dream again. Yes, even if it’s your therapist, don’t let them infiltrate you and make you feel it should be easier, because tbh that’s problematic. They are not you. Whoever is telling you that doesn’t have to live with your brain, which on any given day is subject to a fine array of things to gaslight yourself with.

As my friend once suggested to me, the biggest protection spell you often need is actually one against yourself. Other people can just gently help me stop beating myself up, but them telling me to stop is definitely not going to make me.

Yeah, the world can break me real hard, is what I’ve learned. But what took me longer to realize is I become an accomplice in my own destruction after the first blow. When I, the dreamer, stopped letting myself dream.

The repeated culprit of continued punitivity is none other than me. That’s when shit gets scary. But why is that? Because you’re trying to beat yourself into submission. Because some part of you still does want to dream and hope, and the disconnect of still being able to somewhat do it even when every inch of you is in pain means you’ll try to stop.

When you’re gaslighting yourself, is when you actually should just double down on dreaming. That’s when your ego is dying. Like I said, I advocate for nurture over nature, and our nurture is to say, “don’t dream, you pointless idiot, go and leave without it.” But to dream is also to die. It’s to kill off all bets. To dream is to let go of rationality. To dream is to stop being povertous in this regard, to say fuck you to how the world is the worst debt collector of all and has taken everything from you.

Dream away, be a fool, be a rich fool in your mind even if only a little, be delusional, be reckless, etc. in your imagination.

And then you’ll suddenly find some returns are in your favor.

*or… maybe you can, tbh, because lots of people separate these modalities, but that’ll be for a separate post.