In what seemed like endless days of captivity in the prison of my childhood, I often sought comfort by emphasizing the mental over physical, Victor Frankl would certainly understand this practice. I focused on putting my daily woes and sorrows aside, to allow myself to freely imagine what and where I want to be, or how I want things to work out, essentially creating your own ideal in life, even if it does not exist at the moment. To make it real you have to picture it, feel it, imagine it, and dream it as often as possible.

As a visual person, I’ve always loved scanning through various reading materials, magazines focusing on the pictures particularly of places and things that I admired. With those images I would imagine myself standing inside them living and breathing them. It was really thrilling and exciting! It somehow filled me up with hope.

You could argue that television, movies, computers and even drug induced highs achieve the same effect of fantasy. Sure they are all forms of manipulating sensory perceptions to induce alternate physical states of mind and realities. But with imagination, you can access that anytime and anywhere by your own will, and that is powerful, and probably the only thing we need to survive in this world.

My life till now, I can only seem to recall as a blur of memories. For the most part, memories of childhood, memories of growth, pleasant ones and unpleasant ones. Despite the polarities of emotions, I find comfort in that which lies close to those memories of home.

With comfort in self and surrounding, naturally comes self trust and confidence, and in no better place we are to honestly express our genuine emotions. It is the real that makes us and it is realness that plants our feet firmly to the ground, allowing us to trust and be trusted by ourselves.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

- Langston Hughes

It’s been about half a year now since mom has left. My sister found this poem written in mom’s handwriting on an index card, dated 9/15/94, something she probably wrote during her English classes at adult school. Since discovering this, the poem has touched and inspired me to follow my dreams.

Bring me back to a feeling…

That seems to have been lost,
in the heap of rubble from shattered hearts.

Kiley is named after Rilo Kiley.