Grace Buchanan Audiobooks — Let's Build Bridges Together — renovating

The friendly ghosts and strangers we love devotedly though they don’t know us.

The above article from Psychology Today got me thinking.

Like his quote from Machiavelli, I find it wonderful to be able to summon the greatest thinkers and masters of all time, at their greatest moments, to give them my undivided attention. Likewise, when I write and record fiction, I summon people who never existed, and coax them to tell me their life stories.

I question whether any people grow us in the wrong direction. Sure in the short-term, we regret certain influences, but in the long-term, I see such journeys as being instructive as they form our character, giving us compassion and humility, and helping us identify who we are.

Each teaches us more about ourselves, even when we don’t like how we learned it.

For example, I am learning that unappetizing feedback can be as valuable as friendly feedback; they both reveal my beliefs about what I did. Likewise, when we are around “bad” influences, perhaps they are just reflecting our beliefs back to us until we outgrow those beliefs.

I am also thinking about some of my sources of inspiration that my brain perceives without my ears and eyes. These are voices that I hear that didn’t vibrate my eardrums, and visions that I see that my retinas didn’t respond to, but these other voices and visions are as real as what my eardrums and retinas perceive, and become as real when I have done my work as a writer and narrator. My work makes my imaginary friends real.