The Island of Weirdos
A memoir on imagination, growing up, and becoming a writer
Every writer returns to childhood eventually. It's not because we want to stay there, but because that's where we first learned to notice.
Part I
I. The Last Place Where Weird Was Ordinary
I don't remember the day I stopped believing I could become a dog.
Maybe that's because childhood rarely ends with an announcement. It dissolves quietly, traded for homework, expectations, and the slow realization that adults reward certainty more often than curiosity.
Before I knew what creativity was, I only knew that pretending felt real.
The smell of our home resembled our laundry detergent's scent that melded with smells from outside; lavender and fresh garden tomatoes. The floor looked like laminated pine, slippery for socks and more forgiving on our skin and clothes than the splinters from hardwood floors in old houses.
The floors reminded us we could play on them as animals, our favorite imaginative play. We scrambled through the house on all fours, shifting to a moving down dog position when our knees earned their bruises and strawberries. We shuffled outside where a bowl of kibble sat untouched by our corgi. We wanted to take the imagination to a sensory level, but at the time we didn't understand that our curiosity was strong enough to inspire the impulse. I moved my head close and sniffed the bowl, then I opened my mouth and chomped at a large bite, just like Farley does when he's hungry. It wasn't as unappetizing as I feared; it tasted like chicken bouillon and pumpernickel chips. It was very salty and it cut the roof of my mouth as I worked to break down the kibble into smaller pieces. It was so stale and salty, but it was the best food I had in days. It felt good on my teeth until it became very dry and soggy; then it was ready to swallow.
We became dogs to live in moments that felt safer and sparked more engagement than our own lives did at the time. We weren't pretending because reality was boring. We were pretending because imagination gave us something reality couldn't. Inside those games, we had complete agency. We decided who we became. The rules belonged to us.
II. The Kingdom We Built
Our neighborhood wasn't large. It only became enormous because we filled every corner of it with stories.
Inside the bamboo, the light didn't just shine; it surrendered. It filtered weakly through the broad, sticky leaves of the mulberry tree, creating deep, pooling shadows that swallowed the ground. The heavy, swaying branches of the willow trees and the dense bamboo stalks acted as a thick wall, muting the noises of the outside world until nothing remained but a heavy, isolating silence, a quiet that somehow felt profoundly safe. The air always hung thick with the melancholic scent of wet earth and crushed, decaying leaves, the smell of a world rotting quietly away to keep our secrets.
The rough bark of the trees bit into our palms as we climbed, brushing off scraped knees, desperate to get high enough to outgrow our fears. In those lengthening shadows, we played games of survival. We pounded our chests like King Kong and swung through the lower branches like Tarzan, fighting battles that only mattered to us. We chased the cat through the brush, communicating in a monkey language of clicks and hoots that we invented just for us. Now, those sounds are just ghosts, swallowed completely by the silence of a kingdom that no longer stands.
The bamboo never judged us. It only whispered when the wind moved through it, as though it understood that childhood languages aren't meant to be translated.
Inventory of the Island of Weirdos
One bamboo forest.
One mulberry kingdom.
Countless scraped knees.
A language without nouns.
One loyal corgi.
Three rabbits.
Infinite afternoons.
A child who believed pretending and becoming were almost the same thing.
No maps.
No clocks.
No audience.
Just enough imagination to make the world feel endless.
III. The Box
We had many pets growing up, but most of them ran away or died.
Once we had three bunnies brought home to us in a box. It made me so sad they were trapped in there, uncertain of their future and unable to control what happened next. I related to them in a way, except I was the one with control. It felt a rush of power come over me, and it terrified me.
Adults must feel that way; it's easy for them to box me up and ship me off to the next place. But it's terrifying for those who lack a hand in their own future. It's worse for these bunnies because they don't have a metaphorical hand or a real hand. Maybe it's better though; there is such a beauty in simplicity and the attributes that animals possess. Humans are too powerful for their own good.
I opened the box, and the bunnies escaped almost immediately. I felt torn; I wanted to keep them for love and play, but they looked and acted fearful. Sometimes, captivity provides protection, but how can a child promise this to a living creature when the child isn't safe themselves?
With no hand in life, and an unpredictable environment that drastically shifts between desolate and lonely to amplified violence and heartache, I had nothing to offer these bunnies, other than stale kibble and role play excursions sure to trigger their flight mode.
I thought I was rescuing them. Years later, I wonder if they were rescuing me. They were the first creatures that taught me love isn't possession. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is open the box.
Part II
IV. The Boxes of Adulthood
But adulthood didn’t open boxes; it built them.
The day when I learned to raise my hand less in school was pivotal. It taught me rejection in the form of humiliation. It taught me to be selective with my words; avoid saying the strange thoughts that took up brain space. It taught me to dress like a girl again, because I drew unwanted attention as a girl pretending to be a boy, when really I just didn't feel like I had to decide yet. It followed with questions about my sexuality, which I didn't even understand at the time.
Professionalism was learned through experience, trial and error, and a fear of criticism that manifested into a desire for feedback to help me become the best in my field. But this dedication to professionalism required me to be a planner and a strategist, leaving less room for spontaneity. Growth was inevitable and invited, and adulthood is a natural learning process.
We believed everything could become something else. A tree became a jungle. Bamboo became a country. Hardwood floors became a savanna. We became animals. Nobody told us that imagination had limits. Adults did that later.
V. The Visionary's Lens
I've always been the kind of person who sought out the hidden developments, the unspoken beauty and shame, the natural and unnatural ways of life. I still can't resist relating to animals on a deeper level; in other words, I'm an animal empath. The question I return to most often is: when will we all be able to understand the value of animals in the world?
Photography feels strangely familiar. As a child, I crawled across the floor pretending to be a dog because I wanted to see the world differently. Now I dig my knees in dirt to steady my body as I photograph my adorable dogs, as well as wildlife like birds and rabbits. Now I lay down in wet grass because the light peaks through the trees perfectly from that angle.
As a teenager, I 'pretended' to be a visionary; unintentionally revealing my true creative skills and identity. If I'm fortunate enough to find beauty, I am driven to journal it with captured moments (photographs), inspiring creative and imaginative questions and thoughts that expand my visionary's universe. The universe envelopes me in every creative project; allowing me to see something beyond every visual.
I took a long break from creativity and writing and explored the health field, became a respected entrepreneur and functional holistic health professional, and maintained a successful growing business for years. But eventually, the creative visionary in me couldn't stay silent any longer. Inspiration kept pouring in, more questions provoked investigations, and AI simplified some of the time-consuming tasks that interrupted the creative processes. The instinct hasn't vanished; it's become more powerful and insightful. It's led me here, deeper into the creative universe, back to my true self, which I believed was gone forever.
VI. The Architecture of Words
When did I first realize words could create worlds?
It wasn't a sudden, bright spark of inspiration from reading the books of others, but rather a quiet necessity found in the refuge of writing journals. Growing up in an unpredictable environment that could drastically shift to desolate loneliness and amplified heartache, I needed a place to hide. Photography allowed me to journal captured moments visually, freezing a single frame in time, but it was writing that allowed me to resurrect the ghosts of the past.
I realized words were a quiet, desperate kind of magic when I sat down to write about eating dog food and the imaginary play that consumed my youngest days. Writing everything down allowed me to untangle my life from different emotional states and angles, piecing together fragments of a self that felt so easily shattered. It embedded stories into my memories that protected me, helping me search for something positive in every trauma just to keep the darkness at bay. With a pen in hand, I wasn't just surviving; I was expanding my visionary's universe, proving to myself that words could slowly rebuild the worlds I thought were gone forever.
VII. The Writer Returns
Sometimes I think every writer spends a lifetime trying to return to the first place they felt completely free to imagine. Mine happened to grow behind our house. Inside a forest of bamboo.
My childhood was taken away from me prematurely, and I had to over-analyze alone for years to understand what was happening around me; what led me down such a confusing and depressing path. However, in adulthood, this has inspired my brain to become analytical and to inspire technical comprehension in a unique and powerful way.
Then, I had to grow up. But how?. There was nobody around me who I wanted to be like except for two relatives I never saw enough of. I was flying blind.
Eventually I learned what I had to do: write everything, understand it from different angles and emotional states, and find what speaks to my heart and mind the closest, universally. I mourned the loss of my imagination that was swept away by the rigid, conforming current; so much so that I revisited my past often to avoid losing touch with the child in me. It embedded stories in my memories that I told myself; stories that protected me and helped me find something positive in every trauma; a lesson learned, a new memory, insight into my identity and values.
The external force to those around me was a self-isolating anger, and the resentment slowed growth that has since persevered and exceeded my hopes for innovative thinking and the projects it has inspired.
The long-winded journey is finally connected to a life where creativity, innovation and technical skills are fostered. Where there is endless room to grow and explore, and the world feels infinite (even with a basic geographical understanding). I've traveled, lived, loved, written, photographed, created, inspired and shared myself with the world, and it has done the same for me. I am ready for anything.
Final reflection
I never wish to lose touch with Mother Nature or the inspiration she bestows. As long as She is protected, so is my imagination.
I hope to entertain at least half the questions that sprint through my mind; sometimes I imagine myself in my mind's forest that resembles a Ghibli forest. Soot sprites, or Susuwatari, are zooming through the forest and hiding, making it impossible for me to entertain every question that comes to mind. If I'm able to catch one, it usually becomes part of a thorough investigative process that explores the maturation process and the deeper, hidden or reflective questions within it.
As I search for the sprites, I'm trying to befriend tiny Kodama, the glowing forest spirits in Princess Mononoke, who represent the evolved ideas and questions. In the anime, the glowing spirits of the forest represent the presence of nature's vitality in their environment. To my mind's forest, they represent a flourishing imagination and an ever-expanding creative universe.
Closing
I no longer crawl across hardwood floors. My knees rarely carry fresh scrapes. The monkey language has disappeared. The mulberry tree is older now. And I am too.
But every blank page asks the same question that childhood once did: Who could you become today?.
And every time I begin writing, I find myself walking back toward the Island of Weirdos....
I don't wish to be a child again, but the island is where I first learned that the world becomes larger the moment we're willing to imagine it differently.
Sometimes I imagine that the Island of Weirdos still exists. Somewhere beyond the bamboo. Somewhere between memory and imagination. Maybe every writer spends a lifetime trying to find it again. I don't think I've found it completely.
But every blank page feels like another path through the trees.
