Imaginary Friends

Imaginary Friends

John Paul Derryberry

It will be a smidge embarrassing for everyone to read the next sentence, but there is no other way to highlight the importance of imagination without readers having this piece of information. When I was little, I named my imaginary friends Zazbo and Butthead. Yup, I ran around my house playing with near and dear friends and I felt the best name for one of them was Butthead. Do I have a clue where either name is chosen from? Not even a smidge of a clue. But I ran around our country house and property always talking to these two people and saying their name loud enough that, years later, my family reminded me of these guys. I yelled Zazbo and Butthead enough that it became a core memory for numerous people in my orbit.

Something that I notice in society, as we become more interconnected and local culture is swallowed up by online trends and challenges; is  that we are losing our imaginations. We lean into what others do and fall in line, instead of taking the time to figure out what could be, which takes a large imagination. It’s almost as if we are losing the ability to be comfortable with our own thoughts. Maybe that’s what Zazbo and Butthead did for me as friends, made me comfortable looking at an empty backyard, without friends to play with, and say, this can still be a great playground. Not that I didn’t have friends to play with but growing up on a dirt road, in a town of 400 people, meant there was going to be some alone time.

How do we handle that in 2024? We reach for the nearest tablet and doom-scroll social media looking for connection; when we forget, we can always connect with ourselves. Too often folks in our orbits are realists and take the view of the world that this is always the way it will be. I sat in a meeting this week and witnessed two influential leaders in my industry take that approach. It both angered and saddened me that some leaders in the room lacked the imagination to play with what could be, if for a day, a week, a month, we stopped focusing on what is and played with what our real world would look like if we just imagined. It was at that moment that I came back to my old friends, Zazbo and Butthead. It has never been my nature to take the world as it is. A slow white kid doesn’t play college basketball without some imaginative thinking around what could be possible versus what is. Did I have leaders and coaches attempt to temper that dream, yup- lots of them. It wasn’t malicious; it was out of love to not have me fail. But the imaginative mind doesn’t stop because of fear of failure, it’s in constant search of what could be, or how cool would it be if we pulled it off.

Zazbo and Butthead are not regular conversation partners anymore, but the spirit of those conversations live on with the idea that a kid from a small town in Ohio can change the way we talk about emotions and mental health. I’m doing that and years ago it started as an idea, and it was also discouraged by others. I believed  we would be better served to use stories instead of powerpoint to have those conversations. I get invited to speak in many places now because I do not use power points. Or in a world where we are moving everything into 20-second sound bites, I still imagine a world where we will turn back to insightful, full depth conversations about topics to better understand our world.

Lastly- I give chances to people in my programs, that most programs would say no to, because I can’t imagine giving up on folks. It’s probably the greatest strength I got from Zazbo and Butthead. The ability to imagine places where everyone can heal and deserve numerals chances to accomplish that. It’s not my education, my training, my work ethic that has allowed me to grow my message into something people want to consume. It’s my imagination, and more of us should imagine a world that works better than, "accept it as it is".  All the great things in this world came from imagination, just maybe be nicer to your imaginary friends than I was, because it was awful to call a friend a butthead for all those years.