At some point, I stopped longing for imaginative play and craved facts. Give me information I didn’t know before and my mind will be slightly satisfied.

I love reading and learning, which I suppose is the issue.

When you have a young person in love with learning (a good thing), it gets re-enforced at the expense of their imagination. However, as a young person, I could mitigate this essential need to only build the “left side of my brain” by escaping into books – mainly fantasy and science fiction.

At some point, the outlet dissipated because of a guilt that I must’ve picked up from the environment. This guilt was telling me I had no time for such leisure and I could be doing something more important.

Then the Internet hooked itself into my sensibilities by offering ample material to always be learning something new. To keep me going, my brain received a steady supply of dopamine hits with each new click.

Soon this was replaced by algorithms guiding my hand while for-profit companies found ways to keep me hooked in their ecosystem for just another few moments.

Let’s not even get started on the increasing addictiveness of video games that was also happening.

I was still reading, but the genre shifted to non-fiction and even the smallest steps into fiction were difficult as my focus wavered elsewhere. Desperate, I took courses during my final year of University in different genre fiction so I would be forced to read fiction.

This was only a temporary band-aid to a bigger problem.

Even my career as a magician, a profession dependent on imagination, was on the road to being overtaken by marketers. Magicians were no longer being sold possibilities, but paint-by-number routines.

It was also happening in the world: imagination was being replaced by iteration.

I don’t abhor being a knowledge seeker, but I wanted my imagination back to sit alongside my lifelong learning. Where did it go?

It was still in the parks around my house when I played with my friends.
It was in a book that required imagination and interpretation to picture.
It was in the moments where I was doing nothing but aimlessly staring out the car window, or a lake, or at a night sky.
It was in the art I did, the conversations with my friends and the pencil I held when I wrote my first published poem.

My imagination was in the moments where I just let go and allowed my mind to enjoy what was happening.

Slowly, recognizing where to find it, I’ve been getting it back.

Now that my reading obligations for non-fiction books are done, my list is purely fiction.

I just got a bucket of Lego and a ton of Play-Doh to play with my kids and I have a consistent board game night with my friends.

My writing is flowing easier.

I missed my imagination. I think it missed me too.