What Happened?

What is it about getting older that drains one’s imagination?

Today I was reminiscing with my friend Liz about our middle school/junior high years. We were both obsessed with this RPG (role-playing game) site called “Running Wild Brumbies.” Generally when one thinks of RPGs he thinks of anime and strange things like that, but this was so much fun! You made up a character (a horse) and posted on message boards, living out its life and interacting with other horses. This took up most of my time from about 6^th-7^th grades, at least… possibly even part of 8^th grade. I don’t remember. Anyway, even though it was virtually a pointless game, I can definitely say that it opened up my vocabulary and gave me practice in my writing and using vivid verbs and unique adjectives.

Then Liz and I also used to write stories constantly. I never finished them because half-way through I would get ideas for a new plot so I would just start a new one. We used to always e-mail them to each other and critique them and talk about new ideas. Mine tended to always be set in medieval times with princesses and knights and fencing.

In ninth grade, Liz and I and our friend Anna all wrote letters to each other. We pretended that we had all moved from Conway to different parts of the US and we were keeping in touch. (Our families weren’t necessarily the same as they are in real life.) Each of us had a notebook that we would write letters in, then we would pass around the notebooks so the other two could read what we had written to them. My story was that I had moved to Vermont and my family had opened a bed and breakfast. And of course we each had adventures with new schools and boys and such. We even went as far to cut out pictures from magazines that would be a picture of our new dog or our front porch or our bedroom.

Now, as I have gotten older and am four years down the road, I can’t seem to flow as easily in my writing or in my creativity. As I read Anne of Green Gables, I notice all of her imaginings and I think about how I used to be like that, always daydreaming about fairies or perfectly delightful names for a creek or what my life would be like if circumstances were different, although I was not quite as over the top as Anne. I long to be able to imagine things like I used to, but I think to some extent I have grown out of that stage of my life. Maybe because the world around us tells us to be practical and that fairy tales aren’t real. I know that life isn’t a fairy tale, but at the same time it is fun to pretend and have fantasies.

So as I am reading, I am being taken back into my childhood. Back into a world of dryads, talking animals, whispering winds, and dancing barefoot in the grass with flowers encircling my head. And it’s nice every once in awhile to escape from a world of college, career options, and being practical about everything that I do.