An Imaginative Inner Life

Reconciling fantasy and reality

BY DEVNA PANDA WITH ART BY BROOKE LAMBRECHT

“Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?”

When Jeanette Winterson wrote the above in Sexting the Cherry, she may as well have been peering into my inner consciousness. 

I often feel as if I am spending the majority of my life in my head. I tend to concoct romanticized scenarios in my mind about all of the many ways different situations in my life may play out. Ultimately, these daydreams do little but disappoint me when I am inevitably brought back to reality. 

I can draw several examples from my life that would serve as evidence of this tendency, but I’ll tell a less consequential one. Throughout my entire adolescence, I was hopelessly entranced by a boy I had grown up around. My feelings for him would dwindle for a period of time and then inevitably resurface. By the time sophomore year of high school rolled around, we had lost contact. However, in what I considered a stroke of sheer luck, we were assigned seats next to each other in Honors English 10 and thus forced to converse. 

Throughout the semester, we started talking about the recent developments in our lives and all that we had once had and apparently still had in common. Not having spoken to him in a couple of years, I was surprised (but also not at all surprised) to find all of the old feelings I had once felt come flooding back.

One morning, we were playing with a paper crane we had found in the library. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the interaction. When the next period rolled around, I sat down in my next class. I was pulling out my materials for the class when I noticed a folded piece of pink paper dangling from the ceiling. I’ll bet you can’t guess what’s coming next. The paper was in the shape of a crane! Being as naively trusting in the universe as I was, I told myself that if I saw one more, it was a sign that something more would come out of the newly reformed friendship. As I continued to glance around the room, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The room was teeming with paper cranes of all shapes, colors, and sizes; there was one stashed in every nook and cranny. I had never once noticed them before and now I could hardly take in one square footage of the room without seeing a crane. I was confident that regardless of whether the universe had ever spoken to me before, it certainly was now. This was a sign that we would permanently be in each other’s orbits once again.

Fast forward to the end of high school. Many things happened but the two of us growing closer was not one of them. When I reflected later on that memory, I remembered something that I had initially glossed over. One of my classmates had used those paper cranes for a presentation related to Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes before putting them in the library. It was entirely possible that she had put those cranes in the room just before I had noticed them. 

Instead of having the courage to create my own fate, I had placed my trust in some arbitrary external power. In doing so, I rendered myself as a mere observer in my own life. Moreover, my fantasized life had been so disparate from my nonfictional life that this propensity to romanticize had clouded my ability to turn a fantasy into reality. Fortunately, in this instance, interpreting an occurrence that was likely meaningless as a ~sign from the universe~ had no genuinely significant impact on my life. 

Even still, I have since realized the importance of seeing the world and my life’s events as they are. When the line between reality and imagination is blurred, the risk of missing out on an experience formative to one’s development is run. 

I do not want to be someone whose inner life obscures their outer life. Instead, I intend to prioritize experiencing each moment with as much profundity and clarity as possible. I can’t speak for how we are all living, but that is how I want to live. 

Wake Mag