While you were out having fun, enjoying adolescence, a small part of you died. You probably didn’t notice it. I’m talking about your imagination.

When I was younger, I lived in my mind. I went to outer space during school hours. I drew pictures of crazy places and crazy space ships and I went home and built crazy things with Legos.

When your mind is your world like that, you don’t really need a lot of friends. You didn’t need to hang out in big groups and go to parties and stuff unless it was someone’s birthday.

And using your imagination wasn’t necessarily antisocial. I remember in 6th grade my friend and I took turns paying attention in class while the other drew bizarre pictures with gnomes and elves and various other fantasy creatures. I was fascinated by anything that didn’t pertain to reality. I even drew stuff at home and showed it to my friends the next day.

Now whenever I try to doodle it just turns into a lot of lines and blobs. What happened? It’s not just me. I’m not crazy. I’ve talked to other people about it. It probably happened to you to, and you didn’t even notice that your creativity and imagination died by the time you hit seventh grade.

Now, as teenagers, there’s a lot more fun to be had. For instance, many kids take drugs, which isn’t very good for you. More kids hang out and go places. I got my license a couple of months ago, and I’m always cruisin’ somewhere. I mean, sure, you’re using your imagination to think of things to do, but the higher level of imagination, the kind where you can just sit down and have an adventure in your mind or with a piece of paper, is all but gone now.

School has changed, too. In middle school, particularly from seventh grade on, kids need to concentrate on academics more than imagination. Everything starts to get regulated and the teachers attempt to mold you into logical, sensible adults. “Okay, kids,” they say. “No more recess. It’s time to learn how to be a grown-up.”

School stopped being fun and started being a job. You don’t really have all that free time you had back in the day when you could just relax and not worry about anything, and your mind could wander. Indeed, many parents point the finger at school for killing their kid’s imagination and individuality. They send their kid to Montessori or NOVA or some other alternative school. But I’m not convinced that school is the culprit.

Maybe it’s some kind of hormonal influx that comes with puberty. Creativity gives way to acne and teenage angst. But growing up also makes you more conformist because these remnants of your childhood embarrass you. You’re not going to get into the cool crowd by drawing pictures of spaceships – you have to act older than you really are. So we stifle our minds and label creativity as something childish and embarrassing.

And as much as people like to rag on TV and video games for corrupting America’s youth, they aren’t really the problem. If anything, watching TV gave me new ideas and concepts and territories to explore, even if the TV show was some apparently “mindless” cartoon. In fact, most cartoons are just like kids: lighthearted and fun, colorful, and out of left field in the places they explored.

Whatever the factors may be, this phenomenon is pretty much universal. If you look at the great storytellers, new and old, they’re just retelling real events. For example, Mark Twain, literary genius, based most of his stories off past experiences he’d had. Even sci-fi stuff and fantasy is really all the same when you boil it down: it’s just the forces of good against a bunch of lords of darkness or spaceships or orcs or something.

Whatever it is that caused your creative juices to quietly go away, you need to realize that they’re gone. I wish I knew where. It’s really fun being a teenager, but I wish I could get back inside my head. I think it misses me.