One of the things I am doing with this site to keep me inspired even when I am not — is to find words I love and write about them. I want to take one word and turn it into something more.

Recently I was incredibly inspired and am feeling a bit drained. However, I feel like a difference between a successful writer, and a hobbyist — is that they can push through times of drainage and learn to force inspiration out of themselves.

So that is what I am doing today. I picked one of the tens of drafts of words saved during times of inspiration and am looking to find more within it. I believe I have chosen a good word for my first drainage since starting this website.

Today I want to write about the word imagination and what is has meant to me as a person.

My imagination has gotten me through just about every day that I can remember. From as early as nap time making finger fights between knights and dragons — which truthfully just looked like two hands kicking each other.

Imagination is something I never, ever want to lose. It’s something that I feel I have certainly lost sharpness to over the years. Even feel like part of me starting this website was to fight for it back. To not just sit on the couch and satisfy my creative desires by consuming others’ hard work. Not to say that is a bad thing, but I have spent a lot of time in the last few years just consuming media wracking my brain for what I could do with myself.

What I could apply myself to on my free time that could be supported with my full-time job, while not distracting me from it. I’ve needed a true outlet for my imagination for some time. I work in design for a living, but there are guidelines, and decisions that are not my own. I do not begrudge these things, this is part of being a working professional and I quite like what I do and how I do it.

I did need something that is 100% completely my own however. Where I make the decisions, and choose how things look, feel, and express.

When I first created this website I didn’t even know how it would be perceived. And I am not saying it is a success, far from it. However it is already a success in the way I have wanted it to be.

I have spent the last week crying, almost daily, about the things that have been written. I have broken through a wall of creativity that has been blocked (excepting small, important doses) for nearly 10 years. I’ve been able to use my imagination again.

I love to use my imagination in my writing, even when writing non-fiction. Which I seem to be writing a lot more lately and find funny. I grew up always wanting to use my imagination to write fiction, but believe I am better served using it to illustrate real things, and real perspectives. At least at this time, that’s what’s pushing me to write more.

I don’t necessarily think people deserve to or should read these things, but want to get them down. I want them out of my head for more space for more imagination so that I can continue to do things with these words that have been missed so much.

Words and imagination go hand in hand in for me. My parents spent a lot of time teaching me the value of money growing up — but one thing they also valued was books.

My Mom would take me to the book store to buy one any time I finished the one I was previously reading. No chores needed, nothing. They would buy me books without question while growing up and I cannot thank them enough for this. I was reading adult literature like the Lord of the Rings by around 11-12, and studying it.

That is how I learned to love words and how they can be used to paint any kind of picture for any kind of mind.

Books and books and books and books. So many books that I don’t even really read them any more. I read way more comic books. Almost 100% of my actual personal reading for entertainment comes from comic books these days.

One of the reasons for this is that I really don’t want my own imagination, and my own prose affected by another’s. I really need to keep myself away from those things if for no other reason than I am terrified of accidentally being influenced by something — and then being looked at as a fake because of it.

I know I am already influenced by everything I have ever read. Though now  I feel like I have a strong grasp on the English language, and would be better served by speaking to an editor to learn more.

Maybe this is a bad choice, I am not sure of it, but I am not interested in reading books so much right now. We still have a bit of a library in our house — sometimes I will pick up a book already read and crunch a good 250 pages into it before it goes on the stack next to my side of the bed, almost certain not to be cracked open again.

I’ve been trying to find some larger meaning here, but this time I’m not so sure there is one.

I just love the word imagination, and what it brings with it. I want to make sure I never lose mine, because I feel if I do I will lose a very large piece of what makes me.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms

In featured photo from left to right: Alan Elms, Brian Capone, Kevin Perkins, Paul Perkins, Sean Capone, Trevor Elms.