Andrea Kasprzak - Imagination Transforms Everything: Rewrite Your Lifes Story with Intentional Imagining

Copyright 2019 by Andrea Kasprzak

Cover design by Kerry Rubenstein

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First Edition: May 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kasprzak, Andrea, author.

Title: Imagination transforms everything: rewrite your lifes story with intentional imagining / Andrea Kasprzak.

Description: New York: Seal Press, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051444| ISBN 9781580058261 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781580058278 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Imagination. | Self-actualization (Psychology)

Classification: LCC BF408 .K327 2019 | DDC 153.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051444

ISBNs: 978-1-58005-826-1 (paperback), 978-1-58005-827-8 (ebook)

E3-20190411-JV-NF-ORI

For my parents

H i! Im Andrea, but you can call me Ands.

You likely dont know who I am, but you might feel like you have a better idea once weve gone on this imaginative escapade together.

Ive been obsessed with books, art, and make-believe for as long as I can remember. Born in the 1980s and raised in Michigan, I grew up before social media on a diet of fairy tales, romantic fantasy films, and music videos. It was a gentler time back then, one that allowed for innocence and encouraged wide-eyed exploration. As a child, I was most comfortable deep in the clouds of my own imagination: writing stories, videotaping Barbie soap operas, dancing to records in my moms wedding dress, and calling Nintendo customer service to pitch ideas for new video games.

Reading was my favorite way to spend time.

I fell asleep each night in a sea of library books. The books were everywhereon my nightstand, in stacks against the wall, on the floor next to the bathtub. I loved them all: J. R. R. Tolkien, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, R. L. Stine, Jane Austen. But I wasnt just limited to books. I devoured anything I could get my hands onthe backs of cereal boxes, street signs, JCPenny catalogs, mens magazines, travel brochures, the Sunday funnies.

I wasand still ama voracious consumer of words. I also wrote compulsively. I knew early on that this line of work would be challenging and that one was more likely to die in a gutter than to make a living off writing. Yet still I went for it wholeheartedly. Born into a family of healers and helperssocial workers, special education teachers, speech pathologistsI had no writer mentors other than the authors of the books I loved.

But for me, this was enough. All I needed to know I could learn with help from my library card.

I didnt really have a choice. I went nuts if I didnt write. Writing is my way of making sense of the world. Its a release for all the electric energy that whirls around inside me.

In high school, I didnt fit into any group. I was a floaterI wasnt part of a clique but rather butterflied around from group to group, none of which really felt like home to me. As a result, I became one of those invisible kids. I was fully absorbed in my own ideas and aspirations. I didnt play any team sports or act in any plays or even join any clubs other than the school newspaper.

I was just me.

I spent many nights alone in my bedroom cutting up magazines, listening to music, and reading other peoples interpretations of lyrics on SongMeanings.com.

Desperate for some sense of community, I fell hard for America Online message boardsspecifically, the Whims of Fashion on Seventeen magazines channel. Every day I would dial up via the modem and type to a group of girls based all around North America. Long before Facebook was around, we were writing our own form of status updates in posts that we referred to as dailies. Each day, wed copy and paste the same form and plug in our stories.

Heres what a daily looked like:

Listening To: Did you say no, this cant happen to mejeff buckley

Wearing: BCBG white fitted tee, Gap jeans with the waistband cut off, Adidas Superstars

Eating: Egg white omelet with olives and cheddar, Diet Coke

Thinking About: im in love with this guy Aaron who played guitar in my schools variety show. he came up to me in the library smiled and threw a book with sex in the title at me. what does it MEAN? he sang this song in the variety show. it was about mad hatters and Cadillacs with this guy Matt who i used to work with at a steak restaurant. we both bused tables. Aarons so cute but im scared of him. i think hes had a lot of sex and he was dating this girl who looked like Winona Ryder for like three years. I used to have a locker across from his. I wallpapered my whole locker in photos of Leo DiCaprio and pretended I didnt even know he was alive. I hope we get together before he graduates.

We stream-of-conscious shared about heavier stuff, too: eating disorders, breakups, sex, mental health, family issues. This went on from ages fourteen to twenty-one. I only ever met a few of these girls in real life, but I felt like we were kindred spirits.

On the board, there was no like button. Our personalities were reduced to words. But it was through these words that we found the freedom to express the truest, most vulnerable versions of ourselves. We lived such different livesour locations, ethnicities, and backgrounds variedyet through our sharing of stories, we discovered new connections every day. We each became characters in the boards main story, every girl dutifully writing her part at the end of the school day.

The Whims of Fashion became my diary. More than that, it was a diary that wrote back, in its own beautiful chorus of foreign yet familiar voices. For me, it enforced the importance of story, words, and connection.

Another thing that I loved in high school was predicting Next Big Things, and the secret recipe always seeming to involve some combination of authenticity and honesty. A bass-playing boy wearing a robot helmet in our high school talent show inspired me to go to the office and get his schedule. I showed up at his art class, wanting to profile him for my journalism class.

I wasnt alone.

A week or so later, his band was discovered during a performance at a local art gallery by Jack White. They went on a world tour. I never heard from or saw him again. But this forecasting thing became a reoccurring pattern.

Theyre going to blow up, just wait, I would tell a friend.

It happened time and time again.

One guy went from college radio to winning a Grammy a month later.

Another sold a screenplay for six figures.

And a girl crush went on years later to get a book deal for her illustrations.

Im not trying to take credit for others brilliance. I just had some knack for spotting diamonds in the rough. This daydream-forecasting pattern led me to pursue a career as a lifestyle journalist. I was drawn not to being a critic or breaking hard news but rather to listening to fascinating humans. I enjoyed finding a creative way to share others stories. The thrill of discovery is the quickest way to feel more alive.