Where Did the Fairies Go?
On wonder, whimsy, and why we're allowed to want it back.
We used to search for them, you know. In the backyard, in the gap between tree roots, in the shimmer at the edge of a puddle. We whispered about dragons on the playground. We built whole worlds out of blankets and cardboard boxes and pure, unfiltered imagination. We believed — deeply, naturally, without anyone having to convince us — that magic was real and that we were part of something larger and more interesting than what the adults kept talking about.
And then one day, we became the adults. And somewhere in the middle of becoming them, we stopped looking.
"Where did the fairies go? I think we stopped believing in them right around the time we learned we were supposed to be serious. Productive. Responsible. Realistic."
We lost our sense of wonder the moment we became fully aware that we were people — people with reputations to manage, histories to repeat, expectations to meet. The world handed us a script and we took it, because everyone around us seemed to be running lines from the same one. And so we put the magic down. We told ourselves we'd pick it up again someday. We haven't.
THE WEIGHT OF BECOMING
We learned to be serious
before we learned who we were.
Here's what happens when we become too aware of being people: we get crushed under the weight of it. We learn that history repeats. We learn that the world can be harsh and small and unkind. We learn that joy sometimes gets you laughed at and softness sometimes gets you hurt. And so we do what any reasonable person does — we harden a little. We get practical. We trade in the dragon maps for spreadsheets and learn to call it growing up.
But there's a cost to that trade. And a lot of us are paying it every day without realizing it.
WHY YOUR INNER VOICE SOUNDS THE WAY IT DOES
The messages we internalize about who we're allowed to be don't appear out of nowhere. Psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed that the self-talk we carry into adulthood is an internalized version of the voices we heard around us as children — the way the adults in our world spoke, judged, worried, and wondered shaped the voice we eventually turned inward.
Research from the Association for Applied Sport Psychology describes the mind as a tape recorder that starts running from birth, capturing the words and beliefs of the people around us. If the world you grew up in had no room for whimsy — if wonder was dismissed, imagination was "a waste of time," and seriousness was the only currency worth having — that tape plays on. Quietly. On repeat. Until you start to believe it's just who you are.
Sources: Vygotsky, L.S. (1934). Thought and Language; Association for Applied Sport Psychology (2025). "Your Words, Your World: How Self-Talk Shapes Your Reality."
It's not who you are. It's what you learned. And what was learned can be unlearned — or at least, questioned.
LET'S BE HONEST
We have become the villains
in our own lives.
Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: a lot of us are making our own lives harder than they need to be. Not because the world is easy — it isn't always. But because we've decided, somewhere along the way, that struggle is more honest than ease. That if we're not grinding, we're not serious. That rest is something we earn, joy is something we schedule, and wonder is something we'll allow ourselves when everything else is handled.
Everything else is never fully handled. You know this.
"Life is really easy if you let it be. The ones making it hard are often doing it out of habit — a habit of self-punishment dressed up as ambition."
We have, many of us, become the villains in our own stories. The harsh inner critic. The one who dismisses our own ideas before anyone else gets the chance to. The one who says that's not realistic and who do you think you are and you don't have time for that. That's a rough way to live. And it is a choice — even when it doesn't feel like one.
The good news is that being the villain means you can also choose to become something else.
A GENTLE BUT FIRM REMINDER
You are in charge of
how your life goes.
This isn't toxic positivity. This isn't "just choose happiness." Real life has real weight and real grief and real things that are genuinely hard. But inside all of that — alongside all of that — you still get to decide what you do with your attention. What you let yourself enjoy. Whether you allow yourself to be delighted by something small and strange and beautiful on a Tuesday afternoon.
We are all people just trying to get by. Every single one of us. Nobody has it figured out. The person whose life looks effortless is carrying something you can't see. The one who seems completely certain is usually the most afraid. We are all in it together, stumbling toward something, hoping it adds up to something meaningful.
And in the middle of that — you are allowed whimsy. You are allowed to be a person who finds joy in ridiculous, small, unproductive things. You are allowed to look for the fairies again.
THE INVITATION
5 ways to bring whimsy
back into your life
This is for everyone. Boys and girls alike. Whimsy is not gendered. Wonder is not childish. Delight is not a luxury. Here's how to start letting it back in.
ONE
Go looking for something small and magical — today, not someday.
Not on a trip. Not when life slows down. Right now, in the ordinary geography of your actual life. The light through a window at a strange angle. A bird doing something weird. A flower growing through a crack in concrete. The world is full of small magic and we have trained ourselves not to notice it. Retrain. It takes about thirty seconds to stop and actually look.
TWO
Do the thing you used to love that you convinced yourself you outgrew.
Draw badly. Read the fantasy novel. Build something with your hands. Put on the music you loved at fourteen and actually listen to it. We don't outgrow joy — we just get embarrassed by it. The things that made you feel most alive when you were young weren't wrong. They were just you, before you learned to edit yourself.
THREE
Say yes to something delightful that has absolutely no practical value.
Take the class in the thing you'll never do professionally. Buy the weird decoration. Learn a fact about an animal for no reason. Go somewhere specifically because it looks interesting, not because it's efficient. Your life does not need to be optimized at all times. Some of the best things you'll ever do are completely useless by conventional standards.
FOUR
Let yourself be bad at something — and keep doing it anyway.
We stopped playing when we started caring too much about being good. Whimsy lives in the space where you do something just to do it — not to be impressive, not to improve, just to exist in the experience of it. Sing off-key. Paint something hideous. Dance in your kitchen. The goal is presence, not performance.
FIVE
Protect your sense of wonder like it's something worth keeping — because it is.
Wonder is not a phase. It's not something you had as a child and lost forever. It's something you have to actively choose to protect in a world that is constantly asking you to be practical, rational, and efficient. Spend time with people who are still curious. Read things that surprise you. Let yourself be moved by something beautiful without immediately reaching for your phone. Wonder is a practice, not a personality trait you either have or don't.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The fairies didn't go anywhere.
We just stopped looking.
You are allowed to be a grown adult with real responsibilities and a complicated life and a mortgage and difficult relationships — and also someone who believes, just a little, in something luminous and strange hiding at the edge of things.
You are allowed to take up space in your own life with joy. With silliness. With the specific kind of delight that has no justification except that it makes you feel more like yourself.
You were a kid who looked for fairies. That kid is still in there. She's been waiting — very patiently — for you to remember that wonder was never something you were supposed to outgrow. It was something you were supposed to carry with you.
Go carry it.
— Kaitlyn
Ready to stop being the villain
in your own story?
That's exactly what we work on together.
