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When I was a teenager I was obsessed with magic. My friend and I would do magic shows for kids' birthday parties and the Newcastle Easter Show - and I knew I would become a professional magician.

I'm in my forties now, I did not become a magician, and earlier in the year I had an experience at a Penn and Teller magic show that I wasn't expecting.

As kids we used to tape Penn and Teller off the TV, and then wear out those VHS tapes trying to figure out their stuff. I can still remember a specific moment when they had an entire audience doing a handkerchief trick.

No amount of rewinding solved it. Penn's familiar cadence: "A little whiffle dust, and, it's back". One hundred audience members all doing the same movements in synchronization, every one of them bamboozling us. There are imprints of our eyeballs BURNED into those old tapes, but we couldn't see what was right there.

When I was about 14, my mum moved us down to Melbourne. It marked a chapter in time: me and my little brother used to visit our dad every fortnight. It was a two hour drive between Sydney and Newcastle. One hour for him, one for her. Once we moved to Melbourne we were only able to visit dad every few months via a plane trip. It changed things, but that wouldn't really click for me then, it was a gradual learning.

Significantly, Melbourne had a magic store. Newcastle did not. On the very first day we arrived in Melbourne, I rode a tram (also for the first time) and took myself into Melbourne city to the magic shop.

Over the next few years high school happened (with all the normal horrors) and I built a friendship group with the other little obsessives that hovered around the shop. There was a monthly magic club for "young magicians" that we went to, and I even ended up working in that magic shop (before I was eventually let go because well, I didn't sell much).

The magic store was the central hub of that time, and I fell in love with the craft of magic and the camaraderie, and although this isn't really the story, I fell for a girl who was into magic. She was two years older, dark-eyed and funny, and for a while, we were on the phone every day. If you could go back in time and stop yourself falling into unrequited love, would you?

(Me neither.)

When I was about 17, my illusions and dreams about magic all sort of faded away.

I got impacted by a critical review in a magic magazine. I had pulled together a night of magic in a real theatre. Stuck flyers up all over town. Organized a small team of magicians, pros and amateurs and then attempted to host the damn thing. It was my year 11 English communication project and I went big.

Anyway, receiving those words turned out to be a formative experience.

And somewhere around year 12 in high school, the stress of exams led to a falling out with my closest friend (which I regret to this day). It splintered my friendships. Not just with him, but with those others I'd been close to. And that was me done with magic. Not intentionally, sometimes it's hard to know that an era is closing. But yes, done.

(It is not lost on me that the real magic was the friendships I made along the way.)

Fast forward a couple of decades to now - and my partner had basically thrust the Penn and Teller ticket into my hands. I didn't even know they were in the country. Ticket for one. Hamer Hall. Close to the front. Dead center.

I have always adored Penn and Teller, they bring old-school con-artistry into their performances. And they do it with humour, intellect and also a sort of gleeful darkness. We are all a temporary humorous experiment by the universe after all, flying and faltering. P&T were always quite happy to look into the darkness and pull out a handful of bees.

So here I was in a warm theatre enjoying the show, when Penn held out a hand and asked me if I wanted to join him up on stage. Not even a request for a volunteer just a single finger pointed at me: "Yes YOU, in the plaid shirt."

I just about skipped towards the stage, so excited was I. And then I slowed down and started focussing on looking more like a normal person. I didn't want to accidentally look like a plant and wreck the thing (it takes a lot of concentration to not look suspicious, what do I DO with my HANDS?)

As Penn guided me through the premise, I stared out at the three thousand faces watching me. And then for some reason, I began to realize deeply and truly that the world had changed, and my experience of being in it had too.

I'd given up magic long ago, occasionally still did some theatre or some writing, but my intense focus in my adult life has been on looking after internet infrastructure, Linux servers and security.

And living in this connected world - which mines data, which recognizes faces, which sucks up every bit of information it can get about a person - right alongside yourself gentle reader, has shaped me.

I have gotten a little closer than most to this surveillance economy, and felt how ruthlessly the organizations had turned us into people products. I mention this now because my response to all of this normally, has been to hide.

No Facebook or Twitter. A de-Googled phone (and in fact a secondary phone number for all the merchants). Perhaps not completely obsessed with privacy, but mindful that one should be proactive about it.

So. In that moment on stage I had what I later discovered to be a panic attack.

My initial excitement had worn off and all of a sudden my fight or flight kicked in and I couldn't breath properly, I couldn't swallow or speak, I wanted to run off the stage - and I didn't know why - and only the humiliation of it all, of being "that guy who was too scared to just stand there" stopped me.

My identity meant nothing to anybody in that room. But as Penn kept performing and as part of the patter saying my name, it felt as though I was unwillingly being introduced to everybody in the theatre.

I got through the performance. The person sitting next to me even recorded the moment and sent it to me. I look like I'm having a great time. And I have such gratitude for that experience. But it seems to have left a mark.

Months later I tried to act in a short play and I had another attack in front of a small audience, mid-sentence. Another actor said that I had gone white and she thought I was going to throw up. The people watching that day must have grimaced through it.

How does this all fit together? What even was magic to me back then? Why do some run towards it? And why was my body rejecting these experiences? My partner suggests it's sometimes not the trauma of "an event" but rather the support you get after that event - that impacts how (and if) you end up carrying it with you.

As a mid-forties man who met his childhood idols and should have felt nothing but elated, I actually still feel a sort of mild worry about that night. It's a shame. I wish I could have told them how amazing I think they are. How utterly full-circle that experience was for me. And how the world always needs less bullshit and more malarky, and I appreciate them for that.

As I was filing out with the crowd at the end, a kid asked me if I knew how the trick was done. I said that I was so nervous that I wasn't really paying attention, but that it was nice to meet three thousand new friends.

Then I started walking towards home. In the darkness. Watching tram after tram go past. Unwilling to get on one, just in case someone from the theatre was on board. I'd come away from the show unsettled, and am in some ways still searching for a way to rewind the tape, to figure it out.