I think as you grow older, your Christmas list gets shorter, the holidays feel just a tiny bit different, and the things you really want can’t be bought.

It’s not a coincidence that in all the children’s movies it’s always about believing in the magic of never growing up. Magic is alive if you let yourself believe in it. But, as you grow up, bills and holding a steady job and the prospect of the real world after graduation and all these adult responsibilities find a way of replacing the eagerness and innocence that once was there.

It’s all a trap. A worn out package of inevitable responsibility callously labeled with “fragile: handle with care” because that’s what it was. A cleverly constructed scheme that will crumble if you even let yourself believe otherwise. It’s all a monotonous routine, a charade of three-piece business suits of having it all together and busy calendars. You’ve taken cynicism and disdain and caution and patched it on your too tight collar and rubbed it on your skin to protect yourself from reality.

Growing up, is really a masquerade ball.

It keeps you from believing that the sun can shine on rainy days and that sunsets are worth losing sleep over. It keeps you from taking ten seconds of courage into pure, utter recklessness that leaves your heart gasping for more. It keeps you from falling apart in the arms of strangers and from running away from home. It keeps you from wandering and starting over and rediscovering.

Because of that, you’ve forgotten what it was like to feel full of nerves, to have your hands shake on that first night because they didn’t know where to go or what to do with themselves, and you’ve forgotten what it was like to laugh in the middle of the theaters because really how dumb were those characters in the horror movies? You’ve forgotten what it was like to dance in the rain for so long outside your teeth begin to chatter and your lips begin to turn blue. You’ve forgotten what it was like to do something just because it promised mistakes and messing up and an opportunity for a do-over.

You’ve forgotten how to live.

As life hits us, we let ourselves believe just a little less and sooner or later, we lose that part of ourselves —a part that makes a life filled with hope and the part that makes life worth living at all.