When you are a kid, you look at the world wide-eyed.
Your future is full of possibilities; you see constellations among the sky’s mess of stars and clouds are made of cotton candy. Your innocence is what keeps your mind safe, and you cannot even see most of the evil in the world. When you see someone sitting alone, it is easy to go up to them and strike up a conversation (granted, it is usually bonding over your mutual love of the color blue).
You can smile a goofy, adorable smile after screaming your head off just because your dad made a lame joke and wiped the tears from your eyes. You have faith in the world, and confidence that you will find your place in it. It is like, when you are born, you are this whole person whose mind is as colorful and exciting and confusing as a Jackson Pollock painting. And with each year, you begin to color in the lines a little bit more.
Rather than splattering the canvas at random and calling it a masterpiece, you look for preset boundaries and colors. Each year, you lose a bit of your confidence in your individuality. And each year, you beg to be older.
Until you realize that the older age you were wishing for has arrived, and you would give anything to be back in your front yard running around dressed as Cinderella and a cowboy and the president all at once.
I wish I could have warned my younger self. I wish I could go back and re-wish on all those birthday candles and ask to stay young rather than beg to be able to drive or drink or work at a desk with my own nameplate. I wish I could go back and tell myself to enjoy the little things – like the joy and serenity I got when I woke up at 10 a.m. on a winter Tuesday rather than 7 a.m. because school was canceled and my parents let me sleep in. We don’t understand how important these little moments are – and how rare they are.
The world can be an ugly place when you see it through the eyes of an adult. Once you have weathered some of life’s challenges and overcome pains that you never thought you would survive, you lose that unpredictable joy you had when you were a kid. I am by no means an adult. But I just turned 20 and I have begun to realize that I have been forcing myself to color more inside the lines with each choice I make. I have a lot of life ahead of me, and I want to be able to live it with the same curiosity and zest for adventure that I had when I was eight.
High school sucked and college is tough. But when I was little, I saw them as places I would get to redefine myself and learn new things. I dreamt of the day that I’d walk the halls in a varsity sweater and move into my first college dorm and even throw my graduation cap above my head as my parents snap a photo and try not to cry. I dreamt of how happy I would be as I became the person that the younger version of me had faith in.
I realize now that my younger self had very high expectations. She saw her future to be so bright that she couldn’t wait to get there. I can’t blame her for that. And as much as I wish I could trade places with her, nothing would make me willing to take her innocence away by showing her what the world is really like. It is my job to protect that now, and to help foster that love for life in others.
We all know that, if given the chance, we would go back and warn our younger selves to enjoy every single second of our childhood. And we also know that even if we were warned as kids, we never would have actually listened. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish I could go back and enjoy those Sunday morning cartoons a little bit more.
So I must conclude this with a call for action, like all of my college professors have instructed me as proper etiquette in essays (how I miss the days of writing essays in crayon). For one, look out for those younger than you. Help keep their innocence in tact so that they might continue scribbling outside the lines. And two, take the time to allow your mind to be like that of a child.
When adulthood seems overwhelming, look at the situation as though you were seeing it through younger eyes. Maybe then, if you are lucky, you might be able to smile a little bit more and imagine the wonder of the night sky rather than the terror of its ambiguity. The future that your younger self saw isn't impossible, you just have to have the courage to pursue the dreams you once saw as an inevitability.
