We all grew up wanting to be the very best, like no one ever was. We collected trading cards (even if we didn’t really know how to play the game correctly), we bought the videogames, and we watched the shows on our VHS tapes. The elementary school book fairs sold encyclopedias and physical Pokédexes, and that’s what we spent our allowance money on. We spent our whole childhoods filling binders with playing cards and littering our rooms with Game Boy games. All the while there was a monologue going on in our heads that had us as the Ash Ketchum of our own life story. We all wanted to be out exploring the world, collecting Pokémon, battling gym leaders, the whole nine yards.

And now, all these years later, we finally get to.

On July 7, 2016, "Pokémon Go" was released in the United States. Every single young adult who spent their childhood running around imagining that they had Pikachu by their side, trading and throwing down their cards at recess, stopped everything that they were doing to start living out their childhood dream. "Pokémon Go" is an app available in the App Store and the Google Play Store that allows everyone who downloads it to explore their world through their phone’s GPS and maps to set special landmarks for gyms and battles, hiding places for wild Pokémon and Pokéstops to restock on everything that you need. For all intents and purposes, downloading this app is like walking into a parallel universe, where everything looks the same except now you can see all the Pokémon that you imagined as a child.

This is the kind of thing that we’ve been waiting for. We finally get to tell our parents when we head out of the house that we’re going to go catch Pokémon, that we’re going to meet up with other trainers, that we need to go to the nearest Pokéstop because we’re out of Poké balls. And the best part? It’s all real now. We’re actually being serious when we say this stuff. And it’s amazing.

We’re all kids again. We get to find and capture Pokémon in our own homes, at our friend’s houses. It’s getting people to actually go outside and walk around their neighborhoods, and bringing people together because hey, we’re all in this now because it was everyone’s childhood dream. We’re powering up to battle with gym leaders, just like we always wanted to.

The release of "Pokémon Go" in the US is better than just the nostalgia of breaking out of video games. It’s giving us all a chance to live out a part of childhoods that we couldn’t before. Technology has finally caught up with our dreams and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s providing us with a kind of resolution we didn’t see ourselves getting. In the middle of all the chaos, all of the incredibly heavy topics that I could’ve written about this week, I got to write about a huge part of my childhood coming back. And I think that that really says something. We’re all trying to make the very best of this world that we’re living in, and now we’ve got Pokémon in our back pockets to help us through the process. After all, what's so wrong with having a little piece of our childhoods with us?