Often when thinking about my childhood, memories come up that make me cringe. I was WEIRD. I'm sure many of us can relate to the embarrassing pictures that inevitably surface during the holidays along with the stories of you running around the house naked when you were 3. And revisiting all those funny thoughts you had throughout grade school. As weird as I was, at the time I had no idea that I was weird. It didn't really matter. Kid's are allowed to be weird.

I remember all the make believe games we would play, making our stuffed animals/barbies/other inanimate objects talk, sing, fall in love, fight, and do anything else our little minds could conceive. Or we would act it out ourselves. We were mermaids, horses, princesses, cowboys, the whole works. We'd run around and get dirty, try to kiss boys just to make them scream, scream as loud as we could and shamelessly dance to whatever Disney Channel song we could think of.

I asked more questions. I wondered more, and I looked at the world with more wonder. I had true, honest fun, and real, genuine JOY. Children have a gift of joy that is never quite the same once they grow up. And I remember being both more selfish and more empathetic than I am now. I knew what I wanted and fully believed that I deserved it, whether it was another cookie or to go swimming that day. But I also, with my fresher and younger eyes, saw pain more intensely than I do now. I was more affected by the things happening around me, more shocked, more excited, more bothered even. And lastly, I truly saw, almost exclusively, the good in everyone, especially my elders.

It's around middle school I think, when we start to lose that simple and open way of looking at the world. We started to slowly shed away our childish freedom of weirdness. I distinctly remember actually having that thought one day, "Jordan, people are going to think that you are weird." Judgment comes into our lives, and comparison. We start to see that other people are prettier or cooler than we are, and we start to care. Now people react differently. I know some people whose reaction to this onslaught of preteen angst was, "Who cares? I will proudly be weird." But even they often developed a tragic sense of self consciousness. Most of us slowly started to dress a certain way, to fix our hair, to control when we laughed or cried, and to pretend not to care about anything. We kind of sold pieces of who we were in an effort to be important to other people, something that was almost irrelevant before.

We also started to be more integrated into the adult world. I remember how it felt to gradually realize that all of the people I had so looked up to growing up, have faults too. My perfect little vision of the world started to crumble.

I feel like most of us get past this for the most part. We keep getting older, realize that we do care about things; we find ourselves again. But we never will be able to get back that childhood freedom. Now we have accepted social conventions, ways to act, structures of life. We will never play as we once did, and I believe that my own imagination is certainly smaller. Rather than that childish selfishness, we often sacrifice what we really want for other people, or for society. We are no longer shocked by things, something that is a direct assault on our empathy. We hear about awful, terrible things going on in the world we live in, and then continue eating our lunch. And then today, as young adults and adults, we find a hard time resisting seeing the bad in everyone.

Some of these changes are for the better, and most of them are simply inevitable. When I see children today though, I often wish I could just tell them to hold on to all that they are, and to never sell it for anything. Because, even to just see that fresh freedom of life still existing in the world is one of the most beautiful parts of living. If we all lived as children do, the world would be a lot more honest, a lot more loving, and a lot more fun.