Remember what it felt like when you played hide and seek and no one could find you for what felt like hours?

You tested your friends by sitting alone in that dark, damp corner of the bathroom closet while uncontrollable giggles threatened to escape your lips. The sliver of light that shined through the crack of the door sprung some hope within you as you waited to see some sign of movement, but not one person ever passed by. Everyone gave up and the game became much more subdued than the original amazed laughter and shuffling feet when you were forced to make your way out of the depths of your hiding spot. It felt like your friends were figuring out your magicians trick as you slinked out of the best hiding spot ever, and suddenly, hide and seek felt less fun to you.

You felt small.

Feeling "small" does not refer to physicality. Emotionally, smallness is a looming creature that fearlessly caresses your cheek as if to say, "you won't get rid of me that easily." The feeling comes through the front door of your heart without knocking and creates an empty well for it to reside, curled up and serene. It remains dormant while the rest of your insides decay at a rapid rate. Your only solution is to cut off the life supply - if you quit feeding the monster, soon it will die. However, the tyrant is resilient and slow-moving, like an animal who meticulously surrounds its prey before taking that first leap. With less energy to burn, the monster dies less quickly.

Now of course, feeling small does not crop up in the same ways it did when we were young. In our arguably most fragile ages of anywhere between eighteen to twenty one to twenty three and so on, feeling small can stretch from having no clue what you're doing to feeling like you'll never know what you're doing. This smallness has no definite shape or characteristics - it can be akin to nostalgia or guilt as easily as it could be to loneliness and anxiety. It's an overwhelming sense of feeling flat and not knowing why. It stems from being afraid, from shoving your emotions deep down as you would a seed to be planted. Only, this seed breaks from its shell to produce thick roots of uncertainty. It binds to your feet as if to anchor you down, causing sores that will fester despite your circumstances.

It can come at night, as you lay in bed, when sleep seems to be eluding you. Suddenly you feel alone in more ways than one. You could have had a wonderful day but that doesn't matter. Sometimes feeling small can happen when you've done something similar to what you would as a child. Asking your mom for a glass of water instead of getting up and getting it yourself, running in the backyard with your dog, or watching an old movie from your youth.

On the rare occasion as an adult that you're riding in the backseat of a car at night and look up at the moon, as if you were chasing it, you'll notice a sense of calm washes over you. Your mind slows. The black sky makes the beaming moon illuminate even brighter, like fine, translucent paper against a lamp. Everything is quiet in your brain until you look away and realize that the world around you is big and you can't quite see it all in the dark shadows of the night. You're young and you're scared and unsure of everything, including yourself.

You feel small because you realize you're not anymore. You've run out of viable hiding spots.

Your options for life are endless and that's just the problem. You can't choose just one thing because what if it's wrong or what if it hurts? They say, "don't be afraid to be vulnerable," but what do they say when you come crawling back, your heart shattered in millions of pieces as you lick your wounds? They tell you to "buck up."

There's a stigma against feeling and there's a stigma against feeling too much. How do you know which to choose? Do you have to choose at all? Or will the small, lingering remnants of "what ifs" and "how comes" stick with you for the rest of your days? If the smallness comes and goes in waves, hope that it stays that way. Life happens and mistakes are made. We all move on and grow up whether we ask to or not.

You'll regret the things you didn't do far more than the things you will do, but always remember that fear can paralyze you like stone. Stay sharp.