We are all still kids. Every day there is a taste of the reality of life that challenges us to think and, hopefully, eventually learn. What our environment has failed to teach us is this: life is a process. Society had dictated to us that at a certain point in our lives we need to act like an adult (as if every adult knows what that looks like). Then we fail ourselves to accept the kid inside to help them grow up with us.
We experience a turning point in our lives that happens to change our perception of our childhood reality and a different truth comes out. For me, it was falling in love and working full time. Both I had completely different ideas as a kid that are far from the reality I now live. Only one I had accepted to be different. As soon as those sorts of events show up in our lives, we tend to neglect our childhood selves. The self that believed and held onto a world that was far from the reality we met in adulthood.
Instead of asking our young selves if they are ready to grow up with our physical being, we push them back, leaving them in the corner as if they had done something wrong. When that adult being gets overwhelmed, we tend to visit that child. However, instead of comforting the child in us, we become them yet again, sad in the corner we left them behind. That child is sad, isolated, and neglected by us that they become distant from us holding with them our true selves. The selves we had formed when we were developing into a person. It held personalities we are now too cowardly to show, opinions we are now too afraid to express, interests we are now too embarrassed to work on. We tend to form ourselves into this certain reality formed by a prejudiced, suffocating environment.
Why? Let’s ask ourselves. But more so, can we ask the kid inside to forgive us for neglecting them and to allow them to experience the world with us? Then maybe, maybe that kid inside will grow up with us because perhaps, they are the key to enjoying the world we have no control over as we are who we are. We just need to be whole, not two separate beings.
