I’ve been thinking for a very long time about being a kid. Even though I’m not anywhere near old. The concept of an ‘inner child’ speaks to me more now than ever, cause it feels like all I’m doing every day is drowning myself in either nostalgia or hazy dreams for the future. I want to live like a kid again. I want to create like a kid again, and think like a kid again. Maybe if I did, I’d be *her* again. ‘Smart for my age’, ‘so very strong’, and ‘an old soul’.
I used to like myself a lot more than I do now. I used to think I was a lot more special, more unusual (in a really good way), more me. Then I began to lose it. I became swamped by every glorious distraction in existence and lost sight of myself. Social media, expectations, music, noise, *anything*. Laying in bed, alone with my thoughts, became the most dreaded part of my day. Boredom was my worst enemy.
I couldn’t care to think about myself, I didn’t love me, because I didn’t even know me. How could I ever love a stranger?
Knowing me doesn’t mean knowing my favourite show or the very few things I hate eating. I’m sure if I really put my mind to it, I could learn to love eating those things, and my favourite show could change next week. They're adorable trivia but they mean nothing if it’s all you know. If your deepest beliefs and boundaries and values aren’t things you can put into words.
The reason why I don’t feel like I know myself anymore is cause I don’t think about anything as deeply anymore. I don’t obsess over a book and every word in it for hours anymore. I skim. I fast forward the quiet sections in videos. I consume a piece of media and let it go, having understood maybe 20% of what the creator wanted to say. And a week later, my minds forgotten that 20% too.
So it is that deep. For the sake of my attention span and my emotional development, it is that deep. For the sake of the artists vision and their hours of hard work, it is that deep.
Everything else in the world is that deep too. I go about a lot of my life with invisible rules. Set either by society or myself. Analysing these rules and why they were set in place and what the do for me, how they serve me, is the only way to be free of them. Deciding things about myself is fun. It’s reassuring, too. It feels like i have proof, that i know me, that ive experienced enough life to be so sure of these things about me. But it often limits my options. Narrows my worldview, and shuts off my heart to new experiences.
Deciding ‘parties aren’t for me’ has to be that deep if I want to know if it really is just parties I dont like or if it’s the memories of the parties ive been to before. If i wanna figure out what not liking parties means for me and how I approach certain scenarios. It could be something negatively affecting my life and id never realise and never alters anything about it if I never reflected on it, If, after thinking it over, i come to the same conclusion as before, it hasn’t changed my life at all. But now i know. I know why and i know that it’s only ever been a choice. There is nothing inherent about me that makes me averse to parties and knowing that unlocks more for me than i had before.
There is nothing inherent about me at all. It doesnt mean nothing about me is set in stone. Im an artist, and i always will be. I love love, and i always will. But even these things that are set in stone are cause ive decided they are. Everything about me is a choice i can make. It feels so freeing to build myself up from scratch every other day.
Thats what i did when i was a kid. I could learn a new fun fact online and make it my whole personality for a week and move on so quickly afterwards it’d give anyone whiplash. i could change and learn and grow and not look back and miss what i used to be. Because id make every choice to suit who i was at that instant. Maybe it was immature, selfish, even. But Ive decided not to care.
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