I killed my child.

I find it funny how when I was young, all I ever think about is growing up. 

I had wild dreams back then, wild but simple ones. One of my dreams was to be a cashier in a supermarket or a maid in a mansion. I badly want to fall in love and kiss someone in the rain. I even dreamed of crying because of a boy who broke my heart and he will be there to fix it up again. I used to believe in fairytales and how I’m a princess and I am meant to find my own prince. 

Life was simple when I was young but there’s always a constant… “ I want to grow up already” with a cherry on top - tantrums.

As a child, growing up means independence. I can do whatever I want, go wherever I want and eat the junk foods our parents never wanted us to have late at night. I can also fall in love and get drunk. I can make my own choices and no one has a say to anything because I am a grown up. Oh, how we all wanted to sit in the grown ups table and talk about our jobs!!!

It’s really funny how we always wanted to grow up faster. 

Now that I’m a bit of a grown up, uggggghhhh, I think we can all agree we all want to be a child again. I kept on thinking about how chocolates can make me so happy back then but now having chocolates means getting fat and it will bring up a lot of self-image issues. I also kept thinking about how picking up flowers and putting it in your hair can make you feel like the prettiest girl in the world, now all of these make-up and skin care just to meet the never attainable beauty standards. 

It’s really funny how we want to rewind time and be pure and innocent again. 

But I think a misconception is that you can’t be both, that being a child is an entirely different thing from being an adult. When you’re a child, you must enjoy and not have responsibilities because that’s what a child is. Similarly, when you’re an adult you must focus on your responsibilities rather than have fun because, just because that's how life works.

This made me realize that I killed someone, metaphorically… 

I killed my (inner) child. 

And I’m sure I’m not alone in this one, we all committed murder in killing our own inner child. 

Every time we deny ourselves to be vulnerable, to depend on others, to laugh at the smallest thing and to make the slightest mistake, we kill it. 

A child can be a child and an adult at the same time and more importantly, an adult can be a child too. It’s not polar opposites, they actually compliment each other. A child helps you be carefree and an adult helps you to be cautious. You can be both, you don’t have to kill anyone, or in this case any part of you.

Sadly, in our generation being vulnerable and acting child-like is considered a weakness, but it’s actually a strength. Only a few people can integrate both in their lives and those people mostly are the happy ones because they recognize that you have to have that child-like attitude to fully enjoy your life. 

Though, we should note that being child-like is entirely different from being childish. Being pure and enjoying the smallest thing in life is entirely different from being a complete grown up, physically, who refuses to grow up and face responsibilities and consequences.

I just noticed recently how I’m so hard on myself whenever my inner child wants to go out. I always viewed it as a weakness and that my child-like attitude should already be buried because I am an adult but that saps out the life inside. The world literally turned gray and no more color and sparkles everywhere, it was such a sad place. 

I hope that we would stop committing murder, not just physical ones but internal ones as well. 

May we all start to revive our inner child and make the world sparkle again.

Lead image: Photo by Leo Rivas on Unsplash