Growing up, I was a really good kid. Not just in the listening to my parents or getting good grades kind of way, but in the sense that I was good at being a kid. The spirit and magic of childhood were at the core of my identity, and I leaned into it completely, in no rush to grow up. Adults would tell me that my childhood was fleeting, and I took their warnings to heart.
The second that I reached middle school, time seemed to flash by, and before I knew it I wasn’t a kid anymore. As soon as I hit those preteen years, everything that had once made up the patchwork of my identity, I began to second-guess. I forced myself to develop new interests that mirrored those around me. Reading rom-coms replaced my favorite tales of wizards and demigods, and pop artists took the place of my beloved musical soundtracks. Once the years had passed, it became harder and harder to remember who I was prior to this identity change.
In our early years, from about ages 0-10, our childhood makes up our entire lives. As we get older the years seem to speed up, since our lives become less compressed. The identity that I had built for a lifetime – throughout my childhood and elementary years – was something I seemed to have grown out of overnight. With that, I had to work to rebuild a new identity; with new role models, new interests and a new sense of self.
It is natural that when you grow older, you grow out of the interests that were once central to your identity. However, struggling to remember the lyrics to a song or the plot to a book that once meant the world to me made me realize how much I had redefined myself as a person, losing sight of who I used to be in the process.
Growing up means constantly redefining who you are and learning how to become a better version of yourself, but it also means learning how to lean into who you are at the core, rather than changing your interests or personality to fit other people’s perception of you. Remembering who I used to be, I realize how authentically myself I was when I was younger, which is something that I think we all took for granted.
I now have a new mission: to rediscover who I was as a child, and in doing so, rediscover the person that I am, authentically. Of course growing up has taught me important lessons, but the most important lesson I have learned is something that children naturally practice and adults often forget: to find magic in the small things, and to be yourself.