I Want to Be a Kid Again
Drowning in a sea, gasping for air, desperately seeking solid ground.
I came back from school, dropped my bag on the floor and slumped onto my bed.
Every day feels like a battle, everything crashing over me, threatening to pull me under. I make promises to myself, grand declarations of change, only to suffer defeat after defeat. God knows what I’m doing with my life.
“I just want to be a kid again,” I whisper to the darkness, a prayer to the universe.
But, I am a kid. A kid fumbling through the process of growing up, learning to manage myself in a world that feels too big, too harsh. Isn’t that what childhood is, after all? A series of lessons in self-management, each one more challenging than the last?
“External validation always undermines self-confidence. That is why you must train yourself to let go of all external influences. Like water that rolls off the lotus leaf, it slides off effortlessly without leaving any trace.”
“Building self-trust, is like learning to walk again after a lifetime of being carried. But slowly, painfully you must pick yourself up again. Telling yourself that you are trying, you do not need to seek any words of approval from anyone.” her words kept ringing in my ears.
It’s a pretty thought. The idea that we could simply let go of all external influences, like water drops rolling off a lotus leaf. But Mom, I am no lotus. I am more like a sponge, soaking up every word, every glance, every silent judgment until I am heavy with the weight of others’ opinions. I am also no mighty oak. I am just a sapling in a forest fire, desperately trying to grow roots even as the world burns around me.
“When you let the ‘water’ slide off, unaffected, you can be free from those burden again, like a kid. If you were to be a kid again, then it means you will have to go through lessons to learn the skills that you have gained all these while. That is going backwards. Now that you have the skills that you have learnt from the past, you can use that to deal with your surroundings which you did not know how to handle say 15 years back. And because you now have the skills, and have the capability to handle them, should they come to you. And because of this, you have the independence that you didn’t have as a kid. And that gives you more freedom and happiness. You are now at the phase of acquiring those skills. It is not a switch that you can turn on and to instantly accrue all skills. Think of it like sharpening a knife. A knife that is sharpened can be used to do many good things. It can create, protect, survive; it can also wound, destroy… The knife doesn’t judge its purpose; it simply is”.
Perhaps that’s the ultimate form of self-trust — existing without justification, without apology. But each step is wobbly, uncertain. I stumble, I fall, and every time, I want to reach out for someone to catch me, to tell me I’m doing well, to validate my efforts. Each failure is another crack in the the foundation of my self-belief. Is that the point? Do we need to shatter completely before we can rebuild ourselves into something real? Something useful?
Some days, I feel like I am running out of time. The weight of unmet expectations presses down on me, making it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to simply exist. “I give up,” I want to scream. “I am not who I want to be.” But who exactly do I want to be? And who decided that wanting was the benchmark for existence?
If everything’s going to fall apart anyway, why take risks? Why pursue that crazy dream, speak that unspeakable truth? Why not just give up? Rock bottom, can be a pretty solid foundation to build upon right?
Yet even in those moments of despair, there is a part of me that refuses to let go completely. It is the part that sits reading her messages of encouragement, the part that’s still searching for answers, for meaning, for some way to make sense of this messy, terrifying process of growing up.
Every defeat is progress, she said. But progress towards what? Towards becoming an island unto myself, strong enough to offer shelter to others even as I remain unaffected by the storms that rage around me. But I am no island. And I will not be one.
In the end, perhaps self-trust isn’t really about believing in our goodness, our strength, our potential. It is about trusting in our resilience, our adaptability, our capacity to survive our own self-destruction. It is about looking at the wreckage of our broken promises, our shattered dreams, our failed attempts at perfection, and saying: “This, too, is me. And I can work with this.”
We are all works in progress, unfinished, rough drafts... The challenge isn’t to reach some imaginary finish line of personal growth. The challenge is to embrace the incompleteness, to find beauty in our unfinished selves, to understand “why I am suffering?” and know how to deal with it to have long lasting impact.
We don’t understand their own truth versions because we don’t know our minds and hearts. We are like wanderers in a house of mirrors, each reflection a distortion of who we think we should be. Sometimes we can’t even tell which version is real. Who are we when no one watching?
We try to understand through our own intelligence. But we cannot acknowledge the function of our inner views because of wrong belief, wrong perceptions and unnecessary adherence to rituals , etc — it is like trying to see clearly through a muddy pond. These things keep us away from viewing our true selves yet that function, that clarity is very important to know and free ourselves from this prison of our distorted self-image.
We need the courage to apply that knowledge to our inner view. It is not enough to know the truth; we have to let it seep into our bones, reshape our perceptions, challenge everything we thought we knew about ourselves including the self that we are becoming.
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope it resonated with you in some way. If you found value in my works, I would be deeply grateful for a clap as a small gesture of encouragement. I invite you to join me on this journey, and I would be honoured if you would consider following my profile. Thank you again.
