- Elementary school.
I miss the old school. Not so much the homework or learning, but I miss the parachute game in gym class where we’d all run aimlessly under a waving cloth of colors until the entire rainbow was reflecting underneath us. I miss when everyone was friends with everyone and you weren’t too insecure to sit at any lunch table. I miss the art teachers who would always say “just a dot not a lot.” I miss all of the circle times and reading corners and games around the holidays. I miss when the biggest stakes were whether or not everyone passed a spelling test with a high enough grade to get a pizza party on Friday, accompanied by an episode of The Magic School Bus.
I miss the old school where I never cried over failing tests or had to pull all-nighters just to barely pass a class—back before the stress and drama and anxieties. Before everything became a contest of who was smarter than whom and your entire future was based on three numbers on a transcript.
I miss the old school where my biggest concern was whether I was going to play on the slide or the monkey bars at recess.
- Lunch.
I don’t miss lunch itself so much as I miss what lunch meant. I miss being excited to open my pretty pink patterned lunch box every day, like it was a present on Christmas, sitting with my friends and trading snacks, comparing what our parents had packed for us that day. My friends usually had some form of sandwich, like peanut butter and jelly or bologna, but I didn’t like peanut butter and I don’t like bologna, so I was usually just a leftovers-from-dinner kinda kid: tacos, chicken nuggets, just jelly sandwiches.
I looked forward to lunch; it was my favorite part of the day, closely followed by recess. I miss having handwritten notes from my mom with silly food-based jokes or I love you’s scribbled on them with hearts beside her name on the ziploc bags holding my crackers and cheese.
I wish I had been aware that one day they would stop—I would’ve kept them like treasured keepsakes in a box that I could pull out whenever I’m feeling lonely and missing home instead of racking my brain for fleeting memories of simpler times.
It’s a rarity that I even eat lunch now. I just don’t have time, I am just not motivated. Within the hour and a half I have between classes, I would rather take a nap or do homework than scour my desolate fridge for scraps. It feels like there are so many more important things going on in adult life than deciding what I’m going to eat for lunch. That meal becomes a hassle like most things are now.
I miss the days when lunch wasn’t a chore and I wasn’t rushing out the door each day, forced to grab a granola bar or banana. I don’t even like bananas.
- Being afraid of the dark.
It seems silly, I know, to want to be afraid of something again, but I do. It seems that as I grow older, there are so many more complex ‘adult appropriate’ things to be afraid of: ending up alone, whether or not my friends actually like me, failure, where to go and what to do after college, student loans! Will anyone love me enough to want to spend the rest of their life with me? What if I fail—at anything and everything?
And I am afraid…of all those things. The world is so scary.
But, I miss being afraid of the dark because the scariest thing out there was a tree outside my window making shadows on my bedroom walls. I miss waiting to see a non-existent monster come out of my closet at night to taunt me. I miss when monsters only existed in my head and that darkness could be battled with night-lights and hugs from Mom.
It’s not that easy anymore.
- Being excited.
I don’t get excited anymore. Not often anyways. It’s scarce and fleeting and it takes something drastic to induce it. I miss being excited about little things like a trip to Tim Hortons or the supermarket because they offered samples on Saturdays.
I may look forward to things but even then, it seems like my body, my mind, my heart cannot emotionally support any anticipation. Excitement never comes to overtake me, not like when I was younger and would babble for hours and hours about finally going to Starbucks or trying to fidget out of so much pure excitement for Christmas to come that I physically could not sit still.
Maybe I’ve conditioned myself to be this way. Maybe I’ve done this because adulthood comes with disappointment: people will disappoint me, so I don’t get excited for plans in case they fall through. I think, ultimately, being excited then disappointed is worse than not being excited at all.
- Dressing up:
To dress up now is to go out: to go to a fancy somewhere and wear makeup and take pictures. To dress up is to look good, but it used to be a time for play and imagination—to finally be the Disney princess you grew up watching on TV or the heroic firefighters in the neighborhood. I miss when dressing up was a game, void of all the pressures of matching up to other people and feeling inferior when I don’t feel as pretty.
It feels like now, each and every time there is an occasion where I have to wear something other than the sweatpants and hoodies I hide in, every insecurity I have ever had surfaces. It’s always the same story: my hair being down makes me look chubby because it doesn’t frame my face right, but I won’t match the aesthetic if I wear it up, none of my earrings will match my necklaces, it’s too cold for skirts, but too warm for jeans, but too casual for a dress, but too fancy for casual wear. Nothing I do will make me feel pretty. The story ends with me attending wherever late, wearing leggings and a hoodie, my red puffy eyes and swollen cheeks being the perfect accessory to the hair I threw up in a ponytail.
I miss when I didn’t have an ideal body type or could leave the house without earrings or without having to put twenty different products in my hair just to not feel terrible about myself, just to feel somewhat okay to walk outside. I miss when I could wear giant butterfly wings and a princess dress with uncomfortable, mismatched plastic sparkly heels in public without feeling judged. Everyone judges now—I cannot go anywhere.
- Innocence:
In adults, innocence, like naivety, has been villainized to a certain degree with negative connotations. If you are innocent and naive, you are ignorant and therefore, ill-educated. However, as kids, it is the ideal state of being. When you become aware of the cruelties of the world, you lose a certain critical part of your childhood in which the bliss of life withers away.
I miss when I was innocent; when I knew no misery or heartbreak. It’s as if my perspective on life shifted once I knew about things I didn’t deem possible before.
The first being the loss of my grandpa—death is so strange. The second, when I found out that there are people who don’t have food or homes or money. Santa isn’t real? Some kids get neglected, malnourished, and abused? What’s abuse? Cancer? Pets don’t live forever? It’s not safe for women outside at night? Alzheimer's, war, poverty, assault, drugs, dementia, depression…the list is endless.
Oh how I miss being small and innocent.
How I miss not knowing the evil that comes with growing up.
How unfair to be a child and to lose your childhood because you’re now scared of the world around you that you used to love.
- I miss how carefree, innocent, exciting, simple, freeing, open, and blissfully happy life used to be.
I am in a constant state of mourning for my five-year-old self.
It horrifies me that at some point in time, I put my toys in the toy chest for the last time. My mom wrote a funny food pun on a post-it-note on my lunch box for the last time. I started dressing myself, stopped playing pretend, stopped watching the shows I loved, and never pulled out my princess tiaras again.
That was when I was supposed to grow up.
But I don’t want to… not just yet. I don’t think I’m ready for adulthood.
I delay it by clinging to whatever pieces of childhood I have left. I cuddle up with my stuffed animals and blankets and watch old Barbie movies because I know when I stop wanting to do these things is when my childhood truly ends.
Maybe I should’ve wished harder on my birthdays, maybe then the next one wouldn’t have an extra candle and I would’ve stayed five forever.
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