What do you miss about your childhood?
My friend asked me, “What do you miss about being younger?”
⬇️ Here’s what I said... Can anyone else relate? ⬇️
What I miss about being younger— specifically during grades 1 through 5— is being free from the weight of expectations. Things were so much simpler in those years. I didn’t have to worry about consciously feeling the heaviness of drama and life’s problems. Life felt so carefree before I learned what actual stress of self management was.
I think that once I reached middle school, I became aware that things were changing. That I would have to start relying on myself. When we were in elementary school, even the bigger kids had help. They knew they were being prepared for transitioning into middle school, but they weren’t yet aware what that weight of self reliance felt like.
When the big kids we went to school with were still carefree, things still felt carefree. Then once we became the big kids in elementary school, we had the pride of being able to be role models for the younger kids.
The thing about middle school… is that once you get there, you’re not one of the big kids anymore. The big kids in middle school are meaner and somewhat hardened by feeling the weight and stress of responsibility.
Once you get exposed to that in your daily school environment, you start to sense a shift in the atmosphere. That shift is their stress. That shift is the growing of awareness- an awareness that young children didn’t know before. For me, the gaining of awareness was the loss of the ability to truly feel carefree and innocent.