On the journey to becoming a productive member of society I had to compartmentalize my inner child.
During my early schoolboy years, he waited patiently for the school day to finish so that he could finally resume his creative and playful pursuits.
As the education became more involved, he had to wait a little longer because of homework.
In university, the complicated assignments, group projects, and late night study sessions meant that he would often not get to let loose until the weekend.
The full-time job, commute, technical projects, work politics, and other adult responsibilities really did the biggest number on him though. Sometimes he would go without playing for weeks, or months at a time.
Today it’s as if my adult mask has adhered permanently to my face and I can no longer access him at all.
I never left it. I still have a baby tooth, therfore i still am child.
at 53…thats fucking pretty good
Oh hey, I’m in the baby tooth club! High five!
I had to surgically remove a tooth because it came at an already replaced tooth. So i guess I’m your nemesis.
If we ever meet we have to duel like in an action movie.
Thats cool. I have so many questions. Is it visibly smaller than your other teeth? Did the corresponding adult tooth come in? If it fell out now would you still get tooth fairy money?
It looks the sameish, but my teeth are crowded on the bottom anyway so it “fits” better than an adult tooth, I guess? No, no adult tooth underneath and you’re goddam right i better get some tooth fairy money (to pay for the implant).
I have all of those rerelease retro consoles and a cheap projector onto an unprepped wall. (Cheap projector and unprepped wall imitates CRT blur really well)
Sometimes when adult life can fuck right off, I skip dinner and get my daughter to bed. Go get a pizza and a block of chocolate in MY car, blast the tunes come home and play Metal Slug on a 3 meter “screen”.
I take a moment to appreciate that 15yo me would think that this is pretty badass.
I don’t know if this exactly counts… I have embraced having kids wholeheartedly. I jump on the giant trampoline (sometimes when they aren’t around). I’ve rediscovered going to the movies. I am a huge fan of the holidays now. And a bunch of other stuff. I wouldn’t have done any of that without my kids.
I don’t really have an inner child. My childhood sucked. I have nightmares about feeling angry and scared and trapped like I did as a child. My adulthood just keeps getting better. I’m learning to enjoy life and the world for the first time, and I’m a more productive member of society for it. What you describe is totally alien to me.
It’s also an important trauma processing technique. If you had a shitty childhood like us, it’s called reparenting instead.
Similar. Riding on rollercoasters, watching wholesome cartoons, and reading good fiction don’t feel childish to me, they just feel like well-deserved fun. Why associate that with childhood, when childhood lacked freedom?
You could totally work with your inner child on that basis. Obviously don’t have to. But just imagining this little version of you and the hardship they had to endure, thinking about what they would have needed from an adult, and imagining yourself being that adult for your imaginative younger self - that would be very much in line with the idea of the technique.
Honestly that sounds bleak AF.
Why would you ever “compartmentalize” your inner child? That doesn’t sound like a real thing, that sounds like whoever influenced you (and/or yourself) making you cut off the things you like for no reason.
During my early schoolboy years, he waited patiently for the school day to finish so that he could finally resume his creative and playful pursuits.
As the education became more involved, he had to wait a little longer because of homework.
In university, the complicated assignments, group projects, and late night study sessions meant that he would often not get to let loose until the weekend.
The full-time job, commute, technical projects, work politics, and other adult responsibilities really did the biggest number on him though. Sometimes he would go without playing for weeks, or months at a time.
You know what’s telling about the whole above description that you gave of your life?
You never take ownership or agency. Everything you wrote, you wrote as if it happened to you, and you were just a passive observer with no control over the situation.
Why was your commute so long? Why when work ended at 5pm, did you not have hours to play until you had to go to bed around midnight? Why did you never choose to change your situation?
Sounds a bit harsh but these are the questions to ask yourself. Too many times people are passive and don’t realise they have some power in certain situations.
Because they made the right choice for the goals they set out to reach. The lack of agency is just a playful way of writing.
It sounds like they made no choices and lived life passively just doing what was expected of them.
And there is rarely a single path to achieve an objective.
There’s nothing wrong with doing what’s expected of you. At any time I can give up my career and coast at the expense of my stability but I never choose that option. That doesn’t mean I’m not making the decision to continue to work.
If you have an option to keep my free time and financial stability then I’m listening.
There’s nothing wrong with doing what’s expected of you.
There is something wrong with never making choices to try and improve your life though.
At any time I can give up my career and coast at the expense of my stability but I never choose that option. That doesn’t mean I’m not making the decision to continue to work.
If you have an option to keep my free time and financial stability then I’m listening.
Find a better / closer / remote job and quit your current one.
Buy or rent cheaper housing so that you’re not so financially constrained and / or have a shorter commute.
Don’t just finish school and spend all your free time mindlessly dating because that’s whats expected and then spend all your free time just doing couple stuff and then spend all your free time raising kids. Carve out time for your own hobbies and interests and friends.
OP looking back and yearning for their childhood does not mean they did anything wrong in their life path. Growing away from your childhood is very common.
You have no idea if OP is proud of their path and is casually reminiscing or if they believe they should have done something different.
All of your wikihow tier advice is a weirdly specific to a life that we know nothing about. OP has discipline to continually make the same decision to stay on their path instead of getting distracted by selfish instant gratification.
OP looking back and yearning for their childhood does not mean they did anything wrong in their life path. Growing away from your childhood is very common.
You have no idea if OP is proud of their path and is casually reminiscing or if they believe they should have done something different.
They’re disconnected from their “inner child” the universal symbol of joyous freedom. No one yearns to be connected to their inner miserable child. The fact that they’re asking, is an inherent sign of discontentness and I stand by it sounding bleak. And lots of people living bleak lives doesn’t make them less bleak.
All of your wikihow tier advice is a weirdly specific to a life that we know nothing about.
The broad advice was in response to your broad context free question:
If you have an option to keep my free time and financial stability then I’m listening.
If you want better advice, ask a better question, if you want generic advice on how to have better financial stability and more free time, than the answer probably lies in your job, your housing, and your relationships.
OP has discipline to continually make the same decision to stay on their path instead of getting distracted by selfish instant gratification.
Lmao, look who’s painting an oddly specific picture in literally the next sentence. XD
Telling someone to change jobs and avoid dating is not the same thing as saying he delayed gratification. The ladder is just a quality of growing away from your childhood.
My question was rhetorical. You still tried to answer my question by making up context just like your posts about OP. This is what I’m saying is pointless. There are more important things in life than retaining your childhood such as providing for yourself and others. I would guess in most cases, growing away from your childhood is done out of necessity. It’s a sacrifice of time people choose because of the consequences of the alternative but you say OP should have made different decisions to prioritize their childhood? Your criticisms are only valid for someone who sacrifices needlessly which doesn’t seem like a common thing.
My inner child is dead and I killed them in about second year of university because of fear of other people and lack of money for anything beyond food and tuition -> no fun times except for the computer -> depression, unmedicated for 3 years.
And now that I have money, I’m a mess after years of neglect, and I forgot how to have fun, and I still suffer from depression.
Dude(ess? sorry, idk your pronouns), I feel you and I didn’t even get to the phase where I have money yet.
One good part about having a kid is that you get to re-experience all of the fun kid stuff you remember, both as an adult and through the eyes of your kid. You can introduce your kid to your favorite shows/books/etc that you remember (and cringe at some of the stuff you forgot was in there).
I play and make music, this seems to give me back what i thought i had lost, a feeling of purpose and freedom to express myself.
I talk to my inner child every night. I tell him all kinds of things like:
- he’s worthless
- he will never be enough
- he is stupid
It’s what my mother would have done
:(
Please don’t be like that, it won’t bring you nothing but pain and suffering. If you had bad parents or a difficult childhood (as I did), then you’ll probably want the rest of your life to be as good as possible, right? So, be practical and dont drown youself in negative ideas. Ok? :)
I’m all good. I am just being sardonic. Things were a lot worse for a long time but now I’m unbothered, moisturized, and in my lane
Moisturized? 🤨
Mixed feelings here, what is an “inner child?” Feelings of exercising creativity and spontnuity don’t have to be “compartmentalized”… Just work that into your adult life. only thing that is different otherwise is obviously responsibility, that will never go away. You might have to answer to your wife as to why you chose to spend a whole Saturday watching cartoons, but as long as you make your needs known, that shouldn’t be an issue as well.
I’m sensing you have problems communicating your desires(ideas, inspirations, etc) … other than that, you might be feeling nostalgia. But nostalgia is mostly ignorance. It felt like good times at times because I was ignorant to how my parents struggled.
When I go to the beach I dig deep holes in the sand. Does that count?
I do too! It’s mandatory for guys of all ages to dig holes at the beach. Bonus points for every dad mom boy girl that joins!
Quite a few years ago I used eBay to find some of the toys I had as a kid… a unique Matchbox car, some original trilogy Star Wars figures, some collector cards. I associate them with my childhood so when I look at them of touch them it takes me back to that simpler time and makes me happy
I never disconnected. I just stopped doing certain things in front of other people.
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I don’t know your specific work/life situation, so I won’t pretend to know what all the constraints are, but if you’ll indulge me I want to try to challenge the idea that play is something you can only do away from all the dull stuff.
If you have a “bring your inner child to work day” would anyone notice? And what if it works out for you and you start to smuggle them in every day? It doesn’t have to mean acting like a big ol’ goofball in meetings, but it could be approaching the stuff you have to do from the perspective of openness, what-ifs and sometimes asking the kind of questions (like “why?”) that adults usually don’t because they fear it may mark them as someone who doesn’t know everything and have all the answers. Or when it comes to tasks that genuinely have fewer creative opportunities, setting small work-related challenges for yourself, achieving high scores nobody else knows about, etc. (I feel like I read a blog post or something about this, but I can’t remember what.) Or just having a secret laugh at what five-year-old you might have thought of a co-worker or some situation you observed. If the “adult mask” you mentioned is working for you, then keep wearing it. But you get to decide what goes on behind it.
I don’t want to sound like an apologist for working all the time, and you should also be making time for actual play, on your own time, that uniquely benefits you! But I also don’t want you buying into the notion that work time, where you spend so much of your life, should be reserved for suffering in a straight-jacket.
