Show Your Inner Child Some Love
It’s a big classroom and I walk towards the chairs forming a circle at the center of it. I am early but soon the room fills up with people of different ages and cultures. The instructions say that we cannot talk about where we’re from or what we do for a profession. We are all strangers unified because we came to embarrass ourselves.
The teacher sits down with a big smile. “Welcome to your first acting lesson!”
She goes about the technicalities of the course and her method of teaching. But the one thing that strikes me as odd is when she tells us what we can do. It’s a speech about how in life we’re expected of certain things of society and let our inner child sleep.
Somebody call child services because everybody’s inner child is in a coma!
Even as someone who loves cracking weird jokes, pranking, or being silly, I cannot deny I let my inner child sleep as well. It’s as if society expects us to be functioning grownups once we reach a certain age. We’re afraid of being childlike.
Why?
Perhaps it’s because being childlike is related to being less serious. Children have the joy of not having a care in the world. They go about their day without a lot of consequences.
But as grownups, everything we do has a grave weight.
Not really. Not if you stop thinking about it like that. And that’s the beauty of acting lessons.
It’s only once per week and I‘ve only been to one lesson but it has filled me up with energy. I am an introvert that got energized by making a fool out of myself with a bunch of strangers. I guess it was mostly internal because I connected with myself on a deeper level, but I also worked on my social skills at the same time even if I was embarrassed half of the time.
When we embarrass ourselves it lingers onward eating at us.
But being embarrassed as a group carries no weight. We’ve all made fools of ourselves. And we had fun.
But do you really need acting lessons to awaken your inner child?
Not really. You need courage.
Up until the acting lessons I was aware of my inner child. He just didn’t have a name. But he was there whenever I did a wordplay, cracked a silly dad joke, or pranked someone at work by changing his background to a baboon’s butt.
Next time you have an idea that sounds silly, don’t shut it down. It’s a bit tricky because society has rules but with some practice and awareness, you can stretch your own boundaries. Who knows? Your inner child might finally get some vitamin D.
While you’re at that, give me some dopamine by giving a clap or fifty on this story if you’ve enjoyed it. If you think of bad jokes but are afraid to crack them, read here about how I use my bad humor to be happier:
