Write With Your Inner Child

I was knee-deep in spring cleaning, clearing out boxes of junk from my basement when I uncovered a box of childhood keepsakes.

Rummaging through the box, I rediscovered layers upon layers of my past. Peeling each layer back was like peering through a looking glass, going back a couple of decades.

It was a breath of fresh air to see the innocence of someone who hasn’t yet learned that the world can be full of judgment. I saw the handiwork of someone who felt like she had all the confidence and all the encouragement of the world behind her.

And in a sense, that was true. After all, a child’s view of the world is only as large as what her parents paint for her.

I discovered the sketchbooks from when I thought I could draw.

Some of the drawings are so bad, it made me laugh just flipping through them. No need for any fancy app filters — just let eight-year-old me draw your face and you’ll look like you’re Frankenstein’s half-sibling (gender indiscriminate).

Others are surprisingly impressive and, if someone had shown them to me today, I’d insist there’s no way I could ever draw something like that.

I had the opportunity to become reacquainted with a much younger version of myself as I stumbled across my childhood journals, the ones that I had kept on and off all through my grade school years.

I could see the fluctuations in writing styles, both in sentence structure and in lettering. The overuse of the word “like” when I was trying to fit in with a certain group of girls. The sections are written in cursive because I thought it was a sign of maturity.

Some of it is definitely not legible anymore. I’d really like to ask why neon yellow gel pens were ever invented in the first place.

Most impactful, I also discovered multiple “books” that I had written in the fourth grade. Nearly every story starred my best friend Samantha and a cohort of girls suspiciously named Nancy, Bess, and George. Clearly, I was going through a Nancy Drew phase but hadn’t yet learned what plagiarism was.

Reading the work of my nine-year-old self, I was struck by the amount of self-confidence I had.

It didn’t matter to me that I had spelling errors and grammar mistakes everywhere. It didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t draw but still tried to illustrate every page in my stories. It didn’t even matter to me that I wasn’t a creative person — my solution to that was just to retell my favorite books in my own words which, okay, isn’t so acceptable as an adult, but that’s not the point.

The point is I just wanted to write and so, I wrote. Simple as that.

Getting reacquainted with my younger self was like a breath of fresh air. I rediscovered someone who didn’t care what others thought. I was either too young to feel self-conscious or too naive to know anything other than just being simply me.

And it made me wonder … why do we stop living with this child-like sense of belief in ourselves?

Exactly at what point in our lives do we stop doing whatever it is we love for fear of … well, for fear of what? Fear of judgment? Fear that we’re not good enough? Fear that we’ll be laughed at or booed off this imaginary stage we have in our minds?

When children bring you their artwork, are they ever shy about their work? Do they ever preface it with, “I’m not sure if it’s good enough”? No. They bring it to you with their faces glowing as if they’ve just painted a masterpiece. And to them, it truly is a masterpiece!

The tendrils of self-doubt slip in slowly, insidiously, growing deep roots till it’s a weed that’s difficult to pull out. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I put down the pencil and stopped, but rediscovering my childhood works of writing inspired me to channel that younger self.

We say to dance like nobody’s watching. Let’s write like nobody’s judging. Let’s write again with your inner child.