The Subtle, Powerful Ways I’ve Been Healing And Nourishing My Inner Child
We have all forgotten the power of play, wonder, and presence
There’s a photograph of me as a child that I return to often — one where I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor, cradling a book in my lap and smiling with pure, unfiltered happiness.
I must have been five or six, and though I can’t recall the exact moment the picture was taken, I remember the feeling: a sense of complete joy and freedom, fully immersed in something that brought me comfort and excitement, with no worry about time or what came next.
But that version of me didn’t last long.
By the time I was twelve, weekends weren’t for books chosen on a whim or lazy afternoons spent exploring. They were for schedules, for achievements, for “making the most” of my time.
I learned very early on that there was no room for leisure. On weekends, if I spent the morning studying and reached for a storybook or sat down to watch a movie in the afternoon, my parents would firmly remind me that my time could be better spent — that I should study more, because what I had done already was never enough. In other words, anything that didn’t directly lead to accomplishment was time wasted.
