As a young girl, I always imagined myself older. The way I’d look, the way I dressed, and what I would do as my career.
As a 23 year old woman all I want to do now is reconnect with that little girl. I wonder oftentimes if I live up to what I wanted to be.
I made this piece not knowing how I wanted it to turn out, but I knew what I wanted it to say. A multitude of things.
I am just a woman, 23, always burdened with the feeling that if I am not spending every minute of my life working toward my success that I am a failure.
Always feeling like I am running out of time if I don’t accomplish everything by 25.
Always feeling not enough, because of the wounds carved into me as a little girl that would just scab and then get reopened by everyone else until I was old enough to internalize those things and inflict that pain on myself.
and now that I am older, I do everything in my power to reverse that trauma. To nurture those wounds from my younger years.
To speak life into that little girl, to do the things she enjoyed, to live in the worlds she created.
Like Alice in Wonderland (the live-action).
as a child, I always watched these wacky movies. Shark Boy and Lava Girl, Spy Kids, any princess movie, Coraline, and Alice in Wonderland (both movies). I loved the most insane and visually stimulating things.
as I got older I began to escape there.
Escaping became my way of living. I smoked. I read books. I watched my familiar shows to develop a sense of consistency and comfort in my life. I drew pictures. I painted. I lied. I couldn’t decipher my dreams and the days I lived in. I curated my own world within isolation. I found comfort within my mind and away from others. I found comfort in taking surface-level care of that little wounded girl that still lived inside me.
And maybe getting sick put things into perspective, or maybe my period of doing nothing forced me to face myself, but I realized that my ambition, my surface-level self-care, my indulging in the media I loved as a child wasn’t healing me. It was pacifying me.
So the little girl, she looks up to me because I am everything I always wanted to be.
And just like how the little girl couldn’t understand why the older women in her life were never satisfied with who they were (because she always wanted to be like them), she cannot fathom why she got older and is now placing myself within that same pattern.
Because the older version of herself is everything the little girl always wanted to be.
She is beautiful, she is kind, she is loved, she is successful, she is helpful, she is stylish, she is intelligent, she is talented, and she is so many things that it would just be conceited to name them all.
And the little girl just hopes that one day the older version of herself will stop looking at that clock and look at her and realize that she is already everything, and there is nothing to fix, or improve.
That she is already perfect, that she is already worthy, that she is perfectly made in the image of God, and that anyone who says differently is a liar.
(Because nobody is more honest about being impressed than a six-year-old).
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