By: Alex Evans

Editor-in-Chief

For as long as I can remember — so within the last three months — the phrase “healing my inner child” overwhelms my social media feed. It is inescapable. Why must my inner child be healed? Is it broken? Where can I find her? Hiding within my pocket? For such a vague phrase, I feel there is so much that can be done — besides creating an image of a child within my grown body that is not like a baby, but like a small child that has legs in my legs and arms in my arms like a puppet (see graphic) — so here are a few of the things I have done to “heal the inner child” in myself. 

As the baby in my friend group, I cannot shy away from turning 18 forever; in my last few months before adulthood I am progressively adopting older qualities alluding to my independence and sophistication. Besides filing my taxes, this is clearly evident through my newfound love of cookie dough bites. I vividly remember declining Ben & Jerry’s cookie dough bites from 7-11 freshman year, considering myself too enlightened to dabble in the juvenile and immature dessert. Now, amidst a frozen yogurt kick, my favorite dairy snack is simply incomplete without the little sugary frozen balls to pair. My palette is regressing, and slowly I feel my mind going along with it. 

If there’s anything I have in common with a child at this point, it is my lack of reading comprehension skills. Parking cops ticketed my vehicle twice in the last two weeks, giving me a total of 96 dollars in fines. These tickets are solely attributed to my inability to comprehend the letters that spell out “commercial loading zone Monday through Saturday.” To me, all I read was “Park Here! This spot is open!!!” I also experienced issues with numbers recently, as an AP Lit assignment instructed students to “choose a poem on page 17 or 18 to markup and analyze.” Confidently flipping open my packet, I choose the poem on page 19; what else am I supposed to do? Choose one on another page? Blasphemy. 

Lastly, I am nurturing my “inner child” by virtue of temper tantrums: anything and everything can cause immense rage. I am sure that any sentient individual above the age of four would likely move past these things, but recently anything can tear me down. To start: running out of toothpaste, realizing my bed is unmade, dropping a binder on accident, the sun being in my eyes, having an eyelash in my eye, closing the door too softly, dropping a spoon…need I say more? The majority of these temper-tantrum-inducing instances occurred in the last 48 hours, so be warned around me, the inner toddler is in full swing.

In analyzing these behaviors, mayhaps the phrase “healing your inner child” actually carries some value. In practicing these juvenile tasks, I am paradoxically also perfectly preparing for adulthood. Now I am comfortable enough with myself and who I am to realize that declining cookie dough fails to make me a “more sophisticated” and therefore better person, now I can find the comedy in my unfortunate misunderstandings, and now I can accurately gauge the severity of my struggles by realizing the silliness in their occurrences.