When We Were Young

I was ten years old when I asked my friends to play ‘jump the cloud’ with me. This was a game I’d made up, where I pretended that the painted shapes on the playground concrete were clouds and imagined that the space around them was the sky. But my friends were going on eleven and they were growing increasingly less interested in kids games, and more interested in boys. This was not the case for me. I’d stand in the playground and watch the leaves float to the floor, and try to convince my best friend that my hands held magical powers that could move objects, as I waved my fingers at the leaves. My friends didn’t believe my imaginative stories so much as time went on, but I just wanted to be young and my imagination was unstoppable. Is there so much wrong with that?

Whilst all the other children gathered sneakily in the abandoned school toilets and giggled as they watched one another hug, hold hands and kiss, I wavered in the background as I thought about the next game I could make up.

It was up to year seven that I was still playing with my toys at home. I remember having a little frog ornament that was my Grandma’s and a tiny pink doll, along with many other random toys. I never named them, I just made up stories and played them to their roles. That was all that mattered to me; imagining the story and creating it. Whilst everyone else in my class had just bought the latest Blackberry and girls had discovered that mascara existed, I was quite content to be creative at home. I wasn’t such a girly-girl either. If I wasn’t finding the next way to use my imagination, I would join the neighbourhood boys on my BMX bike or go camping with my Dad and brother. The girls down the road didn’t seem to include me in their playtime, and it was because I hadn’t shown any interest. They were typical girls who wanted to stay stationary on a picnic blanket, and I just wanted to be active.

As I grew older, I’d finally pushed toys to the side and moved onto other ways of being imaginative. Whether it was taking videos with my friends and making stories with them, or writing in my spare time, I always found a way to be inventive and I guess, a bit of a dreamer.

It wasn’t that I was unpopular at school, I always had many friends, but I just took a little longer to mature. But, at the end of year nine, aged 13 going on 14, I picked up my first mascara wand and found that I was starting to gain more attention. I remember at one point looking around me and thinking “right, I should probably grow up now”, and so I did. I went from zero to 100, I began wearing a lot of makeup, went out partying often and suddenly I was the centre of attention.

I guess what I’m trying to delve out of this blog post is, why do we feel the need to grow up so quickly? Why did I have to tell myself to mature? Why did I look at the other girls and feel as though makeup would better me, make me prettier, more grown up? There comes a point in life where we have to throw away our teddies and move on, but should there really be an allocated time slot when we say this to ourselves? Or should it happen naturally? I always assumed that it happened naturally for other children, but perhaps some of them were like me. Clinging onto their childhood, not really wanting to let go of the aspects that made it truly fun.

It does cross my mind from time to time how fast children are growing up nowadays. I sound so old for my age but sometimes I wish I held onto my childhood more and didn’t force maturity. Children as young as six are glued to their iPads and I wonder what it does to their imaginations. They’re not taking in their surroundings as much anymore, they’re wearing makeup earlier and most of all, they’re being sexualised at a younger age. As I get older, I feel we should take a breather and just take childhood at our own pace. But it’s easier said that done.