I Used to Be Smarter...[alternate title: I Think I Just Blew My Own Mind]

I work with kids (think ages 4-12) every day as part of my job. I used to think that I wasn't all that kid-friendly; like, as a person, I just wasn't into it or whatever. Kids are noisy, they're messy. They're unpredictable. They make it hard to sleep sometimes.

I really liked mine (and still do. Mostly. More than half of the time), but I inwardly reacted to kids the same way I react to a horde of mosquitoes...by telling myself to run to a place where they were not, and quickly. I didn't know how to talk to them, I didn't know how to deal with them.

My son kind of cured me of that temporarily, but I found it to be an issue again when I returned to my old movie theater job. I could make all kinds of small talk with adults, even teenagers. But small kids...I would smile in a forced, most likely terrifying, way, and say something like, "HI! ARE YOU EXCITED FOR THE MOVIE!?"

To their collective credit, they took it well, and most had the sense to pretend I wasn't talking to them.

Now I work with kids on the reg, and I have found that, on the contrary, they're a delight. I'm kind of jealous of them. They know what they want. They're not afraid to tell someone. They work actively on their goal if they haven't reached it. Things tend to be more concrete in their world than abstract. They're (mostly) pretty sure of who they are as people. They aren't afraid to tell you what they think of you when asked.

So I guess what I'm curious about is, when does that change?

I remember the Renaissance Festival when I was a kid. It was magic. I loved everything about it...the costumes, the games, the booths, the food, even the car ride.

It was that cloud of nostalgia that gripped me when I took my son to the Festival when he was four...

...and it was NOTHING like I remembered. When did everything get so expensive?! The gas, the money to feed us, the parking, the walking, the highway robbery-style prices of EVERYTHING inside those gates, the price to get IN those gates...it was just depressing and sad. I saw it through different eyes...through jaded, adult eyes that realized it wasn't an educational thing for kids, it was a money-making scam.

It was that same storm-colored lens that became part of my everyday eyesight the older I got. "C" was the letter of the day in my younger adulthood...C for Compromise. As I got older, and more afraid of endings, and more clingy and attachment-happy in my thirties, Compromise went out the window and the letter morphed into "D" for Desperation. Such was my desire for everyone to get along and, more importantly, for everyone in the world to love me, that I became chameleon-like based on the company I kept. Oh, you like that? It's my favorite too! I liked what you liked...no matter what that might be.

Slowly, over the course of the last year, I have started to peel back the layers of this Jen-of-all-trades and realize that I'm not a lot of the things that I thought I was. As I have shed those layers, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes eagerly, I have started to see who I really am.

And it was as they fell that I started to understand the term "inner child."

I embrace the notion that attachment is born of fear. I have learned (just this year! Like, literally the year 2015!) on a core-deep level that all I have to really worry about is me, because I am the only one I can change. I don't have to be responsible for anyone else's happiness. Only mine.

And the most important thing I learned was who I am.

I love my kid, unreservedly and unashamedly. I love to work out four nights a week until I can't form a coherent thought. I love to walk. I love to read. I love a few shows on television. I love learning new things, and getting to talk to different people all the time. I love appreciating beauty in things, specifically nature's surprises.

I also learned who I was not.

What it comes down to is that all of those things I loved, I have loved as long as I can remember (except my kid, because duh). They were the things that grounded me as a child. Swimming until my limbs were jelly, playing hide and seek until the dark necessitated a call from the porch...those were my workouts before I understood what working out was. Losing myself in new books, meeting new people at church...I thrived on those encounters.

As I have come to realize these things, I have started to cast off the heavy cloak that was my previous life. The glass lenses aren't storm-colored anymore. They're not rosy, either...not yet, and they may never be. But I feel, in longer and longer bursts, HAPPY. Happy the way I was as a kid. Happy in the way that means that you can just be, and not label something or think too much about what it really means.

Uncomplicated. Wholly. Happy.

I'm kind of a present-moment kind of chick, so I'm not going to project that this means great things for the upcoming new decade of my life.

But I'm seeing more hide-and-seek games in my future.