Well, you probably didn’t need a degree in folk psychology to have thought of that.īut it has comforted me to think that the treble voice with which I sing has actually been around longer than my speaking voice, even if I don’t use it quite as I did before. Maybe we aren’t all statues in which each new wrinkle is engraved irreversibly by the ruthless chisel of Time: maybe we’re all Russian dolls, with an inner child nestling inside no matter how many layers are stacked on top. My only hope is that childhood is perhaps more a state of mind, a mode of being, rather than anything else. I’d known it for a while already, but we can know things without ever realising them. Only now, looking back through the radical discontinuity of life abroad, have I come to see how my childhood is well and truly over. The mistake I made at prom night – now a distant memory, bitterly separated by two years of conscription (the sort of rite of passage I didn’t want to have) – was expecting that what was to come would be more of the same. I wish that instead of celebrating rites of passage with such fervour, we paid more attention to the close of each chapter, not every next turn of the page. I wish I’d taken the time to bid my childhood a proper goodbye. Yet, surely all this is nothing but Copium, a futile search for lost time. Now, while she binges on the usual lineup of adult dramas on Netflix, I turn to old Disney titles and teen shows as a guilty pleasure, seeking out their gentle idealism and youthful freshness as a much-needed refuge from the harsh edges of adult life. I used to scorn the kids’ shows my younger sister watched as petty and naïve. Traded my gravelly baritone for a reedy, fragile alto, which in its mellower moments recalls just a shade of the blitheness of boyhood. Over the years, I’ve given up texting in prim professional punctuation for no caps and minimal full stops. Instead, the closer I’ve come to the oncoming tide of adulthood, the more I feel like I’ve retreated to the ever-receding shoreline of childhood. “I wish I’d taken the time to bid my childhood a proper goodbye” If you’re never fully a child, it seems, you can’t really outgrow childhood. When our value systems keep rewarding children who conduct themselves more like adults than kids, it was an easy mistake to make. Clinging to the supposedly ‘mature’ choice of focusing dutifully on academics, I let too many teenage experiences and excesses pass me by. I was always craning my neck and tipping my toes to land my precocious grown-up persona a seat at the grown-up table, while my actual child self stayed stunted in its shadow. If it’s taking me a while to learn how to be an adult, perhaps it’s precisely because it took me a while to learn how to be a child. Adulthood has come much quicker than I thought. At some level there’s still a hardwired instinct, when someone meets me for the first time, to assume they see a dorky, doe-eyed schoolboy, clad in the wrinkled white of old uniforms. When someone asks if I’m doing a PhD or my second degree when I feel obliged to explain how I only count as mature because I had to take two years out before uni. Being in a mature college, every day runs the risk of some mildly mind-warping cognitive dissonance. Yet, here I am now, stranded on the wrong side of 21, and still wondering how I got here. “If you’re never fully a child, it seems, you can’t really outgrow childhood” I’m not sure what earned that remark – perhaps some fashionably nihilistic rambles I picked up from some corner of the internet or other – but I probably harboured secret pride upon hearing it, finally gratified that someone had seen me for the old soul I was, adrift in a sea of insipid puerility. “You’re a sulky 40-year-old man in the body of a nine-year-old child,” I remember an intrigued parent volunteer quipping at a Sunday School camp. Child-me must have seemed pretty keen on growing up fast.
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