I miss being five years old. I miss having no worries in the world other than finding a way to get out of eating my peas at dinner that night. I miss it being acceptable to take a nap during school, when we couldn’t be penalized for being tired because we woke up at the crack of dawn to go to class. I miss being friends with everyone because when you’re a kid, everyone gets along with one another, when there was no such thing as society’s standards in our minds. I miss being able to go to sleep at seven at night and wake up absolutely fine in the morning – no insomnia-filled nights where it feels as though sleeping will only be something I do when I die. I miss when the worst thing you could do to a person was stick your tongue out at them and not share any of your Popsicle. I miss when the world was filled with people who actually interacted with one another, rather than scrolling through social media all day, their noses buried in their phones (which I admit I do as well). I miss when my days consisted of eating, sleeping, sitting down with my family and going right back to sleep again. I miss having absolutely no reason to stress; hell, I miss not even knowing what stress is. I miss not even knowing about the existence of anxiety and panic attacks and depression and suicide. I want to wake up and not have the one thing I look forward to be the weekend so that I can just sit back and do pretty much nothing. I miss when I did not hate my body because it belonged to a “young woman.” I want to go back to when politics did not even exist to me because I was too young to know what they were, when TV was just a thing that you watched for entertainment and I did not get emotionally attached to fictional characters that I cry over when they die. I miss when we were all brutally honest with one another because children’s mouths have no filter, and we got to actually sleep when we were tired. I want to go back to a time where the biggest issue was if I colored inside the lines, rather than if I accidentally used cosine instead of tangent or the formula for gravitational potential energy as a substitute for that of kinetic energy. I miss the simpler times, when there was no fear of growing up and being on my own in just a matter of years and having to get a job probably within the next few months because I’m legally old enough to now. The time when our problems consisted of how many cookies we could have after dinner and how late we could get our parents to let us stay up – maybe past ten if you’re lucky. Man, do I wish I could go back.
