Not Childish. Child-Like.

There’s a significant difference between “childish” and “child-like.” When we think of someone as childish, we think of them as immature, emotionally incompetent, someone who lacks the ability to think clearly. But child-like is something else entirely. When someone is child-like they embrace freedom and being abundantly present. It’s someone who approaches life through a lens of discovery without needing a reason for it. And this is the version I’ve been actively trying to get back to.

What I didn’t anticipate was just how scary it would be.

When I first started intentionally doing activities I loved as a child, like painting, drawing, and talking to myself in the mirror, there was this initial pause, or hesitation I couldn’t quite name. And then I realized what it was: I was afraid that doing these things would make me childish. Not in the honoring-my-younger-self way I intended. But in the regressing, losing-my-grip-on-adulthood way. Which sounds ridiculous when I type it out. But I was scared. Like there was this tightly wound part of me convinced that picking up a paintbrush might unravel something.

And yet, I did it anyway. I put on the classical music playlist my friend Liz had shared with me, I pulled out a canvas and some acrylics, and I just started.

Somewhere in the middle of mixing colors I didn’t plan and making marks I couldn’t explain, I felt something crack open. Kind of like when you open a window in a stuffy room and finally feel the fresh air.

I remember looking in the mirror a few weeks into it and noticing I was seeing myself differently. For as long as I could remember, I’d looked at my reflection and seen someone who couldn’t figure it out. Someone chronically behind in her career, behind in relationships, behind on whatever invisible timeline I’d absorbed from somewhere and made my own. I thought that something in my nature must be immature to keep me this way.

But slowly, through showing up at the canvas, the craft nights, the playful evenings just for the heck of it, a shifter occurred.

I’m shifting from “I’m so behind” to “I’m so alive.” And that one reframe has changed more than I can fully articulate.

When I look back at my adult life through that lens, I see something different. Every city I’ve lived in, every job I’ve started, every friendship I’ve built, every person I’ve loved, every risk I’ve taken, some of which worked out and some of which absolutely did not, none of it looks like falling behind anymore. It looks like an adventurous, fulfilling, completely-unique-and-my-own life. I’ve actually done so much, and I’m not even thirty!

The child-like part of me, the part I’d been quietly ashamed of, was never the problem. She was the one who kept moving. Who kept trying things. Who refused to stop being curious even when life gave her good reasons to.

What I’ve been surprised to discover is how becoming more child-like has made me feel more like a woman. More independent, more willing to claim the things I want and name the things I don’t, and more connected to something I can only describe as mine. No longer a role I’ve been handed or a version of womanhood I’ve borrowed from somewhere else.

When I am creating: writing, painting, doing the voiceover work that makes me feel most alive, I feel this most clearly. That’s where the child-like and the woman meet. That’s where they’ve always met. I just spent a long time convincing myself that one of them had to go.

If you’ve ever felt ashamed of the things your younger self loved, I want you to know you’re not alone in that. But I also want you to consider that the part of you that still reaches for those things, that still wants to paint, or sing, or play, or stay up too late doing something with no productivity value whatsoever, that part isn’t evidence of immaturity. That part might be the most mature thing about you.

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If you want to meditate with these ideas, check out one of my favorites: Reclaim Your Worth on Youtube.