Finding The Happiness of The Inner Child

It’s not daily that you get nostalgic when a random occurrence triggers your childhood memories. It could be a favorite meal that your mom prepared for every Sunday dinner, a favorite game, or even your experience with your childhood best friend.

It could be anything.

I can affirm that this feeling hit me recently while going to the shop. I had recently opened up to my younger sibling, expressing to her how deeply I felt attached to the Christmas festive season. Unlike most of my primary school friends, my estate rarely went home for the festive season, and if they did, well, they would be back the same day. This is as far as I can remember.

We’d align a series of events for that Christmas week, like, for starters, the hairstyles that we were going to plait as girls, which must have included a bright color. Once our hair was made, we would then get together at one of the houses and play loud music, swinging our rainbow-made braids from left to right in unison as the song “I Whip My Hair Back and Front” by Willow Smith played in the background.

The music would go on until 11 pm, when the owner of the house arrived full of exhaustion. The next order of events would be to go to the next house that had a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) tree. This tree is also known as the Japanese plum tree that has yellow to orange fruits, oval or pear-shaped, with a slightly fuzzy skin and a sweet, tangy flesh. With the help of our professional climbers and long sticks, we would pluck as many as we could and share them equally among ourselves.

The most enjoyable part of these events was on Christmas Eve, when we would take steel wool and matchboxes, gather outside, light them up, and swing our arms like merry-go-rounds, only for the effect to look like actual fireworks at close range. On this particular day when going to the shop, it felt like that scene was being reenacted by the kids at a nearby field. I stood by and watched, and a sense of joy and peace and maybe even innocence flooded back to me. I can barely explain how good of a feeling that was.

It was magical.

After all, it is Christmas, the season of joy.

It came as a shock to me when some of my friends later on mentioned lacking some of their childhood memories, which made me question whether it could affect our mental health as adults. We have all struggled with it at one point in time. It’s just that some occurrences are severer than others. I later learned that this question that had stuck in my mind for a while wasn’t coming from a singular place of emotion, but it was a well-studied topic.

Psychological research showed that childhood experiences were able to play a significant role in how people regulated their emotions and experienced joy as adults. The mind being programmed as a storage unit often refers back to the positive moments from early life, such as playing, childhood connection, safety, and the shared laughter, the moment one is stressed out or rather uneasy.

Memories tend to shape the people we become, through resilience, comfort, and the ability to feel grounded. This may not be a positive outcome for people who have been raised in environments that are marked by instability, neglect, or emotional burdens. The mind could be offering a safe space that resembles the absence of childhood memories as a way of self-protection.

This may come across as a limitation, but there is always that new day that is yet to be touched. It’s not too late to start making new memories that are filled with joy and happiness. Hey! Maybe an idea of visiting that place that allows you to remake some of your childhood memories. I know I would love to jump up and down on a bouncing castle and wander away halfway into the air, thinking about nothing other than the number of giggles I have let out in a single jump.

We can’t completely erase the past memories, but we can always choose to live by the present happy ones that create safety within our minds. The majority of the time we take care of others more than we take care of ourselves, and until we take the initiative of taking care of ourselves, then we might end up being stuck in an endless loop of distress. The first step would be to identify the areas of joy that we can tap into and enjoy the little things in our present time.