She liked to draw, but now I hate to sketch some simple lines.
She hated to make new friends, but now I look forward to meet new people.
She liked to swim, but now I get anxious in a swimming pool.
She hated to do work out, but now I do yoga and run to ease my mind.
She liked to look forward to birthdays, but now I don’t even want to celebrate any birthdays.
She hated to be in the kitchen, but now I bake as a hobby.
She liked to play pretend, and finally there’s something from my childhood that I still do until now.
Looking back, I wasn’t who I was back then — in both good and bad way. There’s so many things that I used to like, but now I don’t like it anymore. But there’s also so many things that I didn’t even got the guts to try, but now turns out I enjoy it.
I think me a year ago wouldn’t even recognize me now, let alone little me. I see little me as a completely different person. I talk to her sometimes in the morning, giving her reassurances she never got and telling her the live she’s living now. I could imagine her reacting in awe, but sometimes I imagine her being scared of adulthood because of my stories.
“What changed?”, I imagine her asking me this. I’d say, a lot of things did change. The world changed, our families changed, our environments changed, and we changed too.
I sometimes think, is it really possible to outgrow the vessel that you’re in? But as life happens, love happens, loss happens, I learned some things. Through those processes, we lost some parts of ourselves. We gained new pieces to patch the hole in ourselves. We lost people we used to hold on dearly. We moved places in order to find which one fits us better. And of course, we did things we never liked to do before, or vice versa.
It’s strange when you think about it, how much we changed. We have new things, some old things, different things, but some of the things stayed the same.
But that’s okay — changes are bound to happen anyway. And that’s okay if we outgrow ourselves. We’re still the same deep inside, but we change, we shift, we grow.
