Mourning Childhood & Fearing Adulthood

A creative non-fiction piece about how GROWING UP SCARES ME!

PICTURED: Images from Moonlight, Matilda, Uptown Girls, C’mon C’mon & Stand By Me

A brief note: this piece of writing is about things that make me cry. It is less pop-culture shabam and more a cascade of my own emotions. If that makes you a bit itchy-scratchy, you don’t have to read this!

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On Letterboxd I have two different tags for when I cry at films because I cry at many films and naturally, must document and differentiate between when I cry versus when I bawl. The ‘cried-my-eyes-out’ tag is occupied by only twenty-six movies of the supposed one thousand, two hundred and twenty-eight that I have seen so far, yet it truly does feel as though I am always weeping. Among those ranks are (perhaps surprisingly) two Avengers movies, Lady Bird and Little Women, and five films – C’mon C’mon, Uptown Girls, Stand By Me, Moonlight & Wendy – about the tiny, big gap between being tiny and being big. Nobody reading this will ever be eight years old again, and a lot of us spend a lot of time trying and failing to recover from that fact. My biggest wish in the entire world and the one that I would beg the genie for is to go back in time and revisit my childhood. I want to really live in it, like a little girl showing off her newfound ability to float and laying face-up in the swimming pool, shimmering under the sunlight, left alone by time for a few hours. I wish that Time could please let loose of me and let me wander for a moment. I want to visit my baby-faced dramatics and set the table for her and for her parents one last time before diving into the real human world.

When I watched C’mon C’mon in the cinema on the twenty-third of February this year, I sat in the middle of the back row like all of the real cinema fans do. Unless you are a middle-middle person like I sometimes am, or a front-middle person like I sometimes am when I need to feel the world a bit more. I do not understand people who sit on the sides. I was seated next to my girlfriend who doubles up as my best friend because my life has a teeny tiny cast because we spent all of the money on getting the best actors. So, I was seated next to my girlfriend in the back row, and the only other human being in the movie theatre was sitting directly in front of us. My girlfriend and I both sobbed rather loudly and consistently throughout the entire film. This man decidedly did not. Perhaps he sobbed in a petite and dainty way inside his own brain, but I suppose we will never know.

I cried for many reasons, such as Mike Mills being a fantastic writer, Woody Norman & Joaquin Phoenix being wonderful actors. Mostly, I cried because every time I watch a kid and grown-up on screen, I am less and less allowed to be the kid. I have a theory that everybody in the entire world who watches these movies – child or adult – feels strung on the line between the two, or at the very least connects the most with the opposite camp. I remember being younger and desperately wanting to prove that I was older and watching films like Matilda and thinking that she was just like me in being beyond the world of her age. Now, at the not-too-big age of twenty, I watch Matilda and cry, because I think of myself being shepherded out of childhood in the same way. I know that twenty is young, but it is important to note that I do not want to be young, I want to be SHERBERT, I want to be UNREASONABLY ANGRY, I want to be 99p ice creams and not understanding a single thing, I want to be a kid again. And doesn’t the whole world? Especially now! This pandemic has sucked the life out of us, and – at least for me – every time it’s offered it back to me it’s been in the form of my most niche and tucked away interests from when I was ten. I reread book series’ that I haven’t touched in a decade and dug a tunnel to joy that led me to personality traits that I’ve since caked in layers of insincerity and a deep fear of not being accepted. My girlfriend tells me that the truest to herself that she’s ever been was when she was around seven or eight. My external self matched my internal truth the most when I was around four. I know this because when I was in Reception my teacher made me feel self-conscious in front of the rest of my class, and that opened a Pandora’s box of self-doubt and resignation that I haven’t quite been able to put a lid on since.

I’m not saying that everybody’s most true self existed in childhood; perhaps you are truly your most true self now, in which case I and the self-help podcasts I have bookmarked are both very jealous of you, or not because jealousy isn’t productive. I do think, however, that this microgenre of media about kids and adults who learn from each other is a direct result of us as a culture needing to listen more to our inner child. Perhaps that voice is easier to listen to if it belongs to a very great actor and a crew of thousands of people who manage to make the script profound without being cringeworthy. Or perhaps because the children in these films are special and unique, we watch them as a way to process our own grief for our five-and-three-quarters, stardust-grabbing selves without having to fully confront that this melancholy nostalgia belongs to us and not to the characters on screen.

At the end of Stand By Me, The Writer proclaims that “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Does anyone? I don’t know if they do. Not because of the bigness or the littleness of our friendships, but because there is something to not truly understanding the world but understanding somebody else and having them understand you. There is something to being a little fish in a fishbowl and loving another little fish in the fishbowl more than letters can cling onto each other to form words, and then being poured out into the big, salty ocean where there are lots of different fishes. And once you’re in the ocean, there’s no going back to the fishbowl. You have to learn the different types of fishes and the coral, and how the coral isn’t a plant but an animal (maybe?) and how that’s kind of freaky, and as soon as that happens you can’t pretend that Fishbowl is the only world that there ever was. You have to stand up on your splintered fins and say “hey. I’m a fish that was once in Fishbowl and now I’m not and that’s okay,” and it’ll be okay. Except one day, you’ll watch a film about a fish in a fishbowl, and you go “wow. Wasn’t that something?”