• When you’re a little kid, the world just can’t turn fast enough. You can’t wait to grow up, have a job, start a family. You imagine yourself serving cookies for breakfast. Water slides every day, no bed time, no homework. Your parents laugh when you say it out loud. “You’ll change your mind about that when you’re older” They always sound so sure .Rules stacked up so tall you can’t even see over the top. At first you don’t mind so much, because the rules keep you safe. They create balance, something you can depend on. Everyone goes to bed at 8 pm on school nights. Everyone eats their broccoli to grow big and strong. Or at least this is what you assume because you don’t know any better. How could you? You were raised inside a bubble. You sit in a classroom while a man in a uniform tells you to never do drugs. They show you pictures of cancerous lungs. “Just one cigarette is enough to get addicted” he says. And you look around wide eyed at your classmates, wondering why. Why anyone would do such a silly thing like drink alcohol or smoke a cigarette. Not you, you think. You’re a good girl. A quick little buzz of an altered state just doesn’t seem worth the risks when you have such a nice family and you get such good grades. But then, as you get older, you start to notice how the rules aren’t working. How even though you studied for hours, the test is covered with only trick questions. You read the news and you see big headlines. USA GOES TO WAR. MAN MURDERS WIFE AND CHILDREN. So you try to make sense of it. It’s easier than rewriting the whole system. You start to ask questions, but there’s only one answer. “Sometimes life isn’t fair”. You take this into account. It becomes the key to handling disappointment. “Sometimes life isn’t fair”. School work is starting to take over your life. Millions of hours spent studying the battles of the civil war, or calculating imaginary electrical currents. And even as you put in the time and effort because really what else could you be doing, something isn’t right. At first it’s just this lingering cold, this resistance that fills your bones as you convince yourself to get out of bed. You suspect it will go away within a few weeks, but it doesn’t. Soon you feel it in your heart. When people yell at you it stings in a new way, a resounding echo of a gong in a room filled with air. From that echo, you catch the edges of words, skirting like spiders at the back of your skull. Matter. That’s what they’re saying. Something about matter. And you learn all the technical gibberish, about objects taking up space, but the definition doesn’t feel comprehensive. You know you are not made of matter. Otherwise you would feel more solid. You’re bones are made of silk scarves, and your skeleton is dancing, held up by strings. So you listen more closely, and your heart chokes and coughs up a sentence. THIS doesn’t matter. You are not sure what this is, exactly, but it seems to encompass everything. You feel trapped, but deep down you realize you have always felt this way. You just didn’t dare to dream of freedom. The doors at the front of the school are always unlocked. We could all just get up and walk outside. There are no alarms or cages are stopping you. It’s only in your head. You go to college thinking things will be different. You are finally on your own, away from all that coddling. People don’t seem to expect very much of you. They hand you an excuse for why you’re still not happy, why you’re still not having fun. “I’m adjusting” you say. But even after a few months you still don’t feel adjusted. The people who surround you aren’t exceptional. They’re not especially kind or warm or welcoming. Aloneness takes on a new meaning. You become your moving feet. But then something remarkable happens. You take a chance on an adventure. You swallow a piece of magic paper and the ground becomes alive. It brings you back to your childhood self, this illumination of innocent laughter. You remember why you wanted to grow up so fast. It’s a combination of words you haven’t put together in years, and it feels deliciously foreign spilling from your tongue. It was so you could do whatever you wanted. No rules. Total freedom. And the purity and simplicity of that revelation is overwhelming. Tears pour from your eyes and you sink to your knees and your mouth just can’t stop laughing. You are here. You are an adult making decisions, disregarding the world you know. And not just for now, but for always. That’s the best part. The sense of control hums inside your very core, an everlasting melody. If you know how to make yourself happy, the rules don’t really matter. The point is there is no point. The only aspiration worth having is for meaningful experience. And even though you are ecstatic in light of this new discovery, you have to wonder what went wrong. How did the responsibilities and the unfairness flood over everything? In the moment, it seems so ridiculous. You chalk it up to a glitch in the system. Maybe you are special. Maybe for most people the race trumps happiness, trumps freedom. It’s terrifying to unravel the blanket of your history. To go back and see yourself struggling, yanking so hard on all the wrong threads, weaving the picture that came with the instructions. Let go, you think. You have rediscovered the dream from before you were marred by all the worlds’ tragedies. And the prospect of growing up, of all the mountains and mountains of time you have stretched in front of you becomes enchanted, flushed with a magic that catches in your mind. You are the master of your own universe. Paint yourself a picture where fear is unwelcome. Here is a world, entirely of your creation. What could be better than actually living in it?

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