Something I Couldn't Name

I didn’t expect to cry.

I was sitting in an arena watching thousands of children perform from the ages of around 6 to 18 years old, and what struck me wasn’t just the performance itself. It was something harder to name. A quality in their bodies. A lightness. Something that looked, from where I was sitting, like pure uninhibited joy or at least the freedom to just be, without the weight of whatever comes later.

I know childhood isn’t that simple. I know some of those kids were struggling in ways that weren’t visible from my seat. My own childhood wasn’t particularly easy, and by adolescence, I was carrying more than most people knew. So I’m not reaching for some idealised version of a past that wasn’t really there.

But there was something. Some sense I remember, however faintly, that the world was an oyster. That things were novel and possible and open. That the future was a door rather than a list of obligations. Watching those kids, I could almost see it on them. And I felt the distance between that and where I currently am as something almost physical.

My twenties have been hard in a way that is difficult to explain briefly.

OCD that took years to understand and longer to manage. Losing my dad. The aftermath of that, which was its own separate thing. Tinnitus arriving and not disappearing for a long time. Visual disturbances, vertigo, and physical symptoms that accumulated and compounded and never fully resolved. And alongside all of that, the ordinary difficult things - work that doesn’t fit, finances that require constant attention, the slow grind of trying to build a life while also managing a body and a history that weren’t always cooperating.

I don’t say this to catalogue suffering. I say it because sitting in that arena, watching those children move across a stage without self-consciousness, I felt the weight of that decade in a new way. I felt sad for myself. Not in a collapsed, hopeless way. Just in the way you sometimes allow yourself to acknowledge, quietly, that it has been a lot.

What I found myself wishing for wasn’t a specific time or place. It was that feeling. That sense of possibility. The version of me that hadn’t yet learned how heavy things could truly get.

Because if I’m honest, I’m still figuring out how to carry it. There is a spark I used to have when I was younger. A sense of direction, of curiosity that felt light rather than effortful, that I haven’t been able to locate for a while now. I don’t know exactly when it dimmed. I just know that at some point the question shifted from what do I want to how do I manage, and somewhere in that shift, something got lost. I’m not exactly sure what I’m moving toward yet. I’m still in the part where I’m looking.

There is something quietly painful about the way we are almost never satisfied with where we are.

When I was young, I wanted to be older. To have freedom, autonomy, and my own life. And here I am, older, with all of that, and some part of me wants to go back. Not to relive it, exactly. Just to be somewhere before the weight arrived.

I think this is a profoundly human thing, and I also think it is one of the sadder parts of being human. We are almost constitutionally oriented toward somewhere else. The past, the future, the version of our life that is slightly different from this one. And in all that reaching, we are not quite here.

I try to live differently. One day at a time. Genuinely present. Grateful for what is real and in front of me. I believe in that, and I try to practice it, and some days I do okay.

But I am also human. And some days I sit in an arena full of children who perhaps haven’t yet learned to carry what I carry, and I cry a little, and I let myself feel it, and I don’t try to fix it into something more comfortable.

That feels important too. To let it be what it is.

I don’t know how to get that lightness back, or whether “back” is even the right direction. I don’t think you can unknow what you know. And I’m not sure I’d want to, not really.

But I do think there is something worth looking for. Not naivety. Not the absence of difficulty. Just a little more of that quality those kids had - doing the thing before deciding whether you’re good at it. Moving through the world with some genuine curiosity rather than a running audit of everything that needs managing.

I’m not there yet. But I’m trying to find my way there.

And today, that’s the most honest thing I can say.

Until next time.

Alice