For the longest time I believed my inner child was dead. I thought the unfortunate onslaught of character-defining experiences had effectively reduced my inner child to a cynical, disillusioned misanthrope, horrendously resentful that being an adult was nothing like I thought it’d be. I came to realize that my inner child wasn’t dead — it was just hiding, and all I needed to do was find it.

It’s easy to fantasize about times when the world was once new and exciting. Money did not exist, and everything would be better when we could tell the world what to do — a psychological utopia, if you will.

Now, nothing is free and nothing is easy, and it’s not getting any easier. There’s that damn landlord, demanding money that we barely have, if at all. The utopia where everything was beautiful and nothing ever hurt at all has been shattered by revelations and realizations, transforming into a hideous dystopia where maintaining sanity is a daily struggle. Then there is the ever-pressing fear of the future, which is unwritten, and while we may have done some substantial brainstorming, putting pen to paper just isn’t in the cards. Not yet anyway.

How have we strayed so far from the path of innocence and purity? Are we that self-destructive by nature that we have to destroy everything good to rebuild it? What foundation do we have to build upon?

These questions aren’t exactly applicable to everyone, and I consider those people lucky. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to set a path and follow it, without being distracted by all the unexpected variables guaranteed to disrupt who we want to become.

But as the curious creatures we are, we will make mistakes. We will do things we regret. Sometimes, we’ll even become people that we hate, who would pierce right through the blissful eyes of our inner child and make others cower in terror.

Here, realization is key. The realization that we don’t like who we are is the first step on the path to change. The second step is finding the motivation, which is by far the more slippery of the two.

The fact of the matter is that life is nothing like we had hoped. Reality isn’t as pretty as it seemed. The only way to do any sort of justice for our inner child’s grand delusions is to make reality into what we wanted. To take risks. To destroy our comfort zone, which is honestly just a convoluted incarnation of psychological slavery. It isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. It is, however, more invaluable than anything else we could possibly choose to do with ourselves. That, my friends and gentle readers, is true power.