Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why” (2002) played the other day on my Spotify shuffle. Immediately, I was transported back into my childhood bedroom, and I was 5 years old again. I was on Pandora listening to their pop radio station, and just like that, it was 2008 and things had never been so clear.
It’s interesting how little we know when we’re young but how everything makes so much sense. At least for me, it’s only when I get older that I realize just how much uncertainty there is. Most of what we try to do as college students and young adults is to distract ourselves from that realization and, in a sense, pretend we are 5 years old again.
My friend Brin, a suitemate of mine and fellow trivia lover, talked to me about how she “distracts” herself.
“I like to go out and smell things,” she told me. “Candles at Yankee Candle, or perfumes at Sephora.”
That’s quite a unique way to cope with daily absurdities and stressors, but in another way, it makes so much sense. What I would do to smell the “Wonderstruck” perfume by Taylor Swift that was my prized possession when I was 10, to just linger on that sweet smell as I pulled my backpack on to get ready for another day of school.
But we’re not meant to be little kids forever. Another one of my friends was telling me about how she “doesn't understand why people want to go back to being little,” following the recent TikTok trend “she lives inside me,” where users play a sad song over a video of themselves when they were prepubescent.
She said, “I will admit, the first few videos made me cry, but by the tenth or so, I was like, ‘get over it already! People grow up!’”
She’s not exactly wrong. I was a camp counselor this past summer, and when I would speak with my 4- and 5-year-old campers, all they would tell me is, “‘'m a big girl!” and, “My mommy said that I can walk home on my own now!” or, “You’re so old; you’re 19!” I would view them like little humans, and I could almost see glimpses into their futures of how their personalities could evolve and their facial features would change as they grew older.
Part of me couldn’t wait to see how they would be when they got older, but the other part wanted them to stay little forever. Because, at that moment, that’s who they are. At a point that now feels like a distant dream, I was ‘little’ too, and that’s who I was as a human being. People would tell us how small and cute we were, and we would internalize it and be ‘little.’ And then, one day, your bones start aching, and your hair starts growing longer and longer until your face slims and your pants stretch, and you realize that the magic doesn’t last forever. It’s bittersweet.
