Opening your eyes and realizing that there is no innocence left, isn’t there something so innocent about that? There is a day in your early 20s, you know the one, where the world feels a bit duller. The color saturation faded but you don’t know what buttons you clicked to prompt it. The volume got turned up and the earbuds are stuck in your ears. What happened? They asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up and didn’t wait for the answer.

What did you dress up as for career day when you were a kid? What was the untouched hope for the use of your gift? I adorned my mom’s vintage fuschia lace prom dress with whatever play jewelry I could manage to scrape out of the bottom of my dress-up chest and snapped an attitude at anyone who asked me what I wanted to be. It couldn’t be more obvious that I want to be a princess, duh. We were forced to consider how we wanted to spend our days before we were sure what the concept of a day is. I often ponder the desire to go back to that time. Do I miss the vulnerability of wonderment or the social acceptance of dreaming? Would I go back if I had the chance? I know I wouldn’t want to go back with the knowledge that I had now, if it’s even possible to unsee adulthood. Seeing plastic heels and glitter hairspray behind my eyelids with every blink of my adult life wondering if thinking will ever feel as free as it once did.

Where is the fun in getting dressed nowadays? Runway after runway, yet all we step on is the sidewalk. Every breakfast tastes the same and meetings throw around the same words. First grade grammar class seemed more stimulating. It felt new back then, exciting and fresh. Nothing was the same. The world was ours to experience for the first time and the realities of the world was still a deep, dark secret every adult agrees to keep without a pinky swear to seal it. Is reality a thing or a container for compliance? Walking with your feet on the ground and your head just a few feet above that is encouraged. From there you can’t see the rest of the world. When your head is in the clouds, that’s when you can see everything. When you know that there is enough space for everyone to exist in their full expression. Who organized this organized belief? Who drew the lines you have to color within? Who replaced the crayons with a ballpoint pen?

Moving through the world becomes grey when no one is one the lookout to balance the saturation. No one told us we have to keep our eyes on the colors. Keep your eyes on the color, but don’t do anything to hold onto it. Childish becomes an insult and somewhere along the line we were taught to believe it cuts deep when used. Two worlds begin to overlap in every single second. The freedom of before and the entrenchment of after. No graduation cap, no job offer, no apartment keys. Just a blink that collapses one way of thinking so powerfully it can build an entire other universe. But, don’t mourn the first as that takes away from your productivity. Stuck in efficiency and shocked I used to believe that what I know now as entrenchment was enchanted. I yearned for the day that I could sit at my grey desk in my grey pantsuit talking to my grey boss about grey numbers that enhanced someone else’s ability to see the world in brighter color. I fell for it and saw a fuchsia lace dress waiting at the bottom. Thrown without care, the girl is lost and afraid, she needs someone to pull her out. Her dress is ripped and stained, and I’m judging myself for thinking it looks better that way. I’m only in my 20s, I’m not qualified to be a teen mom. I want to help her, but how does someone lost, find another?

We exist in a world exchanged by hate and abundant with love. Combat the extremities with an act of defiance so pure it ripples into tsunamis against the rigidity of normativity: childishness. Drawing outside of the lines only enforces the need to stay in the lines, so scribble everywhere. Mismatching your clothing shows who you are in a world that rewards complacency and conformity, so invent new patterns to clash. Dance in the rain, laugh too loud, wear the princess dress and costume jewelry just because you want to. Hold on to the parts of you that see the world in saturated color. They are the parts that guarantee success. The kind of success that makes your heart flutter outside the lines.