I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss being five years old. Who doesn't? Although I had zero freedom and couldn't choose my own outfits, life was simple and predictable. I woke up and went to school then I came home and played outside. Hunting for snails under rocks and playing baseball with tree branches as bats was the highlight of my day and continues to be a mainstay in my running list of favorite childhood memories.
But of all of the things that I miss about being really young, I only recently realized that the sheer confidence in myself that I had at five years old is something I've been trying to recapture ever since.
Running around with dirt on my face and bleeding splinters in my palms from my makeshift baseball bats must've been a less-than-seemly sight for every adult in my neighborhood but I was absolutely thrilled. At that moment, I wasn't thinking about what I looked like or the opinion other people had about my shenanigans. I was wondering which of my friends was free to come outside and about what my mom was going to cook for dinner. I was thinking about how much I enjoyed the kindness of my kindergarten teacher and how proud I was that I was one of the best in my class at sight words.
Confidence is a funny thing. It seems that the more life I live, the more experience I gain, the more knowledge I learn, the less confidence I have. As the old adage goes, "you don't know what you don't know." Every day, I discover more and more that I don't know and I've become slightly obsessed with closing those gaps as they appear. It's turned into a race that I will never be able to keep up with.
Five-year-old me was blissfully unaware of these gaps in knowledge. I knew that my parents were way smarter than me but I had no conceptualization of just how much it took them to get there. I thought that one day I would just wake up and know how to drive a car (the most amazing adult thing to me at the time). I was so confident that life would work out with no effort. I was unstoppable.
Becoming more self-aware as I get older has enormous benefits, though. Knowing where I fall short means I often acknowledge that I need help in becoming the person that I want to be. Instead of thinking that I can figure everything out if I just have the chance to try it, I'm much more open to getting advice and collaboration. I met great friends my freshman year of college just from admitting that I was completely and utterly clueless in chemistry. That incompetence became something that we bonded over and helped each other grow in.
Five-year-old me wasn't insecure about running around with splintered palms. 19-year-old me knows that the splinters have to come out and that I can't remove them by myself.
