They said I changed a lot, I said a lot changed me

As Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go home again. Never try. Change is inevitable. Change is good. You are always changing, moving down the highway of life; just grab the steering wheel and pick your turns wisely. One of the turns ahead will take you down a road toward a you that has many of the characteristics you had when you were little. If that’s really what you want, take that road. It’s not magic. It’s not rocket science. It’s just planning your trip.However, if it’s simple innocence you pine for, forget it. The only way you can unlearn what you now know is through a lobotomy or the chemical equivalent. Meditation can make you think more simply, but it can’t take away your experiences. Process them and move on.

I think as with most people you are dealing with selection bias. You look back at childhood and think things such as the following: I didn’t care enough what people thought. I knew how to just have fun and enjoy myself being more carefree. I was more romantic and ideological, and less pragmatic. These are all things that were great when you were young and had your parents to pay bills and be stressed and you could make friends by walking up to someone and saying “We are friends now” and that worked. The bias is that you didn’t see the people around you dealing with all the rigmarole that being an adult comes with. Others dealt with that so that you could afford to have the attitudes and perception that you had.

But being an adult is hard. Life is hard. You have to work at maintaining relationships, growing, and cultivating them. You have to pay bills. you have to have housing. You have to have stress in your life in order to be a successful adult, which means the carefree days of youth are never coming back. Even love as a child comes easily, as an adult love is hard. Well, maybe not the love but the relationship, that is overshadowed by love, is hard. And that hardship changes people. You can try to go back to who you were, but I can virtually guarantee you that you will hate it more than your current self because you will have ruined the memory of how great it used to be, to be that way.

here's a saying that people use when they want to change something about yourself. “"Fake it til you make it”. So, let's say you want to be friendlier, you just start doing it. It feels weird and awkward at first, but after awhile, it becomes second nature. If I tell you, are you going to do it? Put the phone down after you read this. Get off the couch and start moving your feet. Take a sheet of paper and write down top 3 things you want to have in your life. Better yet, take a cork board and pin the images of your top dreams. Every morning ask yourself what are you going to do today to get closer to your dreams. Every evening, ask yourself if you've done what you promised yourself. That's it. If you do the above, your life will change.

I went through something similar when my medical conditions pulled my life up to a slow crawl and I became bedridden bitter and just could not find any joy. My chief complaint was how the old me was gone, bringing a crap load of restrictions on my actions and activities. It created a bigger hole in my life with people avoiding me in general, it stank. At some point, I decided to embrace the old me while letting go of what I did not like. It was not easy though the journey did bring me back to my happy natural state.

This included living outloud and challenging myself to seek a lighter state of being. I had to let go of what if’s, how comes, personalizing negative energy, accepting my strengths while acknowledging my weaknesses, and stopping negative thoughts (why me, what’s the purpose, it happened once it will happen again, etc…) and ignore the peanut gallery (anyone/thing that contradicted my change) because this was my path. By nature, I am an optimist, happy-go-lucky with a shit happens attitude so now I am back. Try reading some of my posts on social media, you may find something that can help you on your journey. Good Luck, it’s worth the effort. The key to any change is action. Cheers!