I Miss the Person I Was Before I Grew Up

I Miss the Person I Was Before I Grew Up

On growing up and slowly forgetting how to be yourself.

hasif 💌

Oct 20, 2026

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There are days when I miss myself in a way that is difficult to explain without sounding a little ridiculous. I miss a version of me I can barely remember properly anymore, someone who existed so long ago that I sometimes wonder whether I am remembering my childhood or simply romanticising it because being an adult has become exhausting. I think about the person I used to be, and there is this strange sadness in realising that I have spent so much time trying to become someone that I rarely stop to think about who I had to leave behind to get here.

Growing up was supposed to feel like arriving somewhere. At least, that was how I understood it when I was younger. Adulthood seemed like this distant, beautiful place where I would finally have control over my life, where I could make my own decisions, buy whatever I wanted, go wherever I pleased, and build a life that belonged entirely to me. I thought getting older would mean becoming more myself. Nobody mentioned that somewhere along the way, I might become so occupied with figuring out how to live that I would forget what it felt like to actually enjoy being alive.

I miss how easily I used to be entertained. A random afternoon could become an entire memory, and an ordinary object could occupy my imagination for hours. There was a time when happiness didn’t require planning, money, or a particularly good reason to exist. I could spend an entire day doing absolutely nothing useful and go to bed feeling as though I had experienced something wonderful. Now, even when I have free time, some part of my brain is calculating everything I could be doing instead, as if enjoying an afternoon without producing anything is a privilege I haven’t earned yet.

And I hate that. I hate how quickly rest turns into guilt, how even the things I enjoy sometimes come with an invisible expectation that I should be getting somewhere through them. Reading becomes a way to improve myself, writing becomes something I should be consistent with, and a hobby starts feeling suspiciously like another opportunity to become better at being alive. I can barely sit with an experience anymore without wondering whether I am making good use of it. Somewhere along the way, I started treating my own life like a project that needed constant supervision.

I received a submission from one of my subscribers,

Fatima Qureshi

,

who writes at

Dear Liberation

, and her piece made me sit with this feeling for a little longer. I want to share her essay here because there was something about the way she approached this subject that felt painfully familiar to me.

FATIMA’S ESSAY:

I am struggling to sleep at night over something I am beginning to grieve some 20 years later. When the world is quiet, I catch myself zoning out and into the reality creeping up on me slowly that I will be graduating to my third decade of life.

The more I think about it, the more I am gladdened by the incoming death of my 20s and saddened by the greater distance between who I am and who I was as a child. The latter takes precedence – as if a hole seems to be enlarging inside me, as if I am spectating a loved one die before me and I can’t do anything about it.

When I was on my way back home from a barre class the other day, I noticed a child lagging behind their parent, but whose attention was already trapped by TikTok. The child chose to take a detour towards a rainbow-colored bench. Little fingers softly traced the chalky hard surface. They laid their belly flat on it imagining that combined, they are a plane. Then, they became a dragon that shoots starry dust onto anyone who looks sad. Then, the earth erupted, I think. They pretended to take cover under the bench, closed their eyes and I kid you not, looked

genuinely

asleep for 2 whole minutes.

I got into a car bound for home and through the tinted window, I saw the parent waving aggressively at their child. Perhaps, reprimanding them for choosing to go a separate way, despite the parent’s own chronic absence of care. I will never know. What I cannot shake off is the child’s reaction: there was

none

. The child looked dazed, fixated at the sight of a trio of pigeons eating garbage on the street instead. There was no fear of judgment. There was only playful curiosity, and I miss that part of me dearly.

Adulthood has boiled down to one thing: recycle my wildest dreams in exchange for societal templates that promise happiness in the name of fortune. Dreams are defined by how secure I am, financially, not the joy I need to laugh and breathe. Freedom is folded into a bill I pay every 30 days to stay alive at the risk of killing my body. Peace is gained by breaking the nervous system in order to fulfill my dreams.

The cycle continues.

I read somewhere that overthinking is underfeeling. This has latched on to me so profoundly that my inner reflex halts my thoughts when they begin to mutate into speculation of what could be. In the world we live in, feeling is captured by external mediums of expression. The internal, slowly ceasing to exist. I know for a fact that for the longest time, my understanding of worth rested on external validation. That is the voice of judgment that dominant systems depend on – and we let it overcome us so easily.

Crawling underneath that voice is a yearning to never take myself seriously again, drop labels that compartmentalize who I am and how I present myself to the world. A yearning to experience life through the lens of play and deepen my aliveness in every present moment.

I cannot help but wonder what that child dreamt about in their power nap, and whether they, too, will one day find themselves grieving the loss of childlike levity like I am nowadays.

Reading Fatima’s piece made me think about how growing up slowly teaches us to abandon things we once loved without ever making us feel as though we are losing anything. We give up an afternoon of doing nothing because there is work to finish, stop pursuing things that serve no practical purpose, and learn to dismiss our own desires whenever they seem inconvenient. Each decision feels reasonable on its own, which is probably why we rarely question what they are doing to us. Until one day, we realise we have become people who need a reason to enjoy ourselves, an excuse to rest, and a plan for almost everything that once came naturally.

I keep wondering when we started needing permission to enjoy things. As children, we could be fascinated by something without having to defend our fascination, and we could spend time doing something pointless without feeling compelled to explain its value. Somewhere between growing up and trying to become somebody, we learned to look at ourselves from the outside. We started imagining how our choices appeared to other people, whether our lives looked impressive enough, whether we were falling behind, and whether the things that made us happy were worth the time they consumed. It is exhausting to live with an imaginary audience in your head, especially when you eventually realise that most of those people are too busy worrying about their own lives to notice yours.

I wish I could say I have figured out how to stop doing this, although that would be a lie. I still catch myself measuring my progress against invisible timelines, feeling uneasy when somebody else seems to have reached a place I am still trying to find, and wondering whether I am doing enough with the years I have. There is always another thing to achieve, another problem to solve, another version of myself waiting on the other side of some imagined finish line. I keep thinking that once I get there, I will finally relax, as though peace is something I can collect after completing all the tasks required to deserve it.

The uncomfortable part is that I don’t even know what getting there means anymore. I used to have such a clear picture of the person I wanted to become, and now I wonder how much of that picture came from my own desires and how much I absorbed from watching everyone else grow up around me. I wanted independence, security, and a life I could call mine, and I still want those things. I simply wish I hadn’t come to associate them with the idea that every hour must be accounted for and every decision must contribute to some larger plan. There has to be a way to take life seriously without treating every ordinary moment as something that needs to justify its existence.

Sometimes I think growing up has made me a little afraid of being happy without knowing how long the happiness will last. I find myself wanting to preserve good moments even while I am experiencing them, already aware that they will eventually become memories. It feels absurd to be nostalgic for something while it is still happening, yet I have caught myself doing exactly that, looking at an ordinary day and feeling a strange ache because I know I will miss it someday. I wonder whether this is simply part of getting older, learning that everything is temporary, or whether I have become so preoccupied with the passage of time that I have forgotten how to live inside it.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to recover my childhood, either. That version of me had their own fears, their own disappointments, and very little understanding of the world they were eventually going to inhabit. There are things I know now that I would never willingly give up, and there is a certain comfort in having grown into someone who can make decisions for himself. I am grateful for the distance I have travelled, even on days when I feel overwhelmed by everything waiting ahead. I just wish growing into myself hadn’t sometimes felt so much like growing away from myself.

Perhaps what I miss most is the ease with which I once occupied my own life. I want to be able to do something simply because I enjoy it, to let an afternoon disappear without interrogating myself about its usefulness, and to feel curious about the world without turning every new discovery into an opportunity for self-improvement. I want to remember that there is more to being alive than building a life that looks good from the outside, and that I am allowed to experience my days without constantly evaluating the person experiencing them.

I don’t know whether we ever completely lose the people we were as children, or whether those versions of us simply become harder to hear beneath everything adulthood asks us to carry. I hope there is still a part of me that can find an entire universe in something ordinary, that can laugh without immediately wondering how ridiculous it looks, and that can enjoy being here without needing to know where all of this is going. I miss the person I was before I grew up, and I think a part of growing up might be learning how to make room for that person again, even when the rest of life insists there are more important things to do.

Co-Author Substack ID:

Fatima Qureshi

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