Within adulthood, have you ever asked yourself, “Have I made my younger self proud?” I have been chewing on this for a while and I feel that it’s an important one to ask but challenging to answer. I have a strong belief that as young children we invest our time into more genuine interests rather than attempting to appease external influences. The naivety that comes with childhood welcomes space for free thinking. In adulthood, we may rule out these ideas as preposterous but maybe in the same breath, we lose sight of who we are. With this in mind, I a curious if my younger self is proud of the person I am today.
This question becomes denser as you think about it. So in an attempt to organize it, let’s define the word proud within this context and compare the experiences of childhood and adulthood. Being proud of someone or something is usually manifested during witnessing an event. We are proud of the studying we did when we receive a good grade on an exam, we are proud of a friend who received an award, and we are proud of our old truck when it surpasses 400,000 miles (My father-in-law’s actual situation). We may also gravitate towards looking at it from a career angle. Which shifts the original question into “Would my younger self be proud of the job I have?” In my perspective, this cheapens the original question and the whole picture of who you are. There are a number of aspects to be proud of a person. Their character, relationships, hobbies, accomplishments, involvement, etc. We need to keep these top of mind when evaluating our answers.
As a kid the less life experience we have the more our thoughts are abstract. We have many things to learn through childhood that when faced with a foreign concept we either had to guess or make assumptions based on what info we knew at the time. We also were likely to grasp new interests and hobbies quicker by looking at them in more of a binary way. For example: “Yep, I like trains!” or “Nope, trains are heckin’ scary.” As adults, we have an abundance of information available to us. Whether is it knowledge, intuition, or the internet; we use what resources we have to justify our thoughts and actions. This makes it very complicated when it comes to how we decide what to do with our time, who we decide to hang out with, and what careers we pursue. With an abundance of information comes influence. Influences come from our social circle, belief system, social media, etc. This may stop us from doing things that feel natural to us. With all of this in mind, we could argue that we were more likely to be our authentic selves when in childhood than we are as adults.
The difficulty of finding our answer to this question will vary from person to person. To some, it may feel like a no-brainer and some will have to think about it for a while. For me, I flip-flop between the two. Since the earliest I can remember I love creating things. I loved drawing, constructing things from cardboard, and daydreaming about different projects. Not much has changed as an adult and I, fortunately, have found a career that allows me to continue to create things. On the surface, I could say that I have made my younger self proud but once I started dissecting my thoughts they became more complex. Taking a trip down memory lane, I remember some big dreams that I had as a kid. Things like writing and illustrating a comic book, owning a motorcycle, or being able to make the best breakfast burrito in the world. As I grew older, some of those goals died and shifted into other things. I assume that shift occurred because of external influences. Having this realization allowed me to go down a rabbit hole of ideas that I never got to bring into reality as a kid. The question of “Have I made my younger self proud?”, allowed me to discover past interests and ideas that once provided me happiness and excitement. It allowed me to drown out the influences of my adulthood to think more freely. As a creative person sometimes it is hard to find the significance in my work. I question the validity and quality every step of the way. But if I am aiming to make my younger self proud, I should pursue the ideas that interest me purely because it intrigues me. There shouldn’t have to be any other justification.
Searching for your answer may allow you to find a lost part of yourself. When you are striving to make yourself proud you start to learn more about who you are. You not only see the good parts but also the bad parts. This recognition empowers us to be able to constantly evolve into the person we want to be. A person our younger self would think is awesome. We usually see our role models as people who are older than us but what better role model than a less-influenced more authentic version of ourselves? How can you make that person proud?
