Childhood Happiness

I often look back to my childhood to remember, to reminisce, to find a conclusion as to why or when I was happy. The happiest moments I remember were being around a campfire or riding my bike along the river, over bridges, feeling the breeze rush past me and stopping to eat blackberries. I now have the flexibility and opportunity to do those things again, but it just seems so… fatiguing. Why?

In fact, almost everything I remember as a happy moment happened outside. Even as a young twelve-year-old, I would ride around with my friends collecting shopping trolleys, that people had left lying around with £1 coins still in the trolley return device.

The most vivid memories are, however, stocking up on picnic-style food with my best pals, Daniel, Aiden and Charlie at the time, and riding around the reserve nearby, playing run-outs through fields of corn, throwing it at each other and eating blackberries straight off the bushes.

Yes, I once wrote like a complete retard, but believe it or not, this was the slang and cool way of writing back in the day.

And yes I threw my bike in the lake, which I fully understand now is a stupid, irresponsible thing to do.

I was a teenager. I was having fun. Providing a final resting place and watching my old trusty bike fall from a high bridge and create a huge splash in the lake was exhilarating.

Going home to a Sunday roast with my family; my mum, my dad, my grandad, my sisters, and occasionally my auntie and cousin was a warm ending to the day’s mishaps and shenanigans.
Even if I didn’t understand that at the time.

But times change.

My best pals became interested in girls and getting drunk, way sooner than I became interested. I wanted to joke and hang outside, causing innocent trouble forever.

Girls had never been interested in me in school, and I hadn’t really been interested in them. I only ever asked one girl out and I was unsuccessful, to say the least.

I hated school as a child. From the beginning to the end.

I remember going to work for the first time. It was shortly after that Facebook post actually, as I started working at sixteen.

I enjoyed that first job. There were less than thirty people working there, maybe even less than twenty.

However, I’m moving on into my adolescent lifetime and I should return to the point.

I enjoyed an open fire the other night. I fixed the bicycle to go for a ride. I am working with horses, yet something still isn’t quite right.

Maybe it’s because I’m still not fully managing my own time. Maybe it’s just adulting life. Perhaps I am still looking too far ahead, instead of really focusing on the current situation, or the responsibility I now understand as an adult human. I really don’t know. It could even be a change in diet again.

I’m not sure if I’m trying to run away from this missing thing, or if I’m trying to find it.

Thanks to the algorithm, I accidentally found a YouTube video the other day, which really hit home on the city vibes I was experiencing and I believe he has become another role model for me to inspire to, based on a few of his other videos.

If anyone has any thoughts, please do share in the comments!