If you have one, how do you nuture your inner child?
I have recently bought myself an adult colouring book ( no, it isn't x- rated).
I have also started collecting fashion dolls - after a break of about 45 years.
I also collect copies of children's books illustrated my favourite illustrator (Libico Maraja) and also different editions of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (published in the 1970s or earlier).
Adult coloring books made a comeback years ago, and I have quite a few, along with DoodleArt kits I never finished - or even started, in some cases - from many years ago.
I have a lot of Barbies, but that's because most of them belonged to my grandmother. She caught the collecting fever when she got interested after people gave me dolls for birthdays and Christmas. It started with sewing clothes, and branched out from there. I've been trying to downsize because unlike her, I've got my favorites but no real desire to collect them anymore. The last Barbies I bought were Star Trek Barbie & Ken, and they're not coming out of their packaging.
I have gotten into historical paper dolls, though. I would guess that the popularity of the TV series
Downton Abbey is partly responsible for these making a comeback.
I still have the first books I ever owned, and the first one I ever learned to read:
Buddy Bear's Lost Growl.
Other things... some people may look around my home and conclude that my mental age is about 10, since they'd see many stuffed animals. However, I got into penguins in high school (after doing a research project for one of my biology classes), and the green and purple bears are characters in the
Fuzzy Knights webcomic - I was able to track down the same kind of animals the FK creator uses. No luck on the other two main characters (a very specific edition of Benjamin Bunny and a tuxedo cat that I can't begin to track down as I've no idea which company made it).
But I don't think it's childish to keep up an interest in things we loved as children, unless those things are detrimental to our or someone else's well-being. I've still got (and still re-read) my
Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators books, and belong to a Yahoo! group with other people who still enjoy them.
J. Allen said:
I watch a TV show about pastel colored ponies who value the magic of friendship.
I also write short stories about those ponies.
I watch cartoons.
I color in my coloring books.
I sometimes take my little plastic ships and pretend to engage in combat with them.
I wear shoes that have multicolored laces so I can walk on sunshine every day.
I daydream.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of this. Go for it, and don't let anyone tell you to "grow up". You have an imagination, and that's something far too many people lose as they get older.
Back in the '80s I once waited at a bus stop in town, after having purchased a gaming book called
Dicing With Dragons (by one of the people who created the
Fighting Fantasy gamebook series). I opened the book and started to read it, and a girl who was maybe about 11 or 12 years old took one look at it and informed me in a critical tone of voice, "There's no such thing as dragons."
I told her that yes, there was - in peoples' imaginations. She didn't get it, and I was left wondering how a kid her age could already have lost the concept of imagination and fantasy. There's nothing wrong with it as long as we know that it
is fantasy.