your inner child vs your future hag

nostalgia is not just a comfort, it's a market.

“This video has healed my inner child.”
“I’m doing this for the seven-year-old version of me.”
“I met my younger self for coffee…”

We have a collective obsession with our past selves, or an imagined version of them. It’s what makes us so susceptible to nostalgia, or things that feel nostalgic even though they didn’t exist in our childhood: Jellycats, Labubus (which are grown-up Beanie Babies) - and that’s before we move on to the subject of Disney Adults.

I am, of course, not above it either. I’m 31 and have a flourishing collection of Amuseables, and my TV stand is home to three Sylvanian Family creatures (they’re yellow labs and their names are Ben, Barbara and Barnabita). We talk about our mothers as the fact that “they were girls once too” and fixate on imagery of deer and bunnies in a way that conveys the - not wrong - need for softness in an increasingly cruel world.

Self-infantilisation isn’t anything new, and for years, there’s been a sort of straightforward rationale for it. People can’t afford homes, you live in suspended adolescence for much longer now, and it’s not abnormal in big cities to have flatmates well into your thirties. We all know the traditional goalposts have moved, and what it means to be in your twenties or thirties now is vastly different from a few decades ago. But I’m not sure how much all that looking to the past does when it comes to your present or future.

I’m someone who has been in therapy on and off for about seven years, so I’m well aware of “inner child work” and “reparenting”, which feels different to the sort of collective retreating into youth and constant reference to our younger selves. I get that we’re all afraid to age, to grow up and - ultimately - to die. It’s presumably why Kris Jenner just got a facelift and alerted us to the fact that with enough money, we have the potential to be fuckable into our seventies.

It can be healing to return to yourself, to the hobbies you enjoyed, to the music and movies you watched, and to try and address the wounds formed when your age was in the single digits. But in constantly bouncing between the past and present until they form a feedback loop, at what point do you break it to become anything in the future? While we obsess over a version of us as kids that never really existed in the first place, what about the old person you will become, even if you continue to have the skin of a thirty-five-year-old, well past collecting your pension.

I guess part of it is that the future is unknowable. It feels pointless to bear in mind a version of you that doesn’t exist yet. The past has happened - it’s ripe for poring over. Nostalgia is comforting, sure. But it’s not just a comfort, it’s a market. It’s a way for companies to sell you adult ball pits and an array of other cursed experiences designed to tap into a younger version of you who wasn’t doing those things anyway. If marketers really wanted to tap into my childhood, they would have to recreate the experience of me being teased for having a monobrow. And when it comes to posts that ask “what would your teenage self think of you now?” as if I’m meant to swell with pride at how impressed she would be, all I can think is:

1. I don’t think I would care what someone who cried over the fact Billie Joe from Green Day is married thinks, and

2. I don’t think she would care that I bought a flat and would instead be quite stuck on the fact that our favourite person in the world - our dad - dies when we’re 30.

What does it mean to be a child? Vulnerable, yes. Unsullied largely by cynicism and malaise. The child me was going through it, but she had never filled out a self-assessment form, for example, or had to read three Hinge profiles in a row where the man really wants to go to Japan this year (guess what, everyone wants to go to Japan - it seems like an interesting country!). You also have no agency and are non-threatening. Life happens to you rather than you being an active participant in it. Dolly Alderton once wrote of how she spent her childhood frustrated at being a child, and I was much the same. I couldn’t wait to grow up - though again, I didn’t realise it would involve so much paperwork and death.

Children are also, through no fault of their own, selfish and irrational. Your brain hasn’t developed. It’s why I used to slam my head on the ground in Safeway as a kid when I didn’t get what I wanted, or why toddlers become furious when you serve them a meal they enjoyed two days prior, because now they’re disgusted by it. There’s no concept of consequence or responsibility, or of other people having their own interior lives, which is perfectly reasonable in childhood, but not desirable traits to carry into an adult with a fully developed frontal lobe.

Your future self isn’t untouched by capitalism either. Every green powder that I suspect does nothing is for a version of you that will have great skin and healthy bowel movements. Every purchase you make is, to slightly butcher that James Clear quote, casting a vote for the kind of person you could become one day with enough discipline and disposable income. But the future is ahead - there’s motion in it. There’s inevitability, too. You will never be young again, but you are going to get old if you’re lucky. This is a terrifying fact, but one that, if reckoned with, might help to take the teeth out of it a little.

We can’t romanticise the future in the way we can the past, and the markers of maturity that we might have done are likely not available to us. The house, the car, the well-paid career - though these are things we might not want anyway. But there are other forms of maturity, of personal growth and accountability and doing things that are difficult or unpleasant because they’re the right things to do. Deeply unsexy things like competency and learning to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. Traditional adulthood may not be possible or easily accessible, and being “just a girl” forever won’t work either, so it’s worth exploring the secret, third thing that surely must exist.

The middle-aged you is an unshaped stranger to you right now, and yet it’s still a connection worth forming. I don’t expect us all to suddenly be able to confront our mortality, but we could at least allow our imaginations to stretch to the idea that life has not peaked, that there is the potential for things to get better. And that maybe, when we take a break from engaging with our inner child all the time, we can more closely examine the issues plaguing our adult selves - before they sabotage our future too. There are some bleak inevitabilities ahead, but also something else you can’t experience when you spend too long looking back: potential.

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Who wrote this?

Jasmin Nahar is a writer and editor currently working in branded content for a national newspaper. Her work has been published in BuzzFeed and The Guardian among others, and she publishes weekly essays on her Substack Inner Lives. Outside of this, she is writing short stories and exploring the early stages of a project on millennial and Gen Z grief.