wanting to relive childhood, fear of getting older.

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I'd say yes because I consider adulthood a waste of time. Too much sex and partying/drinking/drugs and not enough having clean, innocent fun. Plus, I do fear getting older as in all likelihood I will die completely alone, never having known what it is like to be loved and have a family of my own.

I feel very afraid of the future and the unknown. If I could I would pause time right here and just live like this forever. I'm very afraid of having to move forward, watching others move forward ahead of me (which they are already doing), being expected to move forward, ending up completely alone and losing the people I depend upon. I also just don't ever want to do all the things adults should do.

I don't want to go back to being under someone else's rules. Freedom is the best thing about being grown-up.

Just because I am a certain age doesn't mean my behavior has to change. If someone has expectations for me to act a certain way, that's their problem. Not mine.

I want to go back to being a small child, and I have for a long time. It was so much safer and I was so much happier.

+1

plus you couldn't PAY ME to go back there. I am 45 and I can basically buy my own toys now

Except for the thing about a parent dying, this absolutely describes myself.

I guess for me the same thing was true about drugs and alcohol, although I was never curious about them as a teenager in more than a theoretical way (still even now, I'm more interested in most drugs as a window into brain function, than as something spiritual or for partying or whatever). Though I don't regret at all not having experimented as a teenager. Like most activities, they are really the same experience no matter when you do them--your first beer or joint will still be the same first-time experience whenever you have it, and in fact it's nice to be able to get a buzz from less alcohol than peers who have been drinking a lot for many years.

What I really regret is missing the social stuff--dating, even friendships. Those require two people, and people aren't standardized things sitting in a pill or bottle waiting for you. They age and develop. What I really want is to be able to have an "adolescent type" of relationship with a girlfriend--but it's getting harder and harder to find girls with the same level of curiosity and "newness" about dating that I have. Beyond that, it's just hard in general to find girls to date who have as active a fantasy life as I do--and most who do, have "graduated" to seeking adult-like men who can take care of them. It really saddens me how hard it is to find partners for childlike relationships and even friendships (or at least those who want friendships I tend to get hopeless crushes on, or are below my level of mental development in other areas).

So this is the main way in which I have definite "unfinished business" from childhood.

I think I fully understand your thoughts. I've been living in a relationship whith a girl who had some issues herself with her phychology. She appeard quite girly to me despite she is one year older than me. I must admit I felt like a teenager during this love (at age 36), as initially she seemed able to tolerate many of my quirks and my weirdness.

So, whitout wanting to turn you down, I suggest you should be cautious about "childlike" relationships. They can be rather fulfilling but eventually prove worthless and cause a lot of pain.

Last edited by OJani on 22 Jul 2012, 5:21 am, edited 1 time in total.

My wife says I have an unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter. I think I secretly wish I was a child again and reliving life in a boarding school.

There was a sense of beauty, innocence and wonder we had as children that is basically drained as we become adults. I would definitively trade in drinking wine and having sex to relive the wonder of discovery being a child.

I didn't have a proper childhood, or a nice one, but I'm still in denial and still feel like I should be a child. I don't want to get older and I want to die by the age of 40 or maximum 50 because I just don't want to be a middle aged or old lady, it would not fit me.

I can't see myself maturing with age. I think I will always be stuck quite young.

If I'm almost 22 now and still feel like I should be 12, then I doubt it will change.

I'm not concerned about dying, really. Sometimes I feel like I'm just awaiting death, but I definitely wish I was still a kid; just not because I don't want to die. I wish I was still a kid because I still feel like a kid in a lot of ways, and as I get older, it becomes more and more difficult to relate to people and just have casual conversations because I have NO clue wtf they're talking about. I don't really watch TV at all. I watch a few tv shows, but I download them or watch them on netflix. And I avoid ads like the plague, so I pretty much live under a rock. I don't know what the hell goes on around me. Then I go to work, and someone asks me if I've seen some movie I never even heard of, and then they sometimes act like I just told them I stick hedgehogs up my ass or some other ridiculous thing... just because I haven't heard of some dumb movie.

Now this would be fine, as I could just not talk to people, except I can't just completely ignore them, and they always try to talk to me. Like, even when I'm depressed or pissed, I can't ever seem to be able to just keep to myself at work. I feel like when I was a kid, it wasn't so odd to people if I kept to myself, cuz I was just some shy kid to them. Now they think there's something wrong with me, and it just leads to more awkwardness the older I get.

I don't want to literally relive my childhood though. I hated growing up in my house... But it would be nice to have a body to match how I feel. And this is something I noticed a LOOONG time ago. I'm not sure exactly when it started, but I've never really felt like I was "ready" for the next "step" in life. Like, when I went to middle school, I remember feeling anxious about it because I didn't feel old enough. As far as school goes, I always just blasted thru it anyway, but every year at my birthday I always find myself thinking I don't feel as old as I know I am.

I would never go back in the past. Not even one year. I felt confined growing up, like I couldn't be or do what I wanted to. Not because I didn't have the balls but because people want you to conform as a child. I love being free as an adult, and I love the journey I've taken. It feels like I've lived a long time because of how much I have changed over the years. I'm a completely different person than I was back in high school/middle school. Sometimes I hear people talking about how they want to go back to those days but I don't. I want to get old and I want to die, it's only natural. But before I die I want to accomplish all of my dreams: travel the world and treat people for diseases, climb mountains, take trips on remote rivers, go ice fishing... maybe not that lol. Most people are so f*****g boring and content with just making money their entire lives. f**k MONEY... okay I went on a tangent as usual.

See, I have held onto this sense, and will do almost anything not to lose it. The problem is finding others, particularly women, who likewise have held onto it.

The career world demands a greater sense of realism and pragmatism than my mind leans toward naturally, even in areas like science where discovery is the goal of the whole thing. Therefore, in order for me to make it as an independent adult, this sense of beauty and discovery has to be sought in my hobby and social life. In fact, the girls I develop crushes on nowadays ALL have this sense of wonder about them, at least they seem to.

For me it's not a problem, because my sexuality IS innocent and based on curiosity--one of my biggest problems with contemporary Western society is the dichotomy between these two. However, finding others who feel the same way is the problem.

I recall an episode of Monk that involved Monk undergoing hypnosis. The process caused Monk to become like a six or seven year old child -- an happy, typical seven year old. As I watched the episode, I recall thinking that there's no way Monk was actually like that as a child. I knew that Monk had always been unusual, and his family had been plenty dysfunctional. I looked at Monk in this childliike persona he had adopted and thought about how that couldn't be right.
Sure enough, when Monk's therapist was called, and came to see what was happening with Monk, he said that Monk wasn't reliving his own childhood, but the childhood he wished he could have had.
I'd love to turn back the clock and be a child again, but not if I had to relive my own childhood. While there were some good moments scattered through those years, on balance, my childhood was far from happy. I'd want to go back on the condition that I could choose the sort of childhood I wanted to have, if everything could be different, if everything could be significantly better the second time around.
If I couldn't go back to childhood and do it all again, I wish I could at least go back ten years and just stay there. I think about the chronological age I am now, and it just seems so grown up, so old. It scares me to see how I seem to be stuck at some earlier stage of development, and can't for the life of me figure out how to move forward. The years just seem to be slipping away from me, and I feel like I'm getting left behind by everything and everyone. Death doesn't scare me, but the idea of continuing to age while making no progress in my life is truly terrifying. Women in my family tend to live into their eighties or nineties. If that's my genetic destiny, that's a lot of years to spend stuck in one place while everything that matters to me gradually falls away. Like I said, though, I can't seem to figure out how to move forward. I believe I did at some point possess some small measure of ability to take the sort of steps that made life progress possible. I feel like that has all been used up now, and I've been stuck for a long time. Meanwhile, even as I remain (figuratively) paralyzed, life continues to happen in the world around me, dragging me away from places I love without warning, and into places I don't want to be but can't figure out to escape, and I just keep on getting older. It's truly a nightmare, and it terrifies me.
I really do wish I could find some way to backtrack some years, then stop time.

When I was an older child, I came home from school to find all my toys were gone. My mother donated them to the local thrift store (on the grounds that I was getting "too old" for toys - I was 13). I'm still in the process of acquiring all the Mighty Max toys I had...

Oh, the countless hours spent creating adventures for Max and his sidekicks (somehow, Virgil always dies and becomes resurrected as an evil Virgil... Poor, poor Virgie).