I was cleaning my room when I dragged a dust-covered box out from under my bed. As I brushed off the dust of years, I recalled what the box resembled: a vault protecting all my miscellaneous childhood memories that were spread across copious glossy sheets.

As I peeled back the top of the box and began looking through the photographs, I found myself mentally transporting back in time. All of the most innocent, pure years of my life were locked up in this box, along with all of my limitless childhood dreams.

That’s when I painfully felt the ache to go back to the days when my mind was entirely open to any possibility and the days when my mind believed I could do anything in the world I possibly wanted to.

My dreams were so much bigger then, and my thoughts weren’t spoiled by the expiration date of reality. This is what I ache for, what I miss most about being a kid. I had the power to dream a whole new universe for myself, but now I barely even take a second to recall a single dream I aspire to achieve.

When do we lose sight of our dreams? When do we shift from believing we are capable of doing anything in the infinite world to barely believing we can achieve anything at all?

I think the loss of a dream happens as we start to learn about the world, as we start to experience what “real life” really is.

As a kid, we see life as this magnificent future ahead of us. We look up at our older siblings and admire every move they make. As children, we only see the good in everything because we don’t fully understand the bad. Therefore, our wide-eyes stare at the world with imagination and hope, and our minds don’t set limits on what we can accomplish.

Yet, one day we get older, and we eventually comprehend this real world we live in. We are exposed to the beauty, yet overwhelmed with the ugly. We no longer dream of things beyond what we believe is reality, and our unbounded childhood dreams are cut off by real life.

That’s what brings me back to what I felt as I gazed through the pictures that held photos of me, yet it was the me that had the power to dream big, endlessly big. It’s inevitable that one day we all let go of some dreams, but it’s a whole different story when it comes to the crime of reality robbing those innocent dreams from our minds.

I made so many big plans for myself. I wasn’t telling myself what I could and couldn’t accomplish. I was simply full of enough confidence to believe I could do anything I wanted to. I was hopeful and excited for the future, and I was always full of ambition. Yet, I now sit here with basically no complete dreams and a lack of the ambition I used to be so full of.

As I continued to look through the pictures, I found myself envying the childhood I once had. I envy the little mind that used to be full of such big dreams yet was in such a rush to grow up, only to realize the purest days of my life were the ones I tried quickly to grow out of.

I realized while on my journey through my younger days that I miss my dreams. Actually, I miss the capability of dreaming with an open mind. My mind is shut to more than half of the possibilities in the world now because I grew up, and honestly, I went from being this ambitious, one-of-a-kind kid to this person who mostly just follows what is “normal.” My dreams made me this special kid, and I feel like I lost that kid when I let go of my dreams.

I wish to be that little girl again, the one with the crazy head of hair who had big, big plans to take on the world. I wish my mind could endlessly be open to what I let myself believe I can accomplish, and I wish I wouldn’t cut myself short and throw away dreams that one day I could create in reality. I wish that I didn’t let growing up take away the ambitious little girl that believed she could do anything her full heart dreamed to do.

For now, all I have left of that little girl is locked up in that dusty box, that vault full of photographs. Whispers of my dreams swarm around the air in the box, and every once in a while, one floats past my ear and reminds me of all I believed I could do.

Yet, I’m finally starting to take time to think of my dreams. My dream now is to dream like a kid, to believe I can do absolutely anything in this chaotic, beautiful, and great big world.