The Dwight Times

Children play with toys.

Dolls, trucks, figurines, plushies. Children walk them through an imaginary world on their bedroom floors. They speak and move on the toys’ behalf, bringing to life inanimate objects by filling them to the brim with personality and intrigue.

I knew this from a young age. I saw it in Toy Story, in Youtube videos my friends showed me, and in my classmates during recess. They’d sit their dolls on cars and roll them away to a shoebox house or workplace, where they were greeted by family, friends, or enemies. 

I never was interested in playing with toys. I collected figurines from Monster High, yes. But they were meant to sit on shelves; the missing arms on Abby prove that.

I never understood playing with toys. Why go through the trouble of shouting your stories aloud? Why bother with walking these objects around the room, or guiding their conversations alone?

My mind was my playground. I could sit and imagine the wildest stories and scenarios with any character I wanted; I never depended on material items to represent what I needed. Ariel would realize she didn’t need a man to be happy and would instead find a way to befriend the sea witch. Percy would show up at my door and whisk me away to Camp for the summer. Anything was possible in my mind.

But children play with toys. And I was a child. 

So I took my dolls off the shelf and walked them across the table as if down a school hallway — I did, however, have the dignity to hold their conversations silently in my head. My LEGO Hogwarts train gave rides to Spider-Man, and my stuffed Stitch was the pet of a Barbie. 

This is ridiculous, I would think, but nevertheless I would continue to manipulate the lives of my toys. Because that’s what children do.

Maybe it’s that children have so little power over their own lives that they turn to the lives of their toys. Parents dictate meals and nap times and chores, even if they try to hide it; teachers direct tasks and schedules; friends influence personality and interests. Instead, we perpetuate parental patterns with our playthings — though of course we lacked maturity to make the wise yet irritating decisions our own caregivers did — in an attempt to take back control. We become the toys’ parents, and the toys become versions of us that we might want to be — we are seeds dreaming of birds.  We envision our future on the bedroom floor in preparation for who we might someday be. I’ll be in high school. I’ll travel all on my own. I’ll have my own dog!

In truth, we always look to prepare ourselves for the next step. Preparation becomes a skill: a virtue. We are taught from a young age how to prepare for the simplest of excursions: brush your teeth, put on your nice clothes, tie your shoelaces. Over time, it becomes habit, until we hardly think about having to prepare for anything we do.

The problem comes when childish innocence — or naivete — is lost, and adolescents become obsessive about preparation. I have known girls who continuously adjust their hair until every lock falls into place fashionably messy and boys who stop at every mirror to straighten the shirt collar that keeps curling up. Since the time my classmates started wearing makeup on a regular basis, I wondered why they bothered; it seemed ludicrous to me that one should spend the time seated before a mirror every morning to change their appearance if every night they would scrub their faces clean with rough cotton to return to their bare selves.

Conversely, I took pride in not following suit. I would take the least amount of effort possible in my appearance; I resisted ironing out my shirt’s creases, or brushing down that stubborn cowlick on the back of my head, or checking that the white insides of my pockets were hidden from view. In hindsight, I think I considered it my own reassurance as much as I did my rebellion: I could look better if I chose to. I would rather not try when it came to my appearance, but focus my energy in places that I thought more important anyway, such as my passion projects and schoolwork.

In fact, I will never forget what a friend of mine said to me once: ‘they say that makeup is to make you more confident in how you look, but what it really does is make you less confident in your real face.’ That sentiment stayed with me, and it reinforced my desire to look as wholly myself as I could. 

Looking back, I realize that makeup is more than just confidence in appearance; it’s confidence in your entire being. Putting it on is a ritual to put you in control of how you look and how you’re perceived. It’s a way to make yourself resemble someone who you believe knows what they’re doing so that you feel a little more secure in yourself. Every drop of creamy bronze and poof of pinkish powder that touches your cheek is your sword and shield. You work inward from the outside. But my old friend’s statement still rings true for the wider world: if you only feel secure in yourself when you’re completely prepared for what’s ahead, how will you cross the thresholds you don’t get to choose?

The other day, I could not get out of my room. I lay half-asleep in bed for hours before I started rising halfway and lying back down when the weight in my arms became too great, fighting with myself to get up and get things done. My heart was a hollow drum. I finally managed to stumble to my feet across the tar floor, but it took me three tries standing with my hand on the cool, swooping door handle and my forehead on the scratchy wallpaper, waiting for something to move me, before I could turn the little lever of the gray door and step out. 

Getting up every morning is an accomplishment. It’s a threshold to cross that starts the beginning of your life anew each day. That morning, I was not ready to face the rest of the day, or my life; every step was made by sandbags and sticks.  So I resisted crossing it. 

However, like most gateways in life, I had to pass through eventually. 

Infants do not consciously choose when to begin crawling or talking or walking. Toddlers must begin preschool even kicking and screaming, children must learn to dress themselves, and adolescents must begin to solve their own problems, until the baby has passed through every gateway of childhood and is no longer a child. Every single adult has done this. And yet not a single one got to choose when they passed each milestone; they simply did.

But how long did they spend preparing, or learning how to prepare, for each checkpoint? How many hours, days, years did they spend studying the functional adult to replicate its façade? 

There is a reason that so many adults say they feel like a child pretending to be grown up. And no amount of preparation can change that.

No number of imagined futures on the bedroom floor or varying visages in the mirror can prepare you for adulthood. Not when you don’t get to say whether you’re ready or not. Here life comes.

So I decided not to let myself be shoved through every doorway. If nothing will ever make me feel ready, why should I spend my life preparing? There’s a reason I didn’t want to play with toys, that I didn’t want to wear makeup: I knew I didn’t need to. 

No matter how long I wait, I will never be ready. I might as well take a deep breath and open the door.