This challenge brought a smile to my face. I didn’t have a lot of pictures as a kid but pure, happy times tend to stick around longer. Remember the movie Inside Out?
Memories from Childhood
I enjoyed drawing / designing dresses for a time and bringing paper dolls wherever I went instead of plushies or the bigger ones. Receiving crayons or jars of paint and sorting them out were more preferable to expensive toys I’d receive as gifts.
One of my aunties would bring me to work a lot and she was in concert production for years. This exposed me to music of all kinds, genres and decades. I’ d use money I saved from my allowance or weekend ‘work’ to buy cassette tapes back then (Thank God for Spotify nowadays).
I remember writing a horror/suspense story after reading my first few horror novels (not exactly by choice, just my brother’s books lying around). This started a pile of notebooks from a few years of journaling.
I realized a lot of the stuff I enjoyed like reading comics, assembling toy robots and wrestling were more because I spent time enjoying them with my brother or friends more than anything else.
Working on the weekends was also a lot of fun as this helped me earn some coins for my piggy bank.
Back in University, languages (Spanish and Japanese) put me right or at least took away the stress from STEM coursework or extra-curriculars.


Someone said it is never too late to have a happy childhood. I luckily have some memories of a happy childhood, albeit a short one. Pre-covid, exploring/ slow traveling (as part of self-discovery, growth/soul work, looking outward) and self-education healed me from some painful or hurtful experiences in adulthood and some part of childhood. These efforts paid off and helped me rediscover or restore my joy. Nowadays writing, reading and cooking brings me joy, or at least calms me down. Not everything can be right all the time but looking inward and working on my self help me cope with challenging times and whatever chaos there is around me.




Written for Cee’s On the Hunt for Joy Challenge