Lessons From a Fairy Child

I am lucky to say that my childhood was a nearly magical time in my life. When I think back on what it was like to grow up, in the early years at least, I literally see sparkles and hear that magical sound that plays in movies like Tinker Bell. The funny part is that my younger self was most certainly not sparkly. I was the little girl that refused to take off her dresses made from costume tulle, ate bugs off the sidewalk, and played with the worms submerged in rain puddles. I was a dirt-covered-sunburnt-redhead with an endless imagination and a fascination with everything living in my front yard. 

Little me, around ages 5-6

I think it's all because of my upbringing in the flowerbeds that I am the way I am—with a love of all things colorful and alive. Now that I’m 18 (hardly finished with my childhood), I see reflections of my younger self within me all the time. I might not spend quite as much time out in the garden as I once did, but I still find myself basking in the sun after the cold, early spring. I still collect and press the flowers that fall from the tree in our yard. I still like to smell all the fresh blossoms, testing myself to see how many scents I remember from years before. 

While I’ve always shown some signs of anxiety, they were never quite as all-consuming as they became in my teen years. I sometimes struggle to communicate how I feel, with all the thoughts swirling around my head, drowning me under 18 years of paranoia. I’ve been going to therapy for over a year now, and (thank goodness) I’m medicated as well. After everything I’ve learned and grown from in my mental health struggles, it still seems to me that nothing quite pulls me from the depths of my worries like warm weather and a moment beneath the sun.  

One of my go-to methods of distraction throughout my childhood was imagining worlds of magic and fairies and everything I wished I could be. My best friend and I had “our own” fairies, which we drew, wrote about, and played pretend with nearly every day of our early elementary school years. Mine was called Isabelle—a whirlpool fairy, as I classified her, probably taking inspiration from the Tinker Bell character, Silvermist. She acted as my own imaginary companion, taking my mind on adventures through magical forests, floral gardens, and various seashell-themed villages. I wished so badly that I could be a part of their world and be one of the flowers I loved to smell. It was partly this yearning to escape my innate humanity and be a person of the soil that I think contributed to my memories of childhood being so colorful and warm.

I imagined myself as a fairy so hard that it's sort of how I remember myself.

One of my fondest fairy memories stems from the lovely neighborhood in which I was seeded. A wonderfully eccentric neighbor, a woman of wrap dresses and wind chimes and

Little me, buttercup in hand

short wispy hair, hosted annual summertime fairy parties, inviting all the kids on the block to eat sweets, build tiny houses from seashells and moss, and watch as the koi swam around in her pond amongst the jungle of flowers and twisting ivy. There was nothing I looked forward to more than those fairy parties. Not even the first day of summer or presents on Christmas morning.  

My affection for such memories only grew after this long and difficult season of college applications, in which I turned to childhood fondness for inspiration in my essay writing. My favorite piece I wrote is about my love of journaling and how I began writing when I was still a little girl, sitting in the grass of my first home. While I didn’t include any details about my taste for flowers and growing vegetables, and playing in the mud, I certainly captured similar themes of sunshine and curiosity. The fairy in me taught me to see the magic in reality, in nature. In my eyes, the only true magic is found in the dirt from which everything grows. 

I have so many stories to tell from the little girl in me, but in this 859-word summary, the biggest lessons are as follows: 

1. The worms are our best friends 

2. Butterfly bushes smell like sweet honey 

3. Fairy parties are the best kind of parties 

4. People are like flowers—they sprout, they bloom, they wilt, then move on 

5. Dandelions are greatly underappreciated 

6. Flower crowns are the greatest skill a person can have 

7. Hose water tastes best in the summer 

8. If you pretend you got cut by squishing Oregon grapes on your palms, your parents will not believe you 

9. Singing to the robins is a good stress reliever 

10. Freckles are really just little kisses from the sun's rays 

I was once six years old, freckled, and rosy-cheeked. I am now eighteen years old, freckled, and still reveling in the magic of nature's mundane. Because really, the biggest lesson is that there's beauty and a lesson to be learnt in everything—even in the bugs hiding beneath garden stones and the strong scent of rain after a storm. So, next time you feel inspired to go outside, thank the birds for singing their songs, smell the flowers that delight the bees, and ask your inner fairy child: what's next? 

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