I don't feel like a child anymore.

  It hurts when people treat me like an adult even if I am still a child on the inside.

  They tell me to be more mature, to grow a thicker skin, to not escalate things.

  They tell me to grow up fast, because my childhood isn't as worth as much time as my adulthood.

  They tell me to grow up with haste. I can't dawdle on the little things anymore. I can't look outside the window for hours at a time anymore. I can't sleep in till 11 anymore, because I am not a child anymore.

  There are people who will try to speed up your childhood, to make you become an infant with adult maturity.

  I feel like an adult with the mindset of a toddler. I can't express myself in real life, so I express myself with some stupid words on a stupid page.

  I can't express how much I want to slow life down just to be a child.

  I know I am not a child anymore, but I also know that I am not an adult.

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  By speeding up the age of my body into an adult, I have yet to speed up the age of my inner child.

  My body is a cage for her as she claws and screams that she doesn't want to write anymore. She doesn't want to write some pointless words on a page, because writing never does anything.

  It doesn't make me a child again, it doesn't magically give me that maturity I need, it doesn't help me.

  When I turned 13, I never felt 13. I felt like I wanted to cry, because I knew what those people said to me was true.

  One day I won't be a child anymore. I will have my own responsibilities, and no one will be able to catch me when I fall.

  No one will hug me and tell me everything is going to be okay, even if nothing is going to be okay. No one will talk to me unless I paid them in exchange for their precious time. No one will validate me anymore, because I don't need validation now. I am supposed to be an adult in a child's body.

  My time is ticking into adulthood, and that scares me so much more than death.

  The world was right, there are much worse things than death, cockroaches, and your parents screaming at you.

  It was the fact that I was never going to be a child forever. It was the fact that time is going to keep ticking, even after I die, even after our sun explodes, even after our galaxies collide.

  What I fear isn't death. Death comes for us all, even if we aren't ready to see what's on the other side of the veil.

  What I fear is not finding my purpose. And what I fear most is that I will never find my purpose as a child in an adult's body.

  I will be stuck in the valley between childhood and adulthood, just because one person told me that my childhood is a waste, just because they told me to grow up faster, just because I lacked the maturity an adult had.