This article is for everyone who still has a child inside them watching — waiting to see if the adult kept the promise

 THE CHILD IN ME STILL WANTS IT

On the Dreams We Are Told to Outgrow, and the Ones We Never Could

Nobody tells you when you stop being a child. It just happens. And then one day you realise the child is still there — still wanting, still watching.

I wanted to be a footballer.

Not in the way children want things casually — the way you want a toy you see in a shop window and forget by the time you reach home. I wanted it the way children want things that matter to them before they learn which wants are acceptable and which ones need to be quietly put away. I wanted it with my whole self, without reservation, without the internal editor that arrives somewhere between childhood and adulthood and begins crossing things out.

I was not exceptional at football. That is not the point. The point is that when I was running on a field, something felt true that felt true nowhere else — the specific freedom of moving toward something at full speed with no thought between you and the motion. The body doing exactly what the mind asked without negotiation. The feeling of being completely present in a way that ordinary life almost never allows.

I grew up. I got a B.Tech in AI and Machine Learning. I started writing research articles about mech engineering feasibility and axolotl regeneration and the temperature extremes of the known universe. The footballer dream faded the way most childhood dreams fade — not in a single moment of surrender, but in a slow accumulation of other things that filled the space where it used to live.

But here is what I have been thinking about lately.

The child who wanted to be a footballer did not disappear. He is still here. He is the one who cannot stop researching things at 11pm that nobody asked him to research. He is the one who built a classified military document for a blog nobody was reading yet, just because he needed it to exist. He is the one who made a promise to himself at midnight — Bloomberg, one day — and meant it with the same completeness he once meant I want to be a footballer.

The dream changed form. The child did not change at all.

I. What We Do With the Dreams We Are Given

The ones that arrive before we know enough to be afraid of them

When you are a child, you have not yet learned which dreams are permitted.

Nobody has sat you down and explained the hierarchy — which ambitions are acceptable for someone from your background, your city, your family's income, your college, your country. You do not yet know that certain things are for other people. You do not yet know that the world has already made certain decisions about what is possible for you before you were born.

So you want things freely. Completely. Without the internal negotiation that comes later.

You want to be a footballer. You want to marry the person you love regardless of what anyone thinks. You want to go to MIT. You want to work somewhere that the whole world knows, doing something that uses everything you are. You want to photograph the northern lights in a city you have never been to. You want to retire your parents before they get too old to enjoy it.

These are not naive dreams. They are honest ones. The naivety comes later — when we learn enough about the world to become afraid of our own wanting, and we mistake that fear for wisdom.

"When you are a child, you have not yet learned which dreams are permitted. You want things freely, completely, without the internal negotiation that comes later. That is not naivety. That is honesty."

II. The Dreams Society Calls Taboo

Wanting what you are not supposed to want

Some dreams are not just difficult. They are disapproved of.

The person you want to love — who crosses a line that your family, your community, your culture has drawn and called sacred. The career that does not match what people from your background are supposed to pursue. The life that looks nothing like the life that was planned for you before you were old enough to have opinions about your own future.

Society has a specific word for dreams it does not sanction. It calls them unrealistic. Inappropriate. Selfish. Taboo. The word changes depending on the dream, but the function is the same — to make you feel that wanting this thing is itself a problem, independent of whether you ever pursue it.

I have dreams that fall into this category. I will not specify them here — not because I am ashamed of them, but because they belong to me in a way that is not yet ready for the world. Some things need to be held privately before they can be held publicly. The telling of a dream too early, to the wrong audience, before you have built enough of yourself to withstand the response — that can kill a dream more effectively than any external obstacle.

But I know they are there. And I know the child who holds them is not wrong for holding them.

The dreams that society calls taboo are often just the dreams that challenge the society's idea of who you are allowed to be. They are threatening not because they are harmful but because they are independent — because they exist outside the permission structure, outside the map of acceptable wanting that was handed to you at birth.

That independence is not a flaw in the dream. It is the most important thing about it.

"The dreams that society calls taboo are often just the dreams that challenge its idea of who you are allowed to be. They are threatening not because they are harmful but because they exist outside the permission structure."

III. The Moment the Dream Fades

How it happens without you noticing

Nobody tells you the moment a childhood dream dies. There is no single day when you decide — today I stop wanting to be a footballer, today I accept that this love is impossible, today I give up on the life I imagined.

It happens in accumulation. A comment from a teacher about being realistic. A comparison to a cousin who took the safer path. A form you fill out for a job that is not what you wanted but is what is available. A conversation with your parents where you see the worry in their eyes and decide, silently, that your dream is not worth their worry.

Each individual moment is small. The sum of them is enormous.

By the time you notice the dream is gone, it has been gone for years. And the absence has been filled with so many other things — responsibilities, routines, the daily work of being a functional adult in a world that does not particularly care what you wanted at age ten — that the gap where the dream lived is barely visible anymore.

Barely visible. Not invisible.

Because here is what I have found. The dreams we had before we learned to be afraid of our wanting do not actually disappear. They go underground. They live in the parts of us that light up at unexpected moments — when we watch a football match and feel something that has nothing to do with the teams playing. When we read about a person who married who they loved and the world did not end. When we stay up until midnight researching temperature extremes because the child who wanted everything is still running on the same fuel he always ran on: pure, unfiltered curiosity about whether the world can be more than what it currently is.

"The dreams we had before we learned to be afraid of our wanting do not disappear. They go underground. They live in the parts of us that light up at unexpected moments — and fuel the things we do when nobody is watching."

IV. What the Child Knows That the Adult Has Forgotten

The intelligence of pure wanting

The child who wants to be a footballer knows something the adult has forgotten.

He knows that wanting is not the same as deserving. He is not asking whether he has earned the right to want this. He is simply wanting it — with his full self, without qualification, without the internal committee that convenes in adulthood to evaluate whether a desire is realistic before allowing it to be felt.

The adult has learned to pre-filter. To want only the things that seem achievable. To scale the dream down to the probable before allowing himself to feel it. This feels like wisdom. It is actually a kind of pre-emptive grief — mourning things before they have had the chance to happen or not happen, on the grounds that the mourning will hurt less if it comes first.

The child does not do this. The child wants completely and then deals with what happens next. This is not ignorance. It is a different relationship with time — one that does not yet know enough about the future to be afraid of it.

I have been trying to remember what that feels like. Not the ignorance — I do not want to unlearn what I know. But the completeness of the wanting. The willingness to want something fully before knowing whether it is possible. The refusal to pre-filter the dream through the probability of its success.

The mech I designed will not exist for a hundred years. I researched it anyway, completely, as if the wanting itself was worth something independent of the outcome. Because it was. Because the Formal Cause — the pure concept of the thing, existing completely in the mind before a single physical component exists — is real. The mech exists. Right now. In the imagination of everyone who has ever wanted it.

The footballer exists too. In the child who is still running somewhere inside me, toward something, at full speed, with no thought between him and the motion.

V. The Dreams That Changed Form

When the child finds a different field

I did not become a footballer. I became someone who writes about the things he cannot stop thinking about.

The connection took me a long time to see. But it is the same impulse. The footballer wanted to be fully present, fully alive, fully himself in a way that mattered to people watching. The writer wants exactly the same thing — to be so completely present in the act of thinking and writing that the reader feels something true.

The dream did not disappear. It found a different field to run on.

I think this is what happens to most of the childhood dreams that seem to fade. They do not die. They translate. The child who wanted to be a footballer becomes the adult who runs toward ideas at full speed. The child who wanted to marry the person he loved regardless of permission becomes the adult who writes about dreams that society calls taboo without apologising for their existence. The child who wanted to go to MIT becomes the adult who studies things at 11pm with the same hunger that MIT students feel in classrooms he never entered.

The specific dream was never the point. The wanting was the point. The specific dream was just the first available shape for a quality of aliveness that the child needed to express.

When the first shape is taken away — by circumstance, by practicality, by the slow accumulation of adult reality — the aliveness does not disappear. It finds another shape. If you let it.

"The specific dream was never the point. The wanting was the point. The dream was the first available shape for a quality of aliveness that the child needed to express. When the shape changes, the aliveness does not disappear. It finds another one."

VI. Permission

The thing nobody gives you and you have to give yourself

The hardest part of holding a dream is not the external obstacle. It is the internal one.

It is the voice that has learned to speak in the language of realism and uses that language to tell you that wanting this thing is itself a problem. That you should know better. That people like you do not get to want things like this. That the dream is embarrassing — not because it is harmful, but because it is large, and large wanting in a small life looks like delusion.

That voice is not wisdom. It is the accumulated weight of every moment you were told to be realistic. Every comparison that made you smaller. Every form you filled out for the life that was available instead of the life you wanted. Every time you saw the worry in your parents' eyes and decided your dream was not worth their worry.

The voice sounds like wisdom because it uses the same vocabulary as wisdom — practicality, maturity, realism, responsibility. But wisdom does not tell you to stop wanting. Wisdom tells you how to want intelligently — with patience, with strategy, with the understanding that the gap between the dream and the reality is not evidence that the dream is wrong but evidence that the work is not yet finished.

Permission to want is not something anyone gives you. Not your family, not your culture, not the society that has decided in advance what is appropriate for someone with your background and your college name and your city. You give it to yourself. Or you do not. And if you do not, the child goes underground, and the wanting goes with him, and you spend the rest of your life occasionally catching a glimpse of something you used to want in the eyes of someone who still does — and feeling, briefly, the specific grief of a dream you did not protect.

I am choosing to protect mine. Not loudly. Not defiantly. Just — persistently. The way the axolotl persists. The way the dream in the notepad at 8:29am persists into an article. The way the child who wanted to be a footballer persists into the adult who cannot stop running toward the next idea, the next article, the next pitch, the next proof that the wanting was always worth something.

"Permission to want is not something anyone gives you. You give it to yourself. Or you do not. And if you do not, the child goes underground, and you spend the rest of your life catching glimpses of what you used to want in people who still do."

VII. The Child Is Still Watching

A final word

I am 23 years old. I live in Tamil Nadu. I write research articles at 11pm about things nobody asked me to research. I have a blog with a tagline that belongs to me and a promise I made to myself at midnight that I intend to keep.

The child who wanted to be a footballer is watching. The child who dreamed of loving without permission is watching. The child who opened a library book on a Friday afternoon and found a photograph of Tromsø and felt something that twenty years have not diminished — he is watching too.

They are all watching. They are all still wanting. They are all still running on the same fuel — the belief, which no amount of adult realism has fully extinguished, that the world can be more than what it currently is. That the gap between what is and what is wanted is not a verdict. It is an invitation.

There is nothing wrong with a dream. Dream to be a footballer. Dream to love who you love. Dream to build something that lasts, go somewhere that has lived in your imagination for twenty years, work somewhere that uses everything you are.

The child in you still wants it.

Let him.

"The child in you still wants it. The specific dream was the first shape the wanting took. The wanting itself never left. Let it find its next shape. That is how all of this begins."

— END —

Mystic Quill  |  Research & Writing by Selva Ganesh K  |  2026

mysticquill.blogspot.com