Last month I had this conversation with my best friend, which inspired me to write this post:

She also happens to be the person with the largest collection of Labubus I’ve ever seen. To her this is not just some trend, but genuinely something that brings her joy and keeps her at peace. That despite us both being around the same age.

Yet stuff like this is still often looked down upon by many adults and mocked as childish these days. Because what do you mean you have plush toys as a 30-something-year-old person? Go get a big girl job and pop out a few kids while you’re at it.

In other words – grow up, because you’re an adult now.

If I stayed in Tallinn instead of leaving, by now I’d be expected to have some middle management job to make my entire personality out of, several Master’s degrees on the side, a huge leased car to take from my bedroom to the bathroom (because apparently walking around the city is difficult for an able-bodied human), and preferably a family with children.

Considering that I ended up in a city as open-minded as Berlin, you could guess that living like everyone else is the last thing I want to do with my life. While I do not judge those who choose to go with the mainstream to stay safe and avoid unwanted attention by not standing out, my predicament sadly meant I’d be an outlier in Estonia whether I like it or not.

That would have also meant abandoning my inner child for the sake of normalcy.

Growing up, I would be the only person in my circle who’d prefer Nintendo IPs over all kinds of shooter games. The community itself was pretty close to non-existent at the time, since to your average teenager Nintendo would be a kids thing. As opposed to… games you’re legally not even allowed to play? Won’t lie though – I enjoyed Valve’s shooters like Portal quite a bit.

Socialising among teenagers rests on competitive maturity – those same urges led me to start solo travelling at 16. In fact, I had to work a summer job to buy my first Wii at the age of 13; later I’d be skipping high school classes for work to pay for my clothes, books, gym and Spotify memberships. In my mind it was always possible to not abandon your inner child while adulting.

Sadly that wasn’t always enough to keep my inner child safe.

Now with the big girl money and around 15 years of freedom from the ethnic Russian bubble I can finally give my inner child all the safety they were desperately looking for in those formative years.

It would not be an understatement to say that I grew up on the Internet. My oldest active email address turns 22 years old in a few months (possibly the closest thing to a child I’ll ever have), and I already had the access to mobile internet on my monochrome-screen Nokia around the time I created that email.

Though it wouldn’t just be computer games that I’d use the Internet for. Quite early on I discovered Wikipedia and would often use the information from there and some hacker resources to tinker with the software our family PC was running on. I’d also make some first attempts at coding by myself.

That is, until coding regularly was forced on me.

I briefly mentioned growing up in a Slavic family before. Without getting too personal, let’s just say that with most things in life Russian Estonian families tend to follow the principle that could be described with this meme:

Which meant that my early interest in coding would be completely crushed by having to code something daily that I didn’t even feel like making, so that “my brain would stay stimulated and I had useful skills for the future”.

In other words, let’s oversaturate your interest and turn it into suffering so that it sticks. No learning at your own pace, no discovering what it is that I would enjoy making by doing it. Fuck that, now you better suffer for your own good. Figure out the rest on the go or later.

Those same people told me that my interest in Tetris was useless, though I still rely on it daily for processing all kinds of negative thoughts. Clearly a good thing that I wasn’t forced to play it in retrospect 😅

Now take a wild guess – have I ever done any software engineering throughout my career since then?

Absolutely fucking not.

This interest was so ruined in my mind that I would avoid any coding job like wildfire, and only work in Operations so that my involvement in any company was more abstract and not too technical. I was initially thinking of getting an IT degree growing up since I would still code for school stuff, but in the end I still wanted to have as little as possible to do with any of that.

Only in my early 20s would I experiment with Raspberry Pi and different modules you can combine it with. Coding on Python was fun for a little while (I took a course for it while in high school too), but eventually other hobbies and interests took most of my free time.

I only got back into all kinds of hacky stuff very recently, now that Local LLMs combined with Agentic AI are picking up the pace. So I suppose thank you Hermes for healing my inner child? Lately I’ve been also thinking of treating them with a used Mac Studio that has lots of RAM. Let me know if you’d like to sell one.

That is not to say that my childhood was bad – it wasn’t. In fact I know that being forced to code doesn’t particularly sound like torture to your average adult in retrospect. In my region in particular older people would say stuff like “all this suffering made you the strong person you are today so be grateful”.

Should I also be grateful for all the childhood trauma this and other situations caused? Did I not deserve the space to enjoy myself and my interests while already exceeding academically? Is it so difficult for adult people who claim that they are mentally superior due to their age and “experience” to just listen for once? Why can’t I be left alone?

In my view, this kind of childhood trauma causes direct damage to one’s sense of agency, which is why to me it is so important now to nurture my interests without caring about whatever outside pressure or opinions come around in adult life. If my inner child isn’t whole, can I really claim that I am authentic? That I am being myself? That I’m living the kind of life I want?

Though most people who can’t understand the concept of being trans do not realise that it is not a choice either – to me transitioning is also a way of making that inner child happy, finally moving past everything that they had to suppress in an extremely transphobic environment for many years.

Another relevant meme while we’re at it (credit AyvieArt):

(also please stop asking if I’m sure about transitioning knowing how much I’ve gone through and still not giving up, please use your brain I’m so tired)

While it is much easier to see in hindsight, a lot of sadness in my adult years came from all the outside expectations that people would force on me throughout my life, inevitably leading to that inner child of mine absorbing most of that pressure. No wonder that child stars go insane and take to self-destructive behaviour. Adults can get to that point too – it just takes longer.

So why do we keep bashing each other for doing harmless things that make us happy? What happened to “live and let live” and why do we invoke it selectively? Instead of living out your frustrations on happy and successful people, why not open yourself up to the things you enjoy – even just a little?

All this pressure, judgement and mockery towards a person nurturing their inner child is no different than teenage bullying. Perhaps moving past that is the kind of growing up we all need to do.

We all do things that some people think are cringe, so what? Most people around us have unconventional needs – we just often don’t know about them. As long as those needs don’t interfere with other people’s freedoms, what they do with their own lives is no one else’s business.

Save your energy for something more useful than judgement.