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Reflections From An Anxiety-Prone Millennial

How I rediscovered joy in my inner child

Kimberly A. Irwin
5 min readMay 3, 2021

I’ve often heard the quote, “The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.”

As a kid hearing that growing up, my gut reaction was always, “Well, no duh.” But I didn’t think about it further than surface-level, and thought it was just another silly saying meant to make adults feel better for not having friends.

Photo of childlike joy; smiling child with paint on her face by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash
Photo by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash

Now, as a full-fledged-tax-paying-adult, who’s had a few bumps-in-the-road and struggled with life’s inevitable ups and downs — as we all do — those words finally hold meaning to me. (Took 27 years, but hey — I’ve always learned better through first-hand experience.)

You can give me advice all day everyday, but until I’ve lived it, I won’t fully believe or trust it. I can believe it for you — that whatever was suggested is your truth. But it’s rare that I’ll internalize and accept something as a universal truth without experiencing it for myself first. I don’t think that makes me unique; plenty of people are stubborn, but I’m just stating this tendency I have to provide a bit of clarity into my psyche.

Change has never come easily to me. My natural instinct is, and always has been, to resist change.

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Kimberly A. Irwin
Kimberly A. Irwin

Written by Kimberly A. Irwin

Writer. Idealist. #AuthorKimIrwin #WritingCommunity #TheEnlightenmentSagaBook1

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