Somewhere between childhood, where anything is possible, and adulthood, where you feel stuck in life and have no time for fun, your innocence and hope were lost. This can be especially true of those struggling with a wounded inner child, who never had the chance to experience a normal childhood. In an instant, your thoughts turn from what makes you

And yet we have this sense of something we can’t remember; we have this feeling that maybe life isn’t as flat as we assume. Maybe ordinary girls can indeed, presto, be transformed by words and oil. But who could admit that? This is the pressure of being crossed up; we doubt what we long for. We doubt that what we long for is sensible.

“Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up,” Herzen says. “But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment … Life’s bounty is in its flow. Later is too late.”