Are we ever more than the smallest thing we ever were?

Now that I’m grown, I wonder: Will there ever be a day when I’ve moved past the stunted sapling I once was, or will my thoughts stay rooted in this place where I was planted?

Do we, in light of the grand and beautiful things we collect throughout our lifetimes, ever cease to gaze up at them from a place of childish awe? Will I always be unfledged and bashful? Will I hold these things I’ve cultivated in my hands ever in my lifetime through the lens of something grounded and established? Or will I always color my life with the tender, unsophisticated reverence that makes everything seem so much more illustrious?

Will I ever see myself for what I’ve grown into? Will I see the length of my stalk and the durability of its making? Will I behold my own petals and laud my sweeping leaves? Or will I ever walk through the world with an inelegant feeling of fraud cloaking me from the world and keeping the world behind gauze? Will I always wonder when everyone else will finally see the small thing that I am, the tiny sapling blundering through the world?

Will I ever feel deserving of my prizes, worthy of the field I’ve rooted in? Will I ever feel comfortable with my nature, accepting of my process? Will I ever stop waiting to be unearthed by indelicate hands and unmasked in front of the sun?

Does everyone else feels as wholly inept, as reproachably green? Is everyone else nothing more than the smallest thing they ever were, masquerading through the world as something established and bloomed? Do all these things that I ceremoniously renounce my own deservingness of hide within themselves like tender saplings, wondering when I will see them for what they are?