Not getting hired on full-time where you spent eight months working hard can be a pretty big slap to the face. It’s like breaking up with your long-term boyfriend when you still live together. It’s the whole bit of “it’s not you, it’s me…” Not an easy pill to swallow that you just weren’t quite good enough. I have and will always hold myself to a very high standard personally and professionally and tend to struggle with rejection. As someone who has such high standards for herself and who puts a lot of self-worth stock into her job, I had never experienced a heartbreak quite like this one in any of my relationship breakups (pretty sure a psychologist would have a field day with that fun fact). As soon as I heard the word “unfortunately,” a part of me retreated, wounded. What did I do wrong? What could I have done better? Was it something I said in the interview? I was riding a rollercoaster of emotions for the week following the news. I was sad, angry, confused, content, lost all at once. I am an obsessive planner and this was not following my post-grad plan at all. I was supposed to work my butt off in an incredible internship following graduation, get hired full-time for my first big girl job, move out of my parents’ house and live happily ever. Instead, I was eight months into the real world with not much to show for it and even more confused as to my life’s path.

I was recently babysitting a 7 year-old girl and her two older brothers. While her brothers played video games (which in my tomboy heart I secretly wanted to play instead), we played everything from doll house, hide-and-seek to beauty salon.

I fondly remember all throughout my childhood the majority of playing I did by myself and with my friends was playing make-believe. We would play house, doctor’s office and my personal favorite: school. The world of make-believe as a kid is a magical place with no ceilings or walls to stop you. You can literally be whatever you want to be with no limits to your imagination.

Now my make-believe skills were a touch rusty as Danielle and I played; I found myself having a hard time seeing all the things that she was seeing. She would be adding to the story and I was left fumbling with my words just trying to keep up with her. “When did this happen…?” I wondered. I used to be able to play make-believe with the best of ‘em. No storyline was too unbelievable for me. Yet here I was wondering why the dragon was in the garage or why the fairies would have their own pets.

I’d like to call this my Peter Pan moment. Without even noticing it, I had grown up, never to return to Neverland. My imagination is a more cynical, rational, shriveled up version of what it once was. In Polar Express, on Christmas morning when the parents jingle the bell Santa gave the little boy and can’t hear a sound at all… that is me! When did I stop believing in “childish things"?