Compile a list of words that describe you as a child. Compile a second list that describes you as you are now. How are these lists the same? How are they different?
Your move, writer.
One way in is the funny, unsentimental route: two blunt lists side by side, "feral" and "loud" next to "still loud, slightly less feral," letting the humor carry a quiet truth about what actually changes in a person versus what just gets better mannered.
Another direction leans tender — picking one word that survived both lists intact, something like curious or stubborn, and following it through the years to see how it protected you, or got you in trouble, at every age.
You could also write it as a conversation between the two lists, the child-word list interrogating the adult one, asking why "brave" disappeared or where "dreamy" went, turning the exercise into a gentle reckoning with what got left behind on purpose, and what got lost by accident.
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