A Sweet Return to Neopets
At the tail end of winter break, when the excitement of returning home from my first semester of college had settled into a dreary boredom, I was hit with a sudden, ineffable urge to return to my favorite childhood stomping ground: Neopets.
I created the account in third grade while attending a family friend’s New Year’s party. The adults had just begun the first of many attempts to wrap up and say goodbye, and this false start signaled that I had about an hour to kill. Consequently, I found myself being guided through the steps of account creation by one of the older kids—new email included—and in a blink, I was the proud parent of a baby blue Shoyru named Masoic. (No, not “Mosaic.” Don’t ask me why because I’m not sure.)
Thus began my full-blown captivation with Neopets.
Over two or so years of visiting the site almost daily, I was able to amass a small digital fortune and deck my precious pet out in the finest garb all of Neopia had to offer. I also maintained an actual notepad on which I jotted down cheat codes and “hacks” that may or may not have had something to do with my aforementioned wealth, and I became a self-proclaimed expert in the lore that surrounded the Faeries.
However, as blazing hot as my love for Neopets ran, once I lost interest, it dissipated just as quickly as it ignited. I couldn’t tell you what threw a wet towel on my passion, but it happened nonetheless, and it wasn’t until a month ago that I decided to make my grand return.
Logging back in for the first time in nearly a decade was truly a surreal experience—for one, I was absolutely astonished that I even remembered my password. Masoic was starving, the tears welling up in his eyes rightly implicating me in child abandonment. After his spirits were lifted by an amount of Hot Tyrannian Pepper Omelette that would stun dieticians, I turned my attention to going through the same motions I would repeat day after day way back when. Nostalgia crashed into me, wave after wave, and I was promptly entrenched in images from a much simpler time.
I spent longer reveling in the past than I care to admit, and I came out of it with a newfound appreciation for Neopets and all it gave me as a child. The games that brought a smile back to my face after enduring a grueling Math Olympiad session, the closet that I spent hours upon hours filling with an expert eye for fashion, the messages that I exchanged with friends, real and digital—everything had remained exactly how I remembered.
Though living in the past may not be the wisest, I think there are moments when almost all of us could do with feeling like a child again; even from my singular year as a legal adult, I can already confidently say that growing older sucks at times, and so maybe we should squirrel away occasions during which we allow ourselves to shed current worries and stress. Go back to a favorite game, book, or show if you’re ever in the mood to because rediscovering the joy of something can be just as sweet as experiencing it for the first time, or, at the very least, it will show you how far you’ve grown since then.