There’s something extremely endearing about the things we become irrationally attached to. Ask someone what they would take with them if they were stranded somewhere, and they might give you a sensible answer about food, water, or a phone. But ask what they need after a horrible day, and suddenly the answer changes. It’s a specific snack, a particular episode, a hoodie that has lost all structural integrity, or a person who gets a phone call that starts with, “Okay, don’t judge me.” We all have these little things we reach for when we need to feel a bit more like ourselves. We just don’t usually refer to them as anything but our things, bits of our identities.
When we’re children, comfort is much more obvious. There is the stuffed animal that has travelled everywhere with you, and is somehow still standing despite being dragged across floors, beaches and questionable family holidays. There is the blanket that cannot be washed because, according to five-year-old me, washing it would fundamentally destroy its magic. There is the cartoon we need to watch before bed or the exact cup we need our milk in. Nobody questions it, there are just parts of our life. Of course a child needs their favourite teddy and their blue cup. But then we grow up, and apparently we’re expected to become rational adults who no longer require tiny objects and rituals to keep ourselves sane.
Except we absolutely do.
We just get sneakier about it. At eighteen, it might be opening your childhood comfort show after getting a disappointing grade and deciding that the academic weapon arc can wait until tomorrow. It might be going to the same café and ordering the same drink because the idea of choosing between twelve kinds of coffee is suddenly overwhelming. It might even be wearing your oldest T-shirt to bed because the newer ones “feel wrong.” We like to think we’ve outgrown our childhood comfort objects, but really, we’ve just upgraded them to things that are socially acceptable to carry into adulthood.
I think the reason we become so attached to these things is that they don’t surprise us. Life does enough of that already. People change, plans fall apart, assignments appear out of nowhere, emails begin with “Just a gentle reminder,” and suddenly you’re questioning every decision you’ve made since birth. So sometimes, you want to reach out to something that is predictable and certain. You want to know that your favourite character is going to make the same stupid decision they make every single time. You want your food to taste exactly the way it did last Tuesday. You want to lie in bed under the same blanket and temporarily pretend that tomorrow’s problems are tomorrow’s problems.
The funny thing is that our comfort things are rarely impressive. Nobody is putting “re-watches the same three episodes whenever mildly inconvenienced” on their résumé. Nobody is bragging about the emotional significance of their childhood snack. Yet these tiny, seemingly insignificant things are intertwined with our lives for longer than we know. As children, we need someone to check under the bed for monsters. As teenagers, we need our friends to reassure us that nobody remembers that awkward thing we said in class, even though our brains will conveniently replay it at 2 AM for the next five years. As adults, we apparently need to rewatch a sitcom from 2014 while eating our favourite snack to recover from sending a slightly awkward text. The vessel changes, but the feeling doesn’t.
Maybe that’s why I find comfort things so ridiculously adorable. We spend so much of our lives trying to be mature, independent, and put-together, but deep down, we’re still just little humans looking for something familiar. We can have responsibilities, deadlines, exams, and absolutely no idea what we’re doing with our lives, and still find immense happiness in a specific snack or a song we’ve been listening to since high school.
So maybe having comfort isn’t childish at all. Maybe it’s one of the most human things we do. We can move cities, change careers, fall in love, have our lives completely rearranged and still find our way back to the same song, the same food, the same person or the same ridiculous television episode. We grow up, but apparently we never stop needing little reminders that everything is going to be okay. And if being an adult means occasionally snuggling up under a blanket with a snack and watching a show I’ve already seen a hundred times, I think I can handle adulthood pretty well.