My Secret Superpower: How Childlike Wonder Changed Everything

A few months ago, I was teaching a sex therapist how to work with texture paste during a session at Wicked Rae's. We were lost in conversation about techniques when she suddenly stopped mid-sentence, tilted her head, and gave me this knowing smile.

"You have childlike wonder," she said. "It's rare these days. And I think it's wonderful."

I laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was so perfectly timed. "My daughter says the exact same thing all the time," I told her.

Just the week before, Oakley had caught me between client sessions, paint smeared across my arms, probably my face too, grinning like a kid while laying down a new floor. She shook her head with that familiar mix of amusement and love and said almost word for word:

"You have childlike wonder. And I love you for being exactly who you are."

I've been this way my whole life. I didn't learn it. I didn't work at it. It's just how I'm wired.

I see beauty in the way leaves dance with the wind. I can hear their rhythm. Even on hard days I can go outside, watch the way light moves through a tree, and remember how lucky I am to be alive in a body that gets to notice things like that.

When I'm excited I jump up and down. I can't not do it. When customers share their stories I giggle with them. It's not a choice. It's an auto response.

Oakley and Jules, splatter painting before the opening of Wicked Rae's

I know exactly where it comes from.

I was 19, studying at NAU in Flagstaff, but I'd taken off for the summer to spend it with my boyfriend in Grand Junction. One afternoon his younger brother and I ended up on their trampoline on the olive farm, quiet and off the beaten path, no noise except the land itself.

We laid on our backs watching the sun flicker through the leaves above us, just talking about life, going nowhere in particular. The leaves made a kind of windchime sound as they moved. And I saw the light dancing through the branches like visible energy, bursting in every direction, like I was watching something most people walk right past.

I didn't have words for it then (still don't, really). I just knew I never wanted to stop seeing that way.

That's what Wicked Rae's is built on.

Not a curriculum. Not a framework. A way of seeing.

When people walk through our door they're usually carrying the weight of whatever they came from that day. Deadlines. Conflict. The relentless pressure of being a functioning adult in a complicated world. And then they put their hands in paint and something shifts. The inner critic goes quiet. The shoulders drop. The giggling starts.

I watch it happen every single day and it never gets old.

Because I know what they're touching. It's not just paint. It's the part of themselves that still knows how to lay on a trampoline on a summer afternoon and watch light move through leaves and think, this is enough. This is actually everything.

The neuroscience has a name for it. I just call it coming home.

Childlike wonder isn't a trait you either have or you don't. It's something that gets buried. Under deadlines and disappointments and the long slow pressure of being told to grow up and get serious.

But it doesn't disappear. It waits.

And sometimes all it takes is getting your hands dirty, or laughing at something that surprises you, or laying on your back somewhere quiet and letting the light do what it does.

You don't have to earn it back. You just have to let it.