I've been thinking about when the official end of my childhood happened. Was there a concrete marker, or was it a series of events?

The last Harry Potter movie comes out tonight, and that made me think about it. Not because I feel like my own personal childhood is ending tonight--the movies have never really been that important to me. It's funny how media plays such a huge role in our childhoods. I've heard people say that tonight, the last movie, is the end of their childhood. The magic is over--the belief, the innocence that comes with it, and we are all a bit more cynical. But that's the way it should be. You can't thrive without a little bit of cynicism.

It's possible that my childhood ended when the last Harry Potter book came out. I was 18, during the summer after my senior year. About to go to college. I lost a lot of my innocence the first year of college. Some of the magic of childhood that Harry Potter represents also disappeared. I like adulthood. Sometimes I feel like I'm still not there. It's not that the last book caused my childhood to end, but it appropriately happened to fall at the same time. Although, you get to be a kid in college a lot.

I suppose that single, isolated events don't spur huge life changes. Rather, it's a series of small things, a slow process, but sometimes there are strange moments where I turn around and suddenly realize I'm different. I do believe that these small things culminate in single moments, or single moments reflect a whole series of changes, like a microcosm.