"I hated being a kid" interview with Ryan Gosling

I love this quote in a Guardian interview with Ryan Gosling - and not just because Half Nelson was one of my top 5 fave films last year. I love it because it's closer to how I felt as a child. I so needed to grow up to be happy! I can never relate when people recall the idylls of childhood. My favorite yoga teacher has lately started referring to that wonderful time in our youths when our postures and breathing were perfect. It always takes me out of the moment because my memories of those years are never free, not good at all. And I see it with my daughter too. Not that her childhood was an unhappy one. I don't think it was. I think she was physically able and expressive, but I see it in terms of dealing with authority. Some people just need to be grown up and under their own steam.

when Gosling was 10 his mother took him out of class and home-schooled him. The year spent with her, watching movies, listening to Chet Baker and Billie Holiday, gave him, he says, 'a sense of autonomy that I've never really lost'. That confidence was crucial: 'I didn't want to work in a paper mill, and I wasn't going to stay in school. I hated being a kid. I didn't like being told what to do, I didn't like my body, I didn't like any of it. Being a kid and playing and all that stuff just drove me nuts.'

(complete interview)