Parenting & Family Quote by Christy Romano

There’s a quiet confession tucked inside this seemingly breezy line: adulthood is a costume, and her real superpower is refusing to let it fully harden. Romano frames “a lot of me is still a little kid” less as nostalgia than as a working method. The “little kid” isn’t a cute anecdote; it’s a mental technology for performance, a permission slip to believe in something hard enough that an audience can, too.

“Alter my sense of reality” lands like a wink and a warning. Actors are paid to bend the real, but she’s describing something more intimate than craft talk: the deliberate softening of the border between self and role. That’s why “become Belle every single night” matters. Not “play” Belle, not “portray” Belle - become. The repetition (“every single night”) underlines how taxing and ritualistic that transformation is, like an emotional marathon disguised as a familiar fairy tale.

Contextually, Romano’s career has lived at the intersection of youthful characters and the audience’s long memory - a performer who grew up in public-facing roles and voice work, where identity can feel both amplified and abstracted. The subtext is that staying childlike isn’t about being naïve; it’s about staying permeable. Belle, as a character, is defined by imaginative escape and stubborn interior life. Romano is admitting she accesses that interiority by preserving her own. In a culture that rewards cynicism as sophistication, she’s arguing that belief is not weakness - it’s technique, and sometimes, survival.