Unspokens

I've been telling myself to grow up lately, usually with expletives involved, but I do try my best to keep the expletives inside of my head instead of out in the world where they could do some real damage. And it's not all the time, before you get worried about my mental state, just those times when you turn a corner or walk into an empty room and take a second to collapse under the pressure of thoughts you'd rather not be thinking.

Because adults can do that, right? They can just stop thinking about something they don't want to be thinking about and it doesn't bother them anymore, yeah? Much better than Barney's "just be awesome instead" idea. That's clearly why I need to grow up: so I can get that skill of selectively forgetting. It has to come in handy.

I definitely know kids can't do it. Kids and teenagers and college kids, we all are held sway by the things in our heads, the ideas we like to focus on and the ideas that don't leave us alone. You ever promise a kid ice cream or cotton candy and forget about it? They sure didn't, and they will remind you every second of every day until you drive over to the State Fair and buy them a package of that blue and pink sugary goodness. Speaking as a writer who has a tendency to border on the emo Myspace side of melodramatic, I can tell you for a fact that any of the billion problems accosting the regular teenager can get stuck in their head and run a little racetrack rut in their brains until every creative and bland method of expression has exhausted it. Ideas, thoughts, they're out to get us, really.

Of course, thoughts and ideas lead to actions. I remember listening to the other girls giving prayer requests at my Bible study in high school and they all had these unspoken prayer concerns. It was a codeword that meant that there was something going on about which they either couldn't or didn't want to talk in front of the adults (or the other rather puritan girls in the room who would definitely, for sure, no chance of it happening any other way, judge them for whatever it was that was bothering them). but for which they knew they needed prayer. I head those unspokens and I never thought it could mean anything serious. The unspokens of a high school girl must be something as frivolous as being upset over a guy who didn't like her back, not getting enough attention, being worried that she's too vain, or something.

But now I'm on the other side of that, where I have a rather large unspoken taking up a lot of my thought time and I would dearly love a prayer group to take that need to and have it lifted up. I mean, I don't know what prayer does, but it comforts me to think that something's being done and to see that proof of caring in a group.   Then again, maybe I'm just hanging onto an idea so I can shoulder this burden and get some attention by having an unspoken. God, it's so easy to be cynical about myself. Add that to the list of things at which I excel.

You never know. Maybe this unspoken will teach me a better way to deal with other's unspokens. Maybe that's what adults actually do- they just learn to deal with it and there's no magic trick involved. Ugh, why is it that half the inspirational posters lie to you and the other half try to make up for that first half by presenting what has now become cliche bits of counter-intuitive knowledge?

Sorry for all the posts about growing up and not being an adult and thinking about what adults do. It's just that I thought I'd have it all figured out by now, not being in the oft-mentioned position of finding out that no one's got it figured out just yet. Sometimes I wish someone would sit me down, give me and affirmation that high school me was good and college me was good and post college me has a lot of potential to prove how much good she can bring to the world. And then someone needs to sit down high school me and tell her not to judge post-college me because she's not that bad of a person besides the fact that she washed her sheets yesterday and has been too lazy to make up her bed and has been sleeping under extra blankets on top of her comforter while trying not to kick the pile of clean sheets off her mattress and onto the floor. Because I think high school me would judge me for that, among other things.

That's not my unspoken, by the way.