We All Have Some Growing Up to Do

One of my favorite catch phrases is "to make the best better." If you don't know what that's from, it's the motto of 4-H, a youth leadership and development program. It's one of the phrases I grew up hearing all the time and I've really learned to love it and embrace it.

No matter how old you are or how mature you feel like you are, we all have some growing up to do. It doesn't matter if you feel like you have everything figured out or if you're a teenager that still has a lot to learn. We can all grow in some way. 

I've done a lot of growing up since the beginning of this year. I've gotten more comfortable with who I am, I've made some important decisions in my life, and I'm better at dealing with things that adults have to do. For the longest time, I was afraid to call and make my own doctor's appointments, but I made one on my own a couple months ago and I've made some major changes to my life since the beginning of the year. However, I still have a lot of growing up to do. I still have to work on making my own life independent of my parents, I have to continue to work to help pay for college, and I have to navigate life with my potential boyfriend. 

In the past couple months, a friend of mine has definitely learned that. He'd been out of high school for a while, but was talking to his ex-girlfriend who was a Senior at the time. He and I had just mended our friendship and he'd decided to start talking to her again since she wanted to get back together. They fought a little, but they'd also been together for a couple years before breaking up, so they were attempting to make their former relationship work after a few months of being single.

I'll go ahead and say it: I never liked the girl. I never trusted her, but that's because she never gave me a reason to trust her after walking back into this guy's life and destroying the relationship I was building with him. It would have been different if she had gone about it differently, but I wasn't a fan of the way that she forced herself back in and he knew that. She'd started crying in front of him and found his soft spot for helping others to make him feel vulnerable. She forced him to hold her because he wouldn't and when she left, she told him she wished she'd never broken up with him. In so many situations, that type of thing wouldn't have mattered, but she showed that she still wanted him to be an intimate part of her life and that she was just trying to hold onto reality. That's not the part I wasn't okay with though. I wasn't okay with the game she was playing with him. At first, she just wanted him to call her, but when he tried, she said she was tired and wanted to meet up instead. When he hesitated because he didn't want to be alone with her, she showed up unannounced.

I want to make it clear that I did not feel that way because I still had feelings for my friend. I had moved on and was happily building a relationship with someone else. I'd digested my feelings, written about them, and made it to the point where I was only looking to be his friend, nothing more. Everything I told him, I told him as a friend, not as a jealous girl. I walked away for myself and because I could tell it wasn't the right time.

The more I learned about her, the more I learned that she wasn't a great person. I wasn't going to necessarily let that sway my friend's feelings, but I felt like he should know. I talked to him for a week or so and he filled me in on what had been going on with them. I didn't think it was the greatest thing in the world, but it wasn't exactly harmful. She was playing games, but I expected that and as long as she didn't hurt him, I wasn't going to stand in his way. Everything he and I talked about during that time (when I tried to step down to save myself from so much pain), she took as a "sign they should get back together" and eventually convinced him to try.

I could tell that he'd been changing, becoming less open about things that were going on. He was quicker to get angry at me and blew up at me several times. I considered walking away from his friendship as well, but he and I both knew that's not the type of person he was or the type of person he wanted to be. I tried to be as rational as I possibly could, but I knew that things were going south quickly. I just couldn't tell which relationship (friendship or his potential romantic relationship) was going to fail.

The innocence of her games changed one day. I don't remember if my friend called me or texted me that day (probably both knowing him), but he wasn't okay. After a few weeks of talking again, he'd found out that her parents were giving him a "grace period" to prove that he'd changed. He'd changed everything about himself for her (and her family) several times, trying to make them happy. He'd let her walk over him time and time again without even noticing at some points. He didn't know what her parents didn't approve of and was genuinely confused. I was at work, so I didn't get the chance to really talk to him until I left.

I spent at least two hours on the phone with him while walking around Walmart that day. He told me everything he knew up to that point. I got to hear about the arguments, how he didn't like her attitude, and so many other things. I was in a unique position where I could speak both as a friend and as someone who nearly dated him. He asked me some questions and eventually walked me to the question of "why did I walk away?" I'm not ashamed of telling him exactly why I walked away. I will always be honest with him. I walked away because I could tell that when things got tough, he closed himself off and wouldn't talk to me. He also fell back into ways of dealing with things that reminded me of high school and I couldn't handle going through that again. I told him that maybe her parents have legitimate concerns about him. He'd been improving himself over the past few months, but was still drinking, vaping, and had started smoking again. Maybe it was best for both of them to know her parent's concerns because he might realize he needed to work on some things and she might realize that he's not someone she wants in her life. He agreed with me.

He tried talking to her about it. She responded with the maturity I expect out of a high schooler: wanting to be an adult, but not necessarily ready to be one (I'm not going to say that I wasn't that way too. Time makes you grow up and forces you to be wiser). She didn't want to talk to him. She didn't want to communicate what was going on. She just wanted to be angry with her parents and not really let him in on what happened. She took out some of the anger on him and it wasn't completely fair.

She finally gave in and told him what her parents said. I highly doubt she told him all of it. From what I understand, her parents are extremely conservative like mine and if a boy had told me that I needed to dress more modestly, my parents probably would have shaken his hand and told me that he was a keeper. They wouldn't hold a grudge against him for it. I think there's more to the story that she didn't want to tell him and I could see how much it hurt him.

She kept contradicting herself. One minute, she wasn't even sure if she wanted to be friends with him and the next, she wanted to keep him on the hook until she turned eighteen. It was a game of tug of war that even I couldn't handle and it wasn't even my relationship on the line. I knew that even if she wanted to be in a relationship with him, my friend wouldn't be okay if her parents didn't like him. He is very much a family man and he and I both said that he wasn't okay with it.

I told him that the best thing that he could do was to try to talk to her and figure out what was going on. If they really wanted to be together, they could talk about it and eventually talk to her parents. If they really wanted to be together, they wouldn't resort to fighting and anger whenever something happened to them. It reminded me of people dating in high school and though they were both younger than me, it was something I didn't want to deal with. I didn't think she was worth his time and as he told me more and more about their past relationship, the more I felt like it was borderline emotional abuse.

They kept talking, or at least he tried talking to her. There was a lot more fighting and arguing and it eventually resulted in a plan for a meeting to return each other's things. As with anything involving the two of them up to this point, it was dramatic. I won't go into the details, but it ended with my friend calling me just to rant because he was so angry.

There are three types of people that I've discussed so far in this exploration: the teenager that has a lot of growing up to do whether they realize it or not, the person who thinks they've grown up and still has a ways to go, and the person who has grown up a lot and realizes that they have a long way to go.

I was never into high school drama, so I don't necessarily know exactly how it feels from the side of being a drama queen. I was always a miniature adult, so I can only observe from the outside. However, I felt like she wanted to be grown up, but didn't really understand that she had a long way to go. She resorted to secrecy and anger quickly whenever something didn't go her way and wanted to bide her time until she legally didn't have to deal with her parents instead of working with the problem at hand. She wanted to be an adult, but still played mind-games instead of having real communication. She didn't want to hear what my friend wanted to tell her because she didn't care what he thought even though he really cared about her and wanted to help her become a better person. I don't know if she realized it or not because the scope of high school is so small that we don't always notice things in the big picture. I can definitely say that I've been there.

So many things that we focus on in high school don't really matter, but seem so gigantic because we're still trying to figure out who we are and how we fit into the world. We're all insecure at times and some handle it with fear and anger while others simply hide in the corner until they figure it out. We feel like high school prepares us for the real world, but it really doesn't. We see people depicted in our shows and feel like that's how things really are when they really don't have to be that way. We feel like we have to fit into a certain category when we really don't. We don't have to hurt each other or tear each other apart. Part of life is learning how to communicate with others and integrate ourselves into our roles into our part of the world.

I can definitely say I've been in the position of the second category. When I started college, I felt a lot more free. I was figuring out how the world worked and thought that I'd started to understand things and that was it. I felt like I was mature and had bypassed a lot of the stages that I thought I'd go through, but I hadn't. My friend was in the same position at this point. He felt like he was growing up and acted like it most of the time, but when the going got tough, he fell back into old ways and let her pull him further down into her drama. He started smoking again and he and I both knew he hated cigarettes. He couldn't stand them, but he'd started smoking them again. He took a while to convince that he didn't have to look at things the way he was looking at them. After two hours of talking on the phone, he'd finally realized what was going on and since then, he's made the decision to walk away. He wasn't sure what his decision was, but figured it out when he told his mom that his wife was going to be ten times more awesome. He already knew that he had things to work on and had been trying to work on them, but this made the fact he needed to grow more pressing. He's actively started working on himself again and has made some real progress.

The third category is the one I fall into. I know that I've grown up a lot, but I also know that I'm nowhere near done growing up. There will always be things that I need to work on in my life. I will always be able to find something to improve upon. I will never be perfect, but I can always work towards it. During that time, I realized so many things that I should have done differently during the month I was going through all of that drama (see Alias No. 4). I let myself feel anger and anxiety that weren't worth feeling. I let myself be hurt by things that didn't really matter. I tried to be patient and open, but still failed to do so.

There are plenty of levels beyond me. After all, I'm still young. However, I don't think we can ever stop growing up. We will always be able to improve upon ourselves. There will always be a need to equip ourselves to better handle anger, anxiety, sadness, and any other emotions we feel. We can always improve how we treat others and love our neighbors (future post) and can always "grow up" to improve our society as a whole. Growing up isn't just limited to before we turn thirty; it continues long after we grow old and frail and it might even continue after death. Never stop growing and never stop improving.




Written: 26 March 2018