By Ingeborg Aure
I don't believe you grow up overnight, I think you have to learn and understand the hard way. It can be things like having a friend brag about how rich her family is to people you'd just met and thinking that you will never ever do that. And you probably never will because you will forever remember how uncomfortable it felt. But it can also be that you realize that your parents aren't superheroes, they don't know the answer to everything, they are just humans, like you.
I have only been on this earth for 16 years. And you're probably wondering what can I learn from someone who hasn't really lived? How can a 16-year-old girl possibly know anything that I don't about life? But it's not as much about learning as it is about remembering. Because we know that things we experience change us. We know that people we love influences us. But we normally can't say that "this and this happened and that's way I am like this". But sometimes we do remember. Sometimes we can point to the exact moment we grew a little bit older.
As our friendship grows older, we learn new things about each other, we learn their favorite color and what kind of candy they eat. But we also learn about ourselves, we learn that if you need people to care about you, you have to care about them as well.
From the age of 7 or 8 to 13, me and my best friend would always walk together back and forth to school. We would take the shortcut through gardens in our naborhood and over the fences. In the winter, we would always carry flashlights and in spring we made small rivers from the water melting from the snow. We would get late for class and say that we fell and one of us had to carry the other, but honestly, we would play or talk all the way to school.
Every day when we had met up and started walking my friend would ask me "so, what did you do yesterday?", "what did you eat for dinner?", "did you watch TV?", "did you do something special?", "if you were an animal what would it be" and so on and so on. And I know that these questions seem fine, and they were. Except that the same ones would come over and over. It seemed like she forgot I had already answered, and she kept asking and I kept answering. "I played with Legos", "we had fish for dinner", "no I didn't watch TV", "I would be a cat", "we had fish for dinner", "no I didn't watch TV". I often got bored and in desperation, I would answer without saying "what about you?" After a while I started to think about this, and tried to understand. And then I realized that my friend who was reckless and independent and in so many ways the opposite of me, needed me to ask her and care. She needed me to ask in different ways so that she could tell me in detail, what she had done the day before. She had so much to talk about, but she didn't want to tell me unless I asked. She needed attention and I didn't give it to her the way she needed. So when I the next day asked her in-depth questions about small things like breakfast and dinner, she happily chatted away.
Often the people who are the kindest have the most trouble, often the people who care the most are the people who need others to care. I don't know why I remember this so clearly, maybe because after that day, I would be extra aware of my friend and ask her how she was, or that I understood that people who bully often are unsure about themselves and that everyone have their own battle they are busy with. People aren't jerks out of the blue. They usually have a reason. What people do can often be explaind, I might never truly understand the reasons behind my friend, but I do know that she needs a bit more attention than the rest. And for what it's worth, I think that makes me a better person.
