Sometimes I doubt whether I’ve matured at all in the past two years. It must have something to do with leaving teenage egocentricism and starting to develop at a much slower rate, even if all kinds of crazy things are going on all around me. I keep looking back to when I was sixteen and seventeen and thinking that maybe I wasn’t all that stupid, which now strikes me as odd. All throughout my life, I would look back at the things I wrote from a few years before and scoff at how incredibly dumb I was. Now, though I’ll laugh at how I know better as an adult, I can’t bring myself to make fun of myself from a few years ago. Once I hit that point where, cognitively, I was an adult, things just kind of… stagnated.
But, as a slap to the face, I received a very lengthy comment from a man whom I had written to a year and a half ago about his doctrine concerning suicide and religion. To sum up his argument, it was that by teaching evolution/atheism, that it was the cause of teenage suicide. Finding that ridiculous, I had written a letter to him detailing the causation-correlation dilemma and psychological facts presented with teen suicide. But, when I had posted a copy to my blog, it was not in the most civil of tones and was quite condescending. Looking back, I wish I’d done something different.
I never agreed with him. I still don’t agree with him. But even sixteen months later, I’m shaking my head at my behaviour. It’s the nagging question: Why couldn’t you have presented the facts and left it at that? I wonder why, and it makes me question my maturity. And it makes me wonder if I have matured since then since I now see what I wrote in a different light.
It’s just something to think about. Maturity, and what the word means when it really comes down to your actions, behaviours, what you say, et cetera.
Missi(world) 