I
will never be a grown-up. Sometimes I fake it well and sometimes not so well. I’ve
always liked the CCR song “Someday Never Comes.” There are no
grown-ups. There is never a “someday” in your life when you suddenly say “I
understand” and the world starts making sense. The world only starts making
sense when you start ignoring all the things that hurt you so deeply that even
the scars mark you as a member of the tribe of walking wounded who survived
that particular awful something. Scars just make your soul more interesting.
But, being a grown-up is acting as if the scars were not there in situations
where acting as if they were would only make things harder. We have to hide the
scars often in order to get our needs meet in the big world of pretend adults
outside. Intimacy is dropping the mask and telling where it hurts. At some
point, it is necessary to stop comparing resumes and start playing show and
tell with the scars any “we” will have to deal with together, when the doors
are closed and no one is pretending to be a grow-up. We eternal children call
this “playing for keeps.”
