hannah Montana sweatbands and johnny depp pez dispensers

I have noticed something recently. Whenever an adult pays me a compliment I  respond with some smart ass remark, as if their admiration is below me. I can think of three exact examples of this, and I know there has been many more. It surprises me I did not connect these sooner. I only give snobby comments when this compliment is coming from a teacher really. If its from a friend or even just one of my peers, I embrace their acclaim, thanking them for their kind words. So why does a peers compliment mean so much more than a teachers. I have decided because I am an immature brat.

I find refuge in relics from my childhood, my Picked Things book, Beetlejuice movie, and of course my blnankie. However, it isn’t only possessions from my childhood that please me, but childish things as well. Par example, my Hannah Montana sweatband and Johnny Depp Pez dispenser. I am one very immature person. How does my unhealthy connection to immature items relate to my disdain for adult compliments? Because it proves that I am afraid of selling out, of growing up really. 

By acknowledging the fact that something I have done can please an adult audience (that’s what she said), I am ultimately recognizing the passing of my youth, and this I just can’t have. So I hide behind childish ‘that’s what she said’ jokes and child icons to reaffirm my place as a child. I am afraid of becoming an adult, as so many of us are, both children and adults alike. I see the responsibility, the hard work, the boredom. Is this what my life is destined to become? They all seem so unhappy. Perhaps its not unhappiness, just a sad realization that this is what their life is, and the sooner they accept it the better. They have settled. That just isn’t me. And I hate to be this naive little girl sitting at my computer preaching about how I will never be that person, I will never settle, I am going to be somebody, when I know that everyone who has settled has once been in my very seat. And I have seen enough movies and read enough books to know that my decline into adulthood is only inevitable. But unlike all those tales of oppression, mine will not have such a happy ending.

And so I shoo off your compliments as if they are the disease, the disease of adulthood, and by keeping them away, perhaps I can remain a kid if for only just a little while longer. 

Peace.