How I Stopped Believing Every Scary Thought
The first scary thought of the day arrived at 9:04 in the morning, in the middle of math class.
It was a small gray paper bat with a very worried face, and it flapped right past my ear. You are going to fail this quiz.
I looked up, but nobody else seemed to see it. Mr. Hale was writing numbers on the board. The boy in the blue hoodie was drawing in the margin of his notebook. The whole room was quiet and ordinary.
Then the second bat appeared. Everybody will see that you don’t know the answers. And a third. You are not as smart as the others. And a fourth, and a fifth, and soon there was a whole flock of them, folded like origami and swirling around my head, each one with a tiny, frightened face.
The strange thing is that I believed every single one. They were so sure of themselves. They flapped with such confidence. And when something sounds that sure, it is very hard to remember that it might simply be wrong.
I held my pencil over my paper, and my hand did not move. My lunchbox sat next to me with apple slices that I did not touch. The numbers on the quiz were just numbers. It was the bats that were loud.
What if I fail?
What if everyone knows I’m not smart?
What if I can’t stop these thoughts?
The bus stop at four o’clock
After school, I met Zoe at the bus stop at the end of Maple Street. She was wearing her yellow cardigan, and she had two warm cups of tea from the café, one for each of us.
“You look like someone is following you,” she said, handing me a cup.
“A flock of bats,” I said. “They’ve been following me since math.”
Zoe nodded very seriously, as if I had told her it might rain. “Scary thoughts. Do they have a lot to say?”
“Everything. I’m going to fail. Everyone will see I don’t know the answers. I can’t stop them.”
“Have you tried arguing?”
“Yes. It makes them louder.”
“Of course it does.” Zoe took a sip of her tea and nodded toward the road. “Then let’s try something different. Watch the buses.”
A long gray bus rolled to the stop in front of us, with its doors sighing open. Above the windshield, in glowing letters, it said: WHAT IF.
“That,” said Zoe, “is a thought. It pulls up, it opens its doors, and it waits for you to get on. And here is the secret that nobody told us: you don’t have to board every bus that stops.”
I stared at the bus. A few people inside looked out of the windows, not at all surprised that I was not getting on. After a moment, the doors folded shut and it rumbled away.
“That’s it?” I said.
“That’s it. You noticed it. You read the sign. And you stayed on the bench.”
A second bus arrived, even bigger, with a sign that read WHAT IF NOBODY. I felt a familiar tug in my chest, the same one I feel when I want to climb on, just to see where it goes.
“Ask it a question,” said Zoe softly. “Where are you going?”
I looked at the sign again. What if nobody… Nobody what? The sign didn’t finish. It never did. It was a bus that went nowhere in particular, round and round the same block, and everyone who boarded it came back at the end of the day feeling tired.
“It’s not going anywhere I want to go,” I said.
“Then wave,” said Zoe, with a small, kind smile. “And let it drive.”
So I waved. It felt a little silly, like waving at a cloud. But as the bus rolled away, something in my shoulders came down by about an inch.
The bus worth taking
“Wait,” I said, after a while. “Are all the buses bad? What if a thought is true? What if I really do need to study?”
“Good question,” said Zoe, looking very pleased. “That’s the other half of the secret. Some buses are worth boarding. You read the sign, and you ask: is this going somewhere useful?”
A small, quiet bus pulled up just then, nothing like the big gray ones. Its sign said Ten minutes of math tonight.
I laughed, a little surprised. “That one is going somewhere.”
“Then climb on,” said Zoe. “Ten minutes. Not the whole mountain.”
And I did, in my mind. I rode the little bus home. That night, I spent exactly ten minutes with my math notebook, and when the timer rang, I stopped, and I felt proud, in a quiet, ordinary way. The bats came once or twice during those ten minutes. I looked at their signs, said, “Not my bus,” and went back to my numbers.
I should be honest: some evenings I still board the wrong bus by mistake. I ride for three or four stops, caught up in the noise, before I notice where I am. But now I know how to get off. I read the sign, I press the little button, and I step down into the cool air. Nobody scolds me. The street is still there, and so is the bench.
On the walk home that day, with the sun setting behind the maple trees and the orange leaves drifting down around me, I saw a last gray bus pulling away at the end of the street. WHAT IF, it said, getting smaller and smaller.
I did not believe it, and I did not argue with it. I simply watched it go.
My brain will keep sending buses. That is what brains do. Some will be loud, some will be gray, and some will have signs that look very convincing. But a thought is not a fact, and a bus is not a destination. I can notice it. I can read the sign. And I can stay right where I am, with a cup of tea, until a better one comes along.
Tonight there will be buses again. I will have my tea, my bench, and my small, steady breath. And if I am lucky, Zoe will be sitting right next to me, waving at the gray ones with a perfectly straight face.
I used to think I had to ride every bus to find out if it was true. Now I know I can simply sit, and wait, and see where the street leads.
Most of them just drive by.
With love,
Lina
