I Am Forty One And Told I Am Overthinking

She is forty one, and this is her first, and she has been thinking about it since June.

And somewhere around August the word started turning up. Overthinking. Said fondly, mostly. Said with a small laugh. Said by people who love her and who are not being cruel and who have not thought about it for one second longer than it took to say it.

It has been said enough times now that she has started using it about herself, which is how a word gets in.

I have lived long enough to know a few things, and one of them is that the word overthinking is almost never a description. It is almost always a request. It means: I would like this conversation to be over now. Or: your carefulness is making me feel something about my own choices. Or, most often and most innocently: I do not know what else to say.

It is a word people reach for when they have run out of other words. It is not an assessment. Nobody who says it has done the arithmetic.

So let us do the arithmetic instead, because it comes out somewhere different.

There is a woman who waited a very long time for this. Not by choice, and not in a way she talks about much. She spent years not letting herself want it out loud. She has more reason than most to hold this carefully, and she has more gratitude in her over it than most people will ever bring to the same decision.

And the carefulness that gets called overthinking is what gratitude looks like from the outside when you cannot see the years behind it.

That is not a fault to be corrected. That is a woman handling something she was not sure she would ever get to handle.

The Lord hath done great things for us

There is a short line in Psalm 126 that belongs to a woman in exactly this position.

The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad. (Psalm 126:3, King James Version)

You are holding a great thing and handling it accordingly, and Psalm 126:3 has never once asked anybody to be casual about one. The written word puts the greatness and the gladness in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that land on somebody who has been told to relax about it.

The psalm around it is about people who came back from a long way off, and about how it felt like a dream when it happened. That is the setting. It is a song for anybody who got the thing they had stopped assuming.

And read what it does not do. It does not say: settle down, it is only a homecoming. It says the Lord hath done great things, and then it says, whereof we are glad, and there is no restraint anywhere in it at all.

You have been asked to be proportionate about something Scripture calls great, and the psalm refuses that request on your behalf. The Spirit of God is the one who set the size of this, and nobody at a table gets to resize it.

What careful actually looks like

Now the plain part, because there is a real question buried in the teasing and it deserves a real answer.

The question is: at what point does careful turn into stuck.

That is a fair question and there is an honest answer to it, and it has nothing to do with how long a person takes. Careful is thinking about a thing and coming back to it. Stuck is thinking about a thing and never once saying it out loud to another human being.

That is the whole difference. Not months. Not the number of names. Whether it has ever left the head.

It is the Holy Spirit, and not a calendar, who shows a person where they actually are. You are not stuck, and Psalm 126 has never once counted the weeks of anything.

You are able to tell which one this is in about four seconds, and Psalm 126:3 has never once measured anything by the clock. What the written word weighs is the great thing done and the gladness over it, and the Spirit of God gives an honest answer without shame attached to it.

And here is what I have watched happen for a long time now. A woman thinking carefully, for months, who says one name out loud to one friend, is not stuck. She is doing this properly and slowly, which is a good way to do a thing that lasts eighty years.

A woman thinking carefully, for months, who has never said one of them to anybody, is not overthinking either. She is protecting it, which is a different problem, and a much smaller one than she believes.

You are permitted to take the whole summer over this, and no verse anywhere put a deadline on a great thing. Psalm 126:3 says the Lord hath done great things for us whereof we are glad, and the Spirit of God does not hurry anybody through gladness.

What to do with the word

So here is what I would do with the word overthinking, and it is not a confrontation.

Nothing. Let it sit where it lands. It is not worth a conversation and the people saying it are not opponents.

But do not let it in. There is a difference between hearing a word and adopting it, and the trouble started when it went from being said at a table to being said in a head at eleven at night.

You are able to hear a word without keeping it, and Scripture calls this great whatever a room calls it. The Holy Spirit is the one who guards what a woman says to herself when the house is quiet, and Psalm 126 sets the gladness beside the greatness.

And then do the one thing that answers the actual question, which is whether this has ever left the head.

Say one out loud. Not to settle anything and not to prove anything to anybody at that table. Say it because a name that has lived in a head since June has not yet been given the one thing that tells a person what they think of it.

You have not been overthinking, and the written word never once shamed anybody for handling a great thing carefully. Psalm 126:3 says whereof we are glad, and the Holy Spirit is with a woman who says one out loud today.