Amber Sweet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ambersweet) wrote2010-01-11 03:14 pm
ambersweet) wrote2010-01-11 03:14 pm
Entry tags:
"But you're so much smarter than that!"
I'm smart. I've always been smart. And by this I mean academically - I pick up on concepts easily, ace tests without studying, write A papers in the two hours before they're due. I don't say this to sound pretentious or anything, it's just the way it is. And I'm pretty sure that most of you guys are the same way, because I tend to make friends with smart people.
I had this idea that university would be different from high school, because the people who were there would want to be there, they would be clever and well-read and intelligent, and oh the horrible disappointment when that turned out to be wrong. There were more smart kids in college; but most of my classmates were just as dumb and annoying as they'd been in high school.
I think that's why I dropped out the first time. I mean, what was the point? Maybe if I was out in the working world, surrounded by adults, it would be better. Of course, this didn't happen either. I worked a lot of secretarial jobs where I was smarter than my co-workers and my bosses; I added extra duties to my job just so I would have something to do; I ate lunch alone, because I didn't want to talk about boyfriends and sitcoms and children like my co-workers. Most of these people were just as boring and stupid as the people I'd known in school. When I was eight and ten and twelve, adults were smart, because they knew at least as much as I did - but I learned more and grew up and they didn't change.
Eventually I went back to school, attended for a while, dropped out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I failed classes, not because I couldn't do the work, but because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't see the point. And on some level I was afraid of finishing my degree, because then what?
There are things that no one ever teaches you when you're "the smart kid." About the drawbacks.
Most everybody knows about the external drawbacks - the constant rejection from other kids (teasing, bullying, violence, being ostracized for being too weird); pressure from parents and teachers to perform up to standard.
But most of the issues with being smart are internal. I am my own worst critic, I give myself impossible standards, I have to sit here being absolutely bored to tears while a teacher explains what seems to me to be a blindingly obvious concept for the third time to my classmates.
Eventually I think every single smart kid hits their academic Waterloo, and flails, and fails, and rips themselves up over it, and has no idea what to do. Because if everything comes easy, you don't know how to study, you don't know how to "apply yourself" to learn anything, and everybody else in the world looks at you and goes "WTF is your problem?" because they just have no damned clue what it feels like. And it doesn't matter if everybody else has to work harder for everything, struggle is struggle and pain is pain when it comes down to it. I was actually talking about this exact thing with someone else the other day, because he's taking a subject that he just doesn't understand and he has no idea how to learn something because he's never had to try.
And what it is is frustrating. Frustrating for someone who is so often frustrated by everything in the world (if nothing else, by how damned slow everyone else is, Jesus Christ, are you people stupid, how do you not grasp this obviously simple concept? You must be stupid). My Waterloo was the times tables. I couldn't memorize them. Couldn't. Tried, and tried, and cried and screamed and couldn't do it, and my parents were convinced that I was being lazy or obstinate because I was so smart that it never occurred to them that maybe my brain didn't work with numbers, at all, ever. I did arithmetic on my fingers until I was in my twenties, and the only reason I managed to memorize my times tables is because my dad found a tape with them set to music and memorized that.
And then there's this crushing fear of failure, and the urge to just... blow it up, because there's no way you could ever be that good, as good as they expect you to be, more, as good as you expect you to be, there is no way you could ever live up to your own expectations because you expect you to be perfect. God, do I know this one. So many things started and not finished because if I didn't finish them no one can tell me that it wasn't good enough. Hell, I've started writing livejournal comments, got distracted or bored or too intimidated by the idea of sounding stupid in front of a community of readers, and just erased them. I told myself I wasn't going to get up until I finished this post because if I stopped I'd never get through it and it was fucking well important.
One day I stumbled across the descriptor "failed perfectionist," and yeah, it totally sounded like me. This idea that if you never finish anything, it's not a failure. If you procrastinate something until the last minute, it won't matter if you don't do well on it, because obviously if you had more time to do it, you could have done better (which leads to that vicious cycle in which you discover that you can produce an A-quality essay in an hour so why bother taking any more time than that?). And revising something is boring, and completing a novel is boring, because once you've figured out where the story ends, who cares if anyone else can read it? You know how it ends, and nobody else really cares, because nobody else has to know it exists. Between the frustration and the low tolerance for boredom and the fear of failure, you never get anything done.
In November I wrote a novel. It's a pretty good novel and the people who were reading it enjoyed it, and if I hadn't had that feedback and the encouragement from Jack I would've stopped 8,000 words from the end in the last week of November because that was when it got hard and tedious and I wanted to cry every time I sat down. Yelling at myself did nothing but make me more frustrated. What actually did work for me (and God I felt like a stupid little kid for it) was rewarding myself. I wrote for 15 minutes (timed!) and then took a break. I hung out in the writingsprints chat room, where they do that too, and I had an external force making me start after my break. I finished the chapter and walked around the room. I hit x goal and went for ice cream. For me, since everything had to be easy for me to want to do it, I had to find ways to make it easy and fun or at least bearable.
So what I really had to do was start from something (you're smart and things are easy for you) and sort of turn it into a disability, something I needed to compensate for. Like - some people learn from lectures, some people learn by reading, some people learn by doing, and if you have one of those learning styles and find yourself in a situation where you have to learn something in a different learning style, you have to compensate. In order to finish something, it has to be easy and fun. How do I make this tedious task easy and fun? Well, I can break it into pieces.... Etc. I also have to keep reminding myself that I am my own worst critic and everyone ever will think this is better than I do. Everyone likes me better than I like myself. Maybe they'd like me less if they saw inside my head but they don't and they never will that is enough.
And thinking about all this, and having this conversation and similar ones with several friends at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that what we maybe need is a community (livejournal, dreamwidth, in-person, on AIM, hybrid sort of community, ideally) where the smart kids who never did as well as they were told they should, who "Never Lived Up To Their Potential," and GOD do I hate that phrase, can get together and help each other. Share their coping mechanisms and their breakdowns and remind each other that it doesn't matter if you don't have a PhD and a six-figure income, you can be happy anyway.
Because none of us have the first damned clue how to cope with being smarter than everyone else; nobody teaches you how to do that, and nobody understands when you're struggling with it - and I've figured out some ways to make myself work, and I want to share them, and I'm sure other people have too, and that way we don't have to totally reinvent the wheel individually and separately. I want a place where I can go where people will say to me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY SMART FAILURE OUT THERE. In fact, honey, you're not a fucking failure at all.
What do you guys think?
I deliberately left this unlocked. If you know other people like this, feel free to invite them in. If we get a bunch of smart kids together, I'm sure we can figure out something awesome to do.
I had this idea that university would be different from high school, because the people who were there would want to be there, they would be clever and well-read and intelligent, and oh the horrible disappointment when that turned out to be wrong. There were more smart kids in college; but most of my classmates were just as dumb and annoying as they'd been in high school.
I think that's why I dropped out the first time. I mean, what was the point? Maybe if I was out in the working world, surrounded by adults, it would be better. Of course, this didn't happen either. I worked a lot of secretarial jobs where I was smarter than my co-workers and my bosses; I added extra duties to my job just so I would have something to do; I ate lunch alone, because I didn't want to talk about boyfriends and sitcoms and children like my co-workers. Most of these people were just as boring and stupid as the people I'd known in school. When I was eight and ten and twelve, adults were smart, because they knew at least as much as I did - but I learned more and grew up and they didn't change.
Eventually I went back to school, attended for a while, dropped out again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I failed classes, not because I couldn't do the work, but because I couldn't be bothered. I didn't see the point. And on some level I was afraid of finishing my degree, because then what?
There are things that no one ever teaches you when you're "the smart kid." About the drawbacks.
Most everybody knows about the external drawbacks - the constant rejection from other kids (teasing, bullying, violence, being ostracized for being too weird); pressure from parents and teachers to perform up to standard.
But most of the issues with being smart are internal. I am my own worst critic, I give myself impossible standards, I have to sit here being absolutely bored to tears while a teacher explains what seems to me to be a blindingly obvious concept for the third time to my classmates.
Eventually I think every single smart kid hits their academic Waterloo, and flails, and fails, and rips themselves up over it, and has no idea what to do. Because if everything comes easy, you don't know how to study, you don't know how to "apply yourself" to learn anything, and everybody else in the world looks at you and goes "WTF is your problem?" because they just have no damned clue what it feels like. And it doesn't matter if everybody else has to work harder for everything, struggle is struggle and pain is pain when it comes down to it. I was actually talking about this exact thing with someone else the other day, because he's taking a subject that he just doesn't understand and he has no idea how to learn something because he's never had to try.
And what it is is frustrating. Frustrating for someone who is so often frustrated by everything in the world (if nothing else, by how damned slow everyone else is, Jesus Christ, are you people stupid, how do you not grasp this obviously simple concept? You must be stupid). My Waterloo was the times tables. I couldn't memorize them. Couldn't. Tried, and tried, and cried and screamed and couldn't do it, and my parents were convinced that I was being lazy or obstinate because I was so smart that it never occurred to them that maybe my brain didn't work with numbers, at all, ever. I did arithmetic on my fingers until I was in my twenties, and the only reason I managed to memorize my times tables is because my dad found a tape with them set to music and memorized that.
And then there's this crushing fear of failure, and the urge to just... blow it up, because there's no way you could ever be that good, as good as they expect you to be, more, as good as you expect you to be, there is no way you could ever live up to your own expectations because you expect you to be perfect. God, do I know this one. So many things started and not finished because if I didn't finish them no one can tell me that it wasn't good enough. Hell, I've started writing livejournal comments, got distracted or bored or too intimidated by the idea of sounding stupid in front of a community of readers, and just erased them. I told myself I wasn't going to get up until I finished this post because if I stopped I'd never get through it and it was fucking well important.
One day I stumbled across the descriptor "failed perfectionist," and yeah, it totally sounded like me. This idea that if you never finish anything, it's not a failure. If you procrastinate something until the last minute, it won't matter if you don't do well on it, because obviously if you had more time to do it, you could have done better (which leads to that vicious cycle in which you discover that you can produce an A-quality essay in an hour so why bother taking any more time than that?). And revising something is boring, and completing a novel is boring, because once you've figured out where the story ends, who cares if anyone else can read it? You know how it ends, and nobody else really cares, because nobody else has to know it exists. Between the frustration and the low tolerance for boredom and the fear of failure, you never get anything done.
In November I wrote a novel. It's a pretty good novel and the people who were reading it enjoyed it, and if I hadn't had that feedback and the encouragement from Jack I would've stopped 8,000 words from the end in the last week of November because that was when it got hard and tedious and I wanted to cry every time I sat down. Yelling at myself did nothing but make me more frustrated. What actually did work for me (and God I felt like a stupid little kid for it) was rewarding myself. I wrote for 15 minutes (timed!) and then took a break. I hung out in the writingsprints chat room, where they do that too, and I had an external force making me start after my break. I finished the chapter and walked around the room. I hit x goal and went for ice cream. For me, since everything had to be easy for me to want to do it, I had to find ways to make it easy and fun or at least bearable.
So what I really had to do was start from something (you're smart and things are easy for you) and sort of turn it into a disability, something I needed to compensate for. Like - some people learn from lectures, some people learn by reading, some people learn by doing, and if you have one of those learning styles and find yourself in a situation where you have to learn something in a different learning style, you have to compensate. In order to finish something, it has to be easy and fun. How do I make this tedious task easy and fun? Well, I can break it into pieces.... Etc. I also have to keep reminding myself that I am my own worst critic and everyone ever will think this is better than I do. Everyone likes me better than I like myself. Maybe they'd like me less if they saw inside my head but they don't and they never will that is enough.
And thinking about all this, and having this conversation and similar ones with several friends at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that what we maybe need is a community (livejournal, dreamwidth, in-person, on AIM, hybrid sort of community, ideally) where the smart kids who never did as well as they were told they should, who "Never Lived Up To Their Potential," and GOD do I hate that phrase, can get together and help each other. Share their coping mechanisms and their breakdowns and remind each other that it doesn't matter if you don't have a PhD and a six-figure income, you can be happy anyway.
Because none of us have the first damned clue how to cope with being smarter than everyone else; nobody teaches you how to do that, and nobody understands when you're struggling with it - and I've figured out some ways to make myself work, and I want to share them, and I'm sure other people have too, and that way we don't have to totally reinvent the wheel individually and separately. I want a place where I can go where people will say to me, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY SMART FAILURE OUT THERE. In fact, honey, you're not a fucking failure at all.
What do you guys think?
I deliberately left this unlocked. If you know other people like this, feel free to invite them in. If we get a bunch of smart kids together, I'm sure we can figure out something awesome to do.
no subject
But everywhere else? Yeah, still the smart kid.
My Waterloo was thermodynamics. FOUR TIMES. But that bitch didn't defeat me!
I'm kind of glad I went into a major that challenged everyone, smart kid or not, in some way. And I do mean everyone. Even the baby geniuses had some ego blows.
I guess my coping mechanism is to treat everything like an engineering problem. XD What are my givens? What are my tools? How fucking many math errors can I make and not kill someone?
no subject
XD Sounds like me trying to balance the register.
no subject
Having met civil engineers and knowing they're worse than me on average, this is why I'm terrified of bridges!
no subject
My Waterloo was the times tables. I couldn't memorize them. Couldn't. Tried, and tried, and cried and screamed and couldn't do it, and my parents were convinced that I was being lazy or obstinate because I was so smart that it never occurred to them that maybe my brain didn't work with numbers, at all, ever. I did arithmetic on my fingers until I was in my twenties, and the only reason I managed to memorize my times tables is because my dad found a tape with them set to music and memorized that.
Oh lord... Me and Math to this day have a very love/hate relationship. I remember being plunked down for an hour every night being made to do flash cards: not just multiplication either. At the age of freaking SEVEN they had me doing addition and subtraction.
And ya know what? My little right-sided, art-heavy, visual-learning brainz DID. NOT. GET. IT. To me, numbers are meaningless shapes. TO THIS DAY I absolutely CANNOT do anything more complicated than single-digit computations in my head (and sometimes I even screw that up). Having to sit through these nightly torture sessions did nothing but embitter me towards arithmetic and convince me that this was just something I would never be able to do without aid of at the very least a pencil, paper and my fingers.
You've got one up on me. I STILL count on my hands. x_x (But at least I bloody well know how to compensate: calculator plz.)
I blame about 50% of my math!fail on never being taught arithmetic in a way that I could understand it. "Supplemental learning programs" for kids who sucked at certain subjects would not come along until the mid/late 90s and I was already in middle/high school by then.
The thing about math, is that if you don't get the basics, you're pretty much screwed on anything more advanced. This is why I understood what I was supposed to do with the numbers in algebra, but I still got every single problem wrong because I couldn't add two and two to save my life. This is also why geometry never made sense because to me there WERE no concrete numerical rules. In my world, what two plus two equaled changed on an hourly basis. The danged numbers would never hold still for me.
Also, I KNEW how to study- vocabulary, concepts, history, geography. My brain will take that in no problem. But I could never figure out how the bloody HELL I was supposed to study for a math test.
Wow this got long and ranty... ^^;
Er...basically I hear and feel what you're saying. I've been there. Am still there to a degree. It's not that we're "weird" per se, we're just operating on a higher level of brain function. ;P
no subject
I just can't memorize numbers to save my soul. Phone numbers, addresses, anything that involves numbers - it took me three solid years of college to memorize my social security number, and when the community college I switched to later started using a totally different number for your ID number I just wanted to cry. The only way I got out of third grade with the timed multiplication tests (the bane of my existence) was that my dad found a tape with the times tables set to music, and I can remember anything set to music, whether it's the times tables; the states and their capitals (that was sixth grade); the nations of the world; the fact that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees; or that my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and thereby my life is better than yours.
no subject
XD Yeah, me too. Schoolhouse Rock: the Multiplication Edition, yo.
no subject
*terrorist fist bump for fellow artsy, right-brained smart kids!*
no subject
no subject
Your milkshake brings more than the boys to the yard. :P
no subject
This was about where I started shouting "YES YES YES!" That was me from about sixth grade onwards. -_- Miserable. Technically, you know, I didn't even graduate high school 'cause I couldn't be arsed to pass my classes. Homeschooling being what it is, though, I faked it.
Because if everything comes easy, you don't know how to study, you don't know how to "apply yourself" to learn anything, and everybody else in the world looks at you and goes "WTF is your problem?" because they just have no damned clue what it feels like.
And THIS is part of why I failed the higher maths classes, and physics. Maths aren't my strong suit, though I'm generally not bad, but once I was getting into the high algebras, and the complicated physics equations, I just... couldn't do it. I don't know how to memorize things on purpose, really - the best I can do is for songs or scripts, when I just play them over and over until they stick, but that's involving music and acting and stuff that doesn't apply to maths or sciences because they're different parts of the brain and just saying a premise (or writing an equation) over and over again does very little for my retention. I just don't know how to study - I just know how I deal with new things, and if it doesn't click right away... I don't know what to do. I've never managed to figure it out.
Between the frustration and the low tolerance for boredom and the fear of failure, you never get anything done.
That whole paragraph really, is... exactly my problem. God, I have SO MANY creative projects that I think could be really and truly good and maybe even publishable if I could ever finish, but I can't. I always say I wanna be like Seanan McGuire or Amanda Palmer when I "grow up", but it's less because they're prolific and famous (at least in their own circles) and more because I see them set out to do things and finish. I want that. I want to not be afraid of that.
Also? I think a comm would be awesome and wonderful and I would totally be all over that. Someplace I can go and flail about feeling like a failure when I'm working at a supermarket when I should've gone to an Ivy League school. Because I don't like flailing like that on my journal because I have friends who would look at that and feel like failures because they wouldn't have been able to get into an Ivy League school AT ALL and I don't want that.
no subject
As a fellow Homeschooler, I gotta add my two cents. My Homeschool years were hardkore. I learned more in those five years (8th thru 12th) than I ever did during the rest of my academic career put together- this includes college.
I know it's different in every state and every family. My mom was a licensed teacher and we had to appease the state of Pennsylvania. I understand it is still THE MOST obnoxious state in which to try to homeschool your kids.
no subject
-_- It was sort of horrific.
I will say that I ENVY the kids whose parents didn't expect them to basically do exactly the same thing they'd been failing so hard at in "normal" schooling, and who got them engaged and really put in an effort. My mom, unfortunately, seemed to take the "high schoolers can be more independent in their education" to mean that I could do it all on my own.
no subject
Mom used a mix of Abekka and BJU afterwards. I actually rather liked them, but then,
no subject
no subject
It was the first time I'd had something like that, and considering the text books I had in school were new when my MOM went there...yeah. It was nice to have an upgrade. ;P
Bummer about the Nutty!Fundie thing. --; I'm afraid the zeal sometimes overrides the intention. :\
Further edit because I'm st00pid and didn't see that last paragraph
Yeah, for me, I was actually homeschooled all through public school- I just didn't have a label for it.
I would go to school, get beat up, be utterly confounded by the teachers, come home, and my mom would translate it all for me into terms I could understand.
I forget at what point she said ro me over yet another 11PM math grind "Ya know...we COULD do this ONCE and be done with it."
no subject
This seems to be something that all "smart kids" have in common - at least, it's something I've heard consistently complained about. I can't memorize things unless they're set to music or are words I'm interested in or just hear enough times (by the time the show went up, I had every line of the whole damned script memorized). Formulae? Forget it.
The other part of that, and what may be the root of the problem, is Why should I memorize that? It's written right here. "Because you have to" is NOT AN ANSWER. As long as I understand the concept or the theory, why does it matter if I have the formula committed to memory? If I were a physicist doing a problem, I would have a fucking book I could look the formula up in (or nowadays, it'd be in a computer). I wouldn't have to have the formulas memorized to do my job. I'm not a physicist or a mathematician, and I will never ever need to use the Pythagorean Theorem, and if I did, I could LOOK IT UP, so why do I have to memorize it? Come up with an actual reason that doesn't involve you being a condescending asshole teacher and get back to me. Yeah, I didn't think so.
no subject
I run into that a lot on a day-to-day basis.
Like...my work sched. I have it written down and programmed into my cell phone (because I know it WILL NOT stick in my head). And if I can't GET to where I wrote down said info, people then get angry at me. Guh.
You can't win for loosin'. :P
no subject
no subject
no subject
And, FUCK. Academics I'm fine, never make below a B in even the godsdamn A&P classes that are rigged, but.... fucking jobs, like the bank.
Learning to process out closed loans was my fucking Waterloo. Because it was all simple fucking concepts, but it was a thousand of them and I just didn't give a CRAP about the work. Done is done, over is over, closed is closed, right? Wrrrrrong. Others cared. Because they weren't smart enough to care about anything else EXCEPT that. Processing loans was their point of "living up to potential."
And, yes, I hate that phrase with a passion. Because it makes me feel like a dumbass loser for only have an associate's degree and my best accomplishments so far being a marriage (with problems, as you see) and a bright, healthy kid..... even though a lot of people would KILL for what I have familywise.
Gaaaaaaah, I love you. <3
no subject
"Oh, it's policy."
Head. Desk.
At my last job, we would all attend training classes to learn new iterations of federal law or whatever, and I would end up explaining it all again to my boss. Nice lady, but so intensely frustrating to find yourself in a situation where you're smarter than your superiors.
no subject
I swear, I ran into that in school, too, in the HONORS programs and... after that many years in the system? Surprise, surprise, I'm great at "critical thinking" but suck at Occam's Razor.
We teach our children SO WELL, let me tell you...
no subject
"Oh, it's policy."
Haha~~~~~~~~~~~~~~n.
HAHA~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~N.
Oh god I had the worst problem with that. And because of the ADD (it exists!) - yeah, guess who's oppositional-defiant nao.
Hooray for being a nonlinear thinker! It's great in drama classes and wonderful ANYWHERE that you don't have to be a protocol jockey...but wow, step outside those carefully scribed boundaries sometimes and you're in for a world of pain.
no subject
no subject
So much of what you describe is how I feel, but you know that.
How does the boy who can do everything suddenly cope with the fact that there is something I am not immediately good at? No amount of knowledge makes me understand the aural difference between a minor seventh and a major sixth, and nothing changes that.
I don't know how to study at all. I have never needed to study. With the exception of AP, chances are, I will never actually care enough to study. I will always write essays <24 hours before they are due because that's how I roll.
I gave up a scholarship to the best school (back home) in the US because I did not give a shit. ACTUALLY not much has changed, I still don't really care, but I decided to do this shit here, so...
But AP just defeats me. I've never failed a class I *tried* at before. I've spent hours crying over it, how I'm supposed to be better, supposed to be SMART and ajskfjhaskhgsjkfg.
You know all this. I'm sorry. Now I'm just talking.
BUT.
I support this idea, because there are things no one ever teaches you when you're the smart kid.
Lately, I feel like...really awkward and teenage. And okay so I'm a teenager but I'm not supposed to be awkward. 8|
no subject
Being "smart" means that everything should be easy for you, and you have to learn to keep the appearance of being smart, and trying to keep that up is hard when everyone around you won't forgive your failures because you're too "smart" to sometimes just, not get things.
I remember reading an article about how the behavior of children was different. Kids that were told that they succeeded because they were "smart" often found ways of cheating for the results, but kids that were told that they were "hard-working", worked harder. "Smart" kids feel the need to keep the label, because their self-worth was tied to it and they weren't allowed to fail. Those who were just hard-working may have gotten lower results at times, but they were better able to improve their scores and were sometimes able to surpass the "smart" kids. The problem is that smart kids get the idea that you're either smart or your not, whereas hardworking ones learn early on that their effort is what counts.
Unfortunately, we live in a results-centric society. How can you prove you worked hard on something you failed at?
no subject
I suspect this is my major stumbling block for going back to school, and it's not something you can really talk about with most people without sounding all douchey. :\
no subject
And the internal critic rises to like Gojira form the fucking SEA when we don't get something.
I hear you on the times tables, too. My dad wrote me a simple little program on our old cassette-data-readin' commodore to teach me the dang things (he was awesome in so many ways but then he'd turn around and freak and freak and freak if I did poorly).
And randomly - have you ever had someone up and decide that you couldn't have been bullied? I've honestly had people go 'oh but that doesn't really happen right you must be exaggerating' or they claim that bullying is no big deal - um, yes it is. Being slugged in the back by a little sociopath is a big deal. For some strange reason people REALLY REALLY LIKE to make believe that I can't possibly have dealt with anything beyond cottonballs, when n reality I learned to hide in bathroom stalls by standing up on the little tank pipe so the creepy girls couldn't see my feet under the stall door...
Anyway, yeah. I went to an art university (now, watch someone come along and say I'm putting on airs for mentioning this - they have before, and they know who they are, too, and they still owe me an apology I will never get) and I was amazed at the high school hipsterism persisting. Like - guys, you are being taught that the shit you are HURR HRURRing over is real, will you grow up?
That's another thing they don't warn you about. Sometimes because you're seeking more knowledge you end up more emotionally - something than your peers. You see things that affect you and you have no vocabulary, mental or verbal, for what the fuck is going on. You put two and two together and people will fall all over themselves trying to convince themselves you didn't because OH HORRORS AND JEEBUS CHRIST if you did that it means their stupidity had an affect they didn't anticipate and onward come the vapours.
Parents are proud of smart kids when they're harmless. I wasn't, so sometimes the pride was abruptly absent. I was a cranky 'why why why why' kid with attention deficit disorder (untreated until I hit 26) and associated oppositional defiant crabby. When you're a 'good kid' they love you. When you're the object of pride it's great. But if you hit a bump in the road - bullying, difficulty with a concept, etc. - you are on your own so very very quickly.
Yes, o ye skeptics, THIS DID HAPPEN TO ME. It don't matter how much you cry and scream that I was never hurt omgomgomgomg. I was. Most of us are walking wounded. And if you have trouble with that concept, skeptics, your emotional immaturity and uselessness is not my problem.
no subject
And then in seventh grade, the "popular" kids thought it would be fun to tease me about it by convincing me to say the "Sally sells seashells" tongue twister, and then laughing and repeating it over and over in exaggerated lisps.
I wasn't the good kid from about third grade onward, because I was miserable. I had no friends, and my parents thought I was lying about how much I was trying to make friends. I hated school even though my teachers were really nice, because it was so boring, and by sixth grade I just sort of... gave up. And then I got mocked and ridiculed for failing classes because I didn't do the homework, even though I got As on my tests.
I couldn't win. Either I was a "retard" with a lisp who failed everything or I was a teacher's pet and was always sucking up to the teachers for better grades.
...just to say that oh god yes you nay-sayers, we were often DEEPLY wounded.
no subject
It took a GIANT FREAKING BRUISE on my forehead to bring this to the attention of my otherwise most awesome parents. I was like "ARE YOU CONVINCED NAO?!"
They were. Dad called the offending punk's dad, who then marched said offending punk up to my house by the ear and made him apologize.
I so wish we could have done that with EVERY kid that picked on me.
no subject
Holy crap, dude.
I never thought about it that way . . . that might be the answer behind why I’ve gotten to the end point in the book I did for last year’s WriMo and have, just, blacked out. There’s literally a black hole where the story should be, that last little puzzle piece before everything is so neat and tidy and DONE. And yet . . . black hole when I sit down to it. I hesitate. Maybe it’s because I really don’t know what will happen once it’s . . . done.
I mean, if I send out application after application for MONTHS and can’t manage to get some crap job at a Starbucks, what hope do I have of attracting any interest from the hypothetical query letter I haven’t written yet, but will have to?
How deluded am I?
It’s gotten to the point where I only want a few people to know how far along I am, and even if, by some miracle, it is picked up and published I’d want to keep it a secret. I wouldn’t want anyone to know how well or how bad it does, except for writerly friends.
Also: I was often mistaken for you easy learning-types. I’m a very dyslexic, very right-brained individual whose environment was constantly trying to cram her into a left-brained box. I’m a bizarre kind of dyslexic, too: in fourth grade, I was reading at the 9th/10th grade level, but they INVENTED a low spelling level for me, I was so bad. But I also had a teacher who went, ‘Huh. This kid is really smart, and yet can’t write the simplest of words. Let’s try teaching her a different way’ and after a lot of hard work playing catch up, presto chango. I can write, as you can see. Getting to this point was NOT easy, and yet there are those whom I’ve worked with in class and in business who are so ridiculously resentful of how fast I absorb new information. I get the, 'well, it's easy for you because you're smart' crap--and they say it like IT'S A BAD THING to be smart, that I should be ashamed--and I want to punch them in the face because it was NOT EASY.
And don’t get me started on the teachers and bosses who don’t want/wouldn’t let me to do operations the way they made sense for ME. I had an awesome teacher in the seventh grade who let me do algebra as a graphic representation of black and white boxes. I was good at it and could ace the tests. But then came eight grade and sure enough I could come up with the answers, but the teacher refused to give me any credit because I couldn’t ‘show my work.’ When I showed him how my work worked, he would only give me half credit since it wasn’t the ‘correct’ way of showing ones work, so I still failed the tests. So I ended up re-learning algebra the ‘correct’ way, but could never duplicate my previous success. Never got more than a ‘B’ in math from then on out, and I can’t remember how I’d done it with the boxes, except that I know I DID.
At least with writing, you don’t have to ‘show your work.’
Which might be the reason for my hatred of outlines.