Hi Chickies.
I’m back. This is back. You are back, reading. Did we ever really leave? Were we afraid to be the next new update because revealing something about ourselves takes away the power of someone finding out? Are we really entitled to the celebrity our facebook popularity spoonfeeds us? That’s thick.
I’m updating.
Why?
Because my life is awesome and you all have to know about it.
Since I was any kind of blip on your friend-dar … in grade ten, from 2004, 6 years ago… I’ve felt overshadowed by your – every one of you – sense of self, motivation, clear-headedness, creativity, vision, and genuine good-heartedness. It didn’t matter so much at the time because I hardly went to school and it was great to be part of what we ended up being whenever I was there and I had my thing being an athlete. Since high school though, your big-ness has thickened my original self-loathing to a sort of… molasses. Don’t think I’m some kind of emotional wreck because of you. I only questioned my every move (question every move?), denied I was ever good enough to pursue anything gainful, and haunted my thoughts with everything I couldn’t do as well as you. Feel nothing but proud of yourselves for making me who I am now, and I mean that in the with most polar-opposite sincerity to the sarcasm it exudes because presently I don’t think I could be happier. Ever. Until I meet my children.
Because I graduated high school with a brain trained for the one thing my condition-ending-in-itis prevented me doing, my molasses crystallized. I wasn’t ready to learn (and now I can see that I spent and continue to spend a lot of grief being afraid of knowledge) and I wasn’t interested in any prospective studies I qualified for having taken courses for amusement rather than foundation. In that, had done something stupid, and I’m glad I paid the time it cost to fix it and I rationalize it to this day by saying, “I never regret doing something, I regret not doing something,” even though I’m not entirely sure what that means.
Being certain is either very dangerous or very stupid, but I’m not sure.
So I decided to write about it instead. I thought publishing literature on how my growing up training for an athletic designation translated so dramatically into educational black holes. If it didn’t help me critically analyze myself it might at least help fund my education, I thought, and so I have since written roughly a hundred thousand words, starting with, “My first dream job is to be The Beatles. My second dream job is to be a pilot. My third dream job? Philosopher. The problem? Too late, too late, and too late… respectively.” And I never changed that part because it was exactly how I felt, in concrete terms. I was too late to have lived in the sixties and grown up with the most empowering culture in recent history, I was too late to re-do every technical course I took in high school to get my C’s up to A’s, and I was too late to enter a 400-years-dead profession. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a career or if I wanted a life, or if I wanted to be creative or if I wanted to be practical. I had grown up comparing myself to others in terms of skill (she got this when she was nine, and I’m nine, and I can’t do it, so either I get better fast or I’m not as good as her). Because you all had (at least seemed to in my eyes) achieved high educational statuses or developed a high-pressure motivation to channel into developing your passions or simply weren’t as disturbed by not knowing as I was, I felt that the letters I got at the end described me because I couldn’t, and I considered myself seriously average. I felt my peer group were the doctors and scientists and not achieving that level of academia reinforced my feeling of being subpar.
And I proceeded to waste time actively liking and pursuing nothing and doing (and hating doing) what I was told. I think my greatest hindrance was being shy or afraid of knowing things. To this day I know all of your birthdays and all of your home telephone numbers, and all those of my near and distant relatives. I know my drivers’ licence number, passport number, social insurance number, credit card number, bank account numbers, student numbers, and I can recite π to the 29th digit after the decimal point. It is simply a strange skill I possess along with the ability to draw perfect freehand circles but since memorizing long strings of numbers and values corresponding with a date or person served me no purpose in figuring out who I was I tucked it away and pretended I didn’t know the answer to questions people asked, because being the only one in a group knowing the answer to something tends to draw more questions than I am prepared to answer. What also tends to draw questions that make me want to get vaporized by aliens are those that come when you respond, “actually I’m not going to school at the moment,” to shocked and judging eyes, it turns out.
Anyways, I continued to sabotage my happiness by applying for programs beyond what I thought my truncated grades could reach. I think it was a combination of getting a credit card and the feeling of needing to reinforce my idea of feeling useless to the world around me whenever I wasn’t accepted, or the feeling of potential when I was accepted. It was all quite a grand waste of time and money. Perhaps it was my mother’s incessant request for updates, or my dad’s silence on the subject of me dropping school like it’s hot. Maybe it was just the constant grief of meeting new people and having them ask me what I was going to school for and not having an answer, maybe it was my sister graduating and the prospect of her continuing to dominate the academic praise my parents never got to give me or maybe I finally grew up and permitted myself an opinion. To all the girls I grew up with: I didn’t like the Easy-Bake Oven or the dollhouse or those weird horse things. Those days we played with fire, rode our bikes in the rain or listened to rock and roll while playing hotwheels were the greatest. Machines fascinate me. Our bodies are machines. Cities are machines. We use machines in the city with our bodies! The achievements of science – blow – my – mind. Manipulating death and gravity? Awesome. Describing physiology and assigning values to characteristics we can see and feel? Brilliant. Science is my art. It is understanding things I sense and categorizing things I experience.
For a while I thought I had to choose: science, or art? Practical or theoretical? Instead, I found out how to apply artistic creativity to scientific methods and learning practical skill by applying relevant theories and what’s really great is that after a bunch of tests and interviews, that all-encompassing field of study is dream job # 2, except that I’m not too late. What was almost too late was the call I got Friday letting me know I had been accepted, and that I can deal with (or maybe it was that I got an acceptance letter from the Nursing program at Douglas on Friday as well, which almost called for an anxiety walk). Now I know what it feels like to be you guys, confident in what I will be and motivated to be what I expect of myself. It’s great on this side of the… depression. Things are sunny and real. I can’t wait to spend so much money and so much time learning. I understand now, the things sacrificed in the pursuit of education and that ideal person somewhere far off, vaguely us-shaped with maybe a nicer hat. I had gotten so expert at dealing with things not working out that this concept of not-failing still has that new-feeling smell. It’s wonderful. I am so high on it.
I can’t wait for my kids to tell people that I fly airplanes.
I spent an hour bloody blogging instead of persuading institutions to give me scholarships. But for the sake of two years from now, based on two years ago, I need to know how I felt exactly now and being quarter-past terrified is my new favourite feeling.
First flight on April Fools’!
Fort Nimbus, originally uploaded by box of lettuce.
