Used to be a minor scale, but now I'm just a major one
When I was younger, I used to want “I am rooted, but I flow,” from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves tattooed on me; I’ve always presented as inherently contradictory and the quote embodies that tendency better than any other I’ve came across and I’ve come across a lot. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how brains works, particularly my own, because I know mine better than anybody else’s, and I’m admittedly introspective to the point of being self-obsessed. Like Simone de Beauvoir before me, I don’t think genius itself is inherent and rather is constructed, but also like Simone de Beauvoir before me, I have a certain arrogance about my intelligence that I don’t have about my beauty or kindness or lack thereof, and I’m less apologetic of it than I perhaps ought to be.
I couldn’t finish Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld since one of the bigger fears in my life is being Hillaried, of being smarter and more competent and more accomplished than my husband and loving him in spite of himself and that love for him being my downfall (I have an extravagantly overactive imagination it should be noted), but there’s a quote in that book which lives rent free in my head:
“I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my own competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull of a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn’t. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness - the loneliness of being good at something.”
When I was a freshman in college, a guy on my floor (shoutout to Ian aka “Dad” on the off chance he’s reading this) told me that dating me would be like a 6-credit PhD course that you sign up for because it seems fascinating, but you have to drop it during add-drop period because it’s too complicated and time-consuming and no matter how hard you work, you’ll never fully understand what the fuck is going on within it. A precise metaphor to be sure, and I’m sure it was meant to be insulting, but even at 18, a part of me was oddly proud at that description. I’m not good at a whole lot; I’m neither athletic nor socially adept, but I’m analytical (to a fault) with a borderline eidetic memory and uniquely good with numbers, and most of the world is not that way and despite the fact it’s made me enemies in the past, I do like that about myself.
Moreover, I’m perfectly aware that the truth of the matter is that the way I am would be much more acceptable if I didn’t look how I look. The following passage is from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Craido Perez (which I gave to my roommate for her birthday this year), and it gets at my point:
My friend and I were actually talking about this a few nights ago: the thing is, my manner of presenting would be more acceptable to society at large if I were a white male, or perhaps even less “princess-like,” and that’s my reality. I’m sharp if not mean, optimistic but not fantastical, and not really down to earth but instead, down to Venus. I sometimes joke that I’m also the type of woman that’s attractive to men who don’t have a type because I’m unremarkably pretty and reasonably stylish, but nothing to write home about and I’m fine with it. Don’t get me wrong, things could obviously be worse like I’m not complaining about how I look or fishing for compliments, but it does grate that people assume I’m simple when I’m not, and then treat me like an anathema when I reveal that in the words of my high school ex-boyfriend, I’m an onion, extremely layered, and the more layers are unraveled, the more I make people cry.
I can tell you who are the current sitting US senators from all 50 states and list out all 46 presidents in chronological (and alphabetical) order, I can explain how confidence intervals and probability distributions work and then apply that knowledge to explain how Bernie Sanders got blown out of two consecutive Democratic primaries, I can recite every scandal faced by most major (and many minor) Hollywood stars of the last 59 years, and I can multiply three digit numbers in my head. However, I cried my way through high school and college physics (shoutout to my ex-boyfriend for saving my E&M grade), I have a knack for accidentally saying incredibly mean (but objectively true) things, and well, I’m not nearly as comfortable in social situations as I wish I was.
All that being said, I’ve come to terms with myself more or less. I’m never going to be cool in a traditional sense and I’m always going to bring up obscure facts about people and things that nobody wanted to know but maybe that’s a charm in itself, or so I’ve been told. Acceptance is a skill I wish I was better at, of myself more than anybody else, but I guess I’m still a work in progress and that’s the bottom line.