A nerd's nerd.
I sunk into my awkward phase.
Some people blaze through it, and they emerge from the other side in a week or a month as a mob of tall, blonde amazons, perfectly sculpted and glowing. One day in late spring they are adorable baby-faced ten year olds. A summer of roller-skating and bike-riding passes on squeaky wings, and then they arrive at school in the fall with long, tanned limbs and almost-adult smiles.
I sunk into my awkward phase like a nearly-porous rock sinking into a swamp.
I was an energetic and friendly little girl. My second grade teacher moved everyone in her class around me in an attempt to find someone with whom I would not hold a conversation. Even the bullies were not safe from my ramblings. I wasn't ugly. I was even kind of cute. Not curly, blonde hair and rosy cheeks cute, but cute nevertheless.
Then something began to change. First came the braces, then the glasses, and so on - insult piled upon insult - until I was stooped with plastic and metal fixatives. I slowly withdrew into a strange shyness that I can't explain even now. I ate lunch in the English teachers' classrooms, year after year, in order to avoid the horror of seeking acceptance at some cruel adolescent lunch table. God bless the English teachers of the world. We must have all had the same experiences in middle and high school.
I remember once, in the seventh grade, hidden behind a desk as I bent to pick up a book. Two girls, both belonging to the nerd class, were making jokes about me, not realizing that I was there. I remained bent, waiting for them to leave. It remains one of those memories that I revisit unintentionally. Even the nerds thought I was a nerd.
And still, I wouldn't change a moment of it because I'm one helluva woman now.
Some people blaze through it, and they emerge from the other side in a week or a month as a mob of tall, blonde amazons, perfectly sculpted and glowing. One day in late spring they are adorable baby-faced ten year olds. A summer of roller-skating and bike-riding passes on squeaky wings, and then they arrive at school in the fall with long, tanned limbs and almost-adult smiles.
I sunk into my awkward phase like a nearly-porous rock sinking into a swamp.
I was an energetic and friendly little girl. My second grade teacher moved everyone in her class around me in an attempt to find someone with whom I would not hold a conversation. Even the bullies were not safe from my ramblings. I wasn't ugly. I was even kind of cute. Not curly, blonde hair and rosy cheeks cute, but cute nevertheless.
Then something began to change. First came the braces, then the glasses, and so on - insult piled upon insult - until I was stooped with plastic and metal fixatives. I slowly withdrew into a strange shyness that I can't explain even now. I ate lunch in the English teachers' classrooms, year after year, in order to avoid the horror of seeking acceptance at some cruel adolescent lunch table. God bless the English teachers of the world. We must have all had the same experiences in middle and high school.
I remember once, in the seventh grade, hidden behind a desk as I bent to pick up a book. Two girls, both belonging to the nerd class, were making jokes about me, not realizing that I was there. I remained bent, waiting for them to leave. It remains one of those memories that I revisit unintentionally. Even the nerds thought I was a nerd.
And still, I wouldn't change a moment of it because I'm one helluva woman now.
posted by Autumn at 12:38 PM
2 Comments:
Um...do me a favor and tell me what my life is gonna be like cause you seem to have already lived it. I was a sub-level reject in high school, and now my wife complains that I am too outgoing and gregarious.
Frankly, I think that the experience of being a reject in youth prepares a person for greatness in adulthood. As a reject, you are under no restrictions, since you have already failed to qualify under the terms of the "quality folk." And you are bound by no constrictions, as no one cares what becomes of you or even acknowledges your existence. As such, you are absolutely free to think and believe the exact opposite of everyone else in the world. (Einstein would agree with me here, but his science teacher would not. Who do you trust?)
Furthermore, having been solitary fringe-dwellers, we develop our own standards. People who grow up in herds, having been accepted and having developed a taste for acceptance, have a difficult time creating their own unique standards. A person might say, "Well, he does X amount of work, so I'll do X also." Or, "Jones donated Y amount of his time to such and such a cause, so I suppose I should too." But we don't worry about how well or poorly Jones and his crowd work. We set our own bars, usually much higher than theirs. (Which is why we are almost universally neurotic as a people...yes! We are a people! A nation of misfits strewn across the globe! Somewhere in Saigon a young girl is sitting in her literature teacher's classroom eating lunch and wondering why no one notices she's missing!)
Who knows what will ever become of us in the end? In the end, I don't think it matters so much. I'm a firm believer in the idea that each moment is just the next moment. Maybe you'll do something great, maybe you'll just do something. But either way is perfectly fine since we geeks realize that impressing people is over-rated and not nearly as much fun as dumb-founding them.
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