A word or two about my struggles with words
If it didn’t feel impossible, we wouldn’t have to dream it, would we?
For better or worse, I’ve always had a prove-them-wrong kind of attitude. It was around before that night in the converted ball room of the student center where everyone gave a standing ovation after a performance of a play I directed. But it was on full display that night. We had spent the last six weeks getting the actors through a sort of boot camp and unleashed them on the stage like wild beasts, and one or two of them may have been tripping balls off, but the point was — The so called established geniuses of our class who were all much cooler than me and would go on to have international success in their fields were all standing. And I was like, ‘how about them apples.”
It’s an ugly unflattering thing, I know. Jealousy fueled by insecurity that in turn fuels jealousy. I suffered from an almost insane inferiority complex and desire to be accepted. Maybe it was because secretly I thought everyone in the art scene held a suspicion that I didn’t really get into NU on my scholastic merit. That I had quacked my way in because I was just in a major motion picture and the program was gambling on me being a big alumni.
I knew that everyone knew I didn’t belong. I had a much lower SAT score than anyone in my class. I’m pretty sure it was three hundred points below the mean. And because of that score, I had to take remedial English classes my Freshman year to learn how to write coherently.
What a strange phenomenon to be gifted at a thing, feel a desire to use that thing, and spend most of your waking hours doing it, but being told you don’t make sense.
Looking back, I think my brain moved faster than my hand. It still does. But I have learned to get them more synchronized by listening and following my heart. And by surrounding myself with people who want the best for me and my work and can help me get there. I used to resist that kind of help, afraid everyone thought I was stupid, but eventually, and I mean very very eventually, I embraced it.
I’m sure I should have been diagnosed with some kind of learning disability, but it was the 80s and 90s and we didn’t go into that shit much back then. It wasn’t thought much of as a wider spectrum of things, but more a binary cut off valve with a clear demarcation line on who fit in where.
Our school had a special needs campus and those kids, who we rarely saw, were other-ed, given their own wing, so we lived in terror of being outcast-ed. Or I did. Friends and fellow students who had come from the other side of the fire door were treated differently. Cruelly.
I knew we were being evaluated and scores were being sent down state, probably to Springfied, where a slide rule measured whether I was gifted, or troubled, and broke if you were both.
I’ve just never been test smart. I never saw the point. I was too curious to learn if learning meant test preparation. My best friends were an old set of encyclopedias that were a wedding gift for my parents because that’s what people did back then. I spent my days searching through those, and a collection of art books my mom stole from her days as a volunteer picture lady, and whenever I could, I would put one of a set of classic comedy albums in the corner of of our entertainment center on the record player.
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