“I was home schooled.” It’s a thing I say to excuse myself, as if my presence were a sneeze. Sometimes I say it seriously, more oftentimes jokingly. I’ve used it to shrug off almost every social malady from interrupting to absent-mindedness. The problem is you forget that everyone already knows some form of your loneliness; everyone has an ocean or two they’re afraid to dip their toe into. Mine is the social ocean, the “how does everyone perceive me and what does it mean?” ocean.
Finishing an entrance test to Southside Community College with high scores in everything but math should have felt rewarding. Except that the math scores were not simply low; the were abysmal. The hours fell back on me like a movie trailer; in sequence, predicting the outcome that should’ve been easy to guess. I am the product of fundamental Christianity and disattachment from society at large. My parents taught me what they thought I should know. Of these things, I learned what I loved. Between the two, my soul grew…and shrank.
The verdict? I had to enroll in “Math 02”, the most remedial course Southside had to offer. Barely middle school level. Barely more than basic arithmetic. On the banks of the mathematical ocean, I found the shores deserted; everyone I knew had been forced to learn this shit already – by the school system or by parents with ambition. My first choice was to clench into a little tangle of human misery and weep over my ignorance and lost opportunities. My second choice was to dive in from the beginning and learn the order of operations. I fell somewhere in the middle, my body plunging forward out of “duty” and my spirit vomiting with disgust and dread on the shore. I don’t know whether to blame myself for the procrastination, the shame that kept me from trying harder. And I don’t know whether it’s true or not that the most beneficial life lesson I’ve learned in the past two years is “fuck shame; just go”. Grab at that ideal self, let the pendulum taunt, let your body go into shock over how cold and deep the water really is.
Maybe it’s sentimentalism. Failure in my chosen profession, writing, seems different from failure in algebra. Maybe because language makes everything wider. Through language, I’m able to talk about math/social problems in the first place. Writing is the largest ocean we can come to, the coldest water to fling a whole life into – simply because literature has everything conceivable of humanity and life inside it.
There is so much to write about. It’s one of the simplest, truest things a writer can say. After two years of classifying myself “writer” and yet writing nothing more literary than comprehensive grocery lists, I find myself at that point in the college career where you know your parents told you that you could do anything you wanted and yet you want nothing. Not “wanting nothing” in the manner of not possessing an ideal self you swing, pendulum fashion, in front of your current self — but in the manner of wanting nothing immediate because immediate means admitting you are currently dumb.
So one starts by reading, by staring at the collage of incredibly relevant subjects surfacing, written by those already in the water. They seem so comfortable, but really they’re just adapted to the climate; they’re capable of looking at one wave and ignoring the rest.
Maybe this blog has none of the “core truths” I want to reveal — those things I started writing at thirteen that needed magnification. But it is a start; and that’s the only place anyone begins at.
