The Greatest
I don’t know if it was a personal deficiency or too many books or something about how I was raised, but the things I used to do weren’t just things I did, they were who I was.
At different times during my life I have viewed myself as a serious pianist, artsy, a scientist, strong in the language arts, outdoorsy. I had an image of myself as an amenable, adaptable free spirit who was also a competent hard worker. My personality was 20/20 vision.
When did you realize other people didn’t see you the way you saw yourself? Was it when you played piano for your brother’s wedding with Glenn Gould whispering in your ear, and a man with a side part and a sweater vest said “you play pretty well. You could play in bars. You could make tips!”
When did you first end up somewhere other than where you thought? Was it that time you worked for a professor, getting paid to do your own stuff as long as you did the dishes? You were 20, practiced at telling people you made decisions about summer jobs based on your “career,” and he said you should consider becoming a professor because “you aren’t married,” and, conspiratorially, while trying not to look at the busted zipper on your thrifted corduroys, “women have advantages on the academic job market now.”
How about when you were partway through a figure-crammed power point at your dissertation committee meeting when they stopped the show to ask how you would “feel” if you didn’t finish. Or when your interim advisor wanted to be sure you knew that the ag school you went to wasn’t competitive to get into, unlike the rest of your college.
Was it when you were quizzed about the origin of your last name and then told that couldn’t be true, not with you looking like that.
Or when you showed a clever drawing of a ballerina in orange chucks to your high school crush who was on his way to RISD and asked him to critique your sketchbook and he didn’t really say anything.
Was it when you took your 3 semesters of Spanish to vocational school in Spain* and the instructor, who chose a different 19-year-old with whom to pick a shouting match each day, said you needed to have your lab reports translated because she couldn’t understand them?
Was it the *redactedth* time you failed your intermediate-level Basque exam?
What about the time you hiked and swam up a canyon with friends of a friend in California? A handsome Portuguese guy was working up the courage to talk to you, sizing you up. You thought he could discern something hidden about you, something about how you were standing, and you predicted that he was going to ask if you were born in the mountains. He asked if it was your first nature outing.
Was your image of yourself tested that time you went on a hike with your attractive, slender housemates, again in California, and they decided to go skinny dipping while you wandered off into the thicket for “a nap”?
Maybe those times made you stop, made you wonder if you ever legitimately had any of the identities you gave yourself when you were younger.
Not me, though.
*not exactly but we’ll talk about this later.
