All I ever wanted, as I explained last week, was for boys to like me and for people to think I was smart.
Neither has been easy.
The boys I liked didn't always like me back. They thought I overdid everything. I frightened the poor souls by running after them. When I offered Brett Simon all my brother's Hardy Boy books, he clearly would have been less terrified had I started chasing him with stick. That, at least, would have seemed appropriate to childhood. Mean and vicious --but appropriate. All the affection I was attempting to lavish--now that was just nuts.
There were times I'd have a similar effect on the people I most wanted to impress. No matter how hard I worked to provide right answers, or how devotedly I tried to jump through hoops, some looked at me with unbridled contempt. I overdid it; I wanted too much. Understand this: it is not that I wanted too much of it--but that I wanted it too much. I was too eager, too needy. So they pushed me away.
I now feel sorry for the young men I pursued. They were innocent enough. I built my fantasies around them the way you carefully pack layers onto a snowman.
But I don't feel too sorry for those adults who treated me as if I were chasing them with a stick.
Them I don't forgive.
If I worshipped them or longed for their approval, that's because they were standing on pedestals. What can you do with people put on pedestals, after all? You worship them or you try to push them off. Early in life, I tried the first.
Now I like to think I have become adept at the second.
Do I worry about it? Nope. "Only false gods can be laughed off their pedestals." Agnes Repplier said that over a hundred years ago and it has gotten truer every day since then. And if laughter doesn't work, sometimes a hard push will do the trick.
There was the kindergarten teacher who announced to the class that I didn't know how to read the The Cat in the Hat--I'm having flashbacks now that the movie is out--but who instead sneered (and even if I didn't know the word "sneer" back then, I sure recognized the concept) that I had "just memorized" the book. As if memorizing an entire book would not, in and of itself, have been a jolly good thing for a six-year-old.
Basically she didn't like me. Which is fine; I understand how a teacher can not like a particular kid. What I don't understand is why she needed to show it to the class in a way that made me feel bad for wanting to do well. That's just lousy--"lousy" being a word I knew back then and employ regularly now. She was a lousy teacher. And I adored her. It was not in me to do otherwise. It was an unrequited love more bitter than I ever had with any boy.
There was the fifth-grade teacher who told me I raised my hand too much and needed to be less "prideful." So much for encouraging self-esteem. (Where were teacher workshops in those days?)
There was a college professor who accused me of cribbing notes because I could not have managed on my own the insights into poetry I'd worked on for weeks, cried (yes) over, because I was entirely determined to impress this apparently unimpressionable man.
I impressed him all right--he thought I was a cheat.
When I brought in, by way of proving my virtue, my sheaf of notes, pencilled-smudged, when I showed him the copious scribblings in the margins of my books, when I waved in front of him three early drafts of this paper, he dismissed me as a "brown-noser."
"Let's see how you do on the final" he hissed.
I got an A.
He didn't get tenure.
Sometimes the world is just. It's worth our effort and trouble and pain, this attempt to be loved, this desire to do well. Sometimes the right people are impressed, sometimes those you love will love you back. And sometimes those who mess you up find themselves in messes.
Sometimes it all works out just fine.
