Muchness and Light

Never let your fear decide your fate.

I hate math.  Hate it.

"Maybe it feels the same way," my 13-year-old son math genius said, when I lamented outloud.

"I wouldn't blame it," I replied.  "I've done nothing but badmouth it since I was 12 years old."

That's about the time it started.  Pre-algebra.  I'm okay with arithmetic, even solving for basic variables.  But give me rational expressions, and my brain just kind of shuts down.  I'll struggle through the homework, think I have it, and totally bomb a test.  The problem is that I never really seem to get why I was wrong.  For years my math grades were comprised almost entirely of partial credit. 

College algebra is part of the reason I never graduated.  Only part, I stress, because I know damn well that my choices had a lot to do with it.  But when I was already inclined to blow off class and get into some other trouble, it was all too easy to blame my mutual hatred of algebra for keeping me from doing what I needed to do. 

I was complaining on Facebook about my hatred of polynomials.  I have three friends who are both geniuses (truly) and math teachers: Moonshine, Boogie Shoes, and Mathilde. 

Mathilde, who teaches college math, had this to say in the course of our discussion:

It's true that there are many different levels on which one can "get" it, and you can feel like you've gotten it when you still really have a fairly superficial understanding. (It's a bit like the difference between being able to drive a car vs. being knowing how to fix the engine when it breaks.)

Of course I have some professional expertise here, but lately I've been thinking about this on a whole different level as I watch the different ways that my son and daughter approach math. They're both good at it, but they have totally different reactions when they hit a wall. It's really driven home for me how important it is to PLAY with it, look at a problem from all different angles, see what you CAN figure out even if you don't know how to get all the way to an answer. Don't be afraid to fuck it up, because you learn the most from coming to understand HOW you fucked up, and how to fix it. There are a zillion different ways to approach any particular math topic, and the more of them you explore, the more solid your overall understanding will be. I really believe that that willingness to get your hands dirty and engage with it is far more predictive of success than whatever your innate talent may or may not be.

Don't be afraid to fuck it up, because you learn the most from coming to understand HOW you fucked up, and how to fix it.  I really believe that that willingness to get your hands dirty and engage with it is far more predictive of success than whatever your innate talent may or may not be.

Best.  Advice.  Ever. 

It's how I try to live every other part of my life, so why the hell would I let this be my undoing?  Why would it be okay to let a required math class or two be the one thing that could stand in the way of completing the degree necessary to move my life forward? 

Had I graduated from college in 1994 as originally planned, I would've likely gone on to work in my originally-chosen field—Mass Communications.  I would probably have still married DH, though we would've been living a different life.  I very well might not have had the boys I have, who could only have been who they are because they were conceived in their respective moments.  I might have something different and just as wonderful, but it wouldn't be Max and Tricky, without whom I can't imagine my life. 

Just because I didn't get what I'd planned, just because my journey took a different path than anyone anticipated for me, that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile or in any way less than what I'd envisioned.  In so many ways, I am more fulfilled as a woman and a soul than I ever thought possible. 

I have the very real task of learning the skills necessary to get a real job, to take care of me and my boys.  I have to relearn a lot of things I should've mastered a long time ago.  To choose not to do it is to be ungrateful, again, for the opportunities I've been given and have made for myself. 

So I can't be afraid to fuck it up.  I will likely fuck it up.  But I will choke down the disappointment and dust my hands off and try again.  I will look closely at what I did wrong, which variable threw me off, and I will try it again and again and again until I can pass these tests.  Maybe not with flying colors, but certainly with far more knowledge and insight than I had when I started. 

And on the other side?  There's an entirely different life ahead of me.  It's not where I thought I'd be, not where I originally dreamed of being.  But it will be goddamn good, because I got dirty and fought like hell to make it that way.  I'll still struggle with math.  I'll still catch my breath at the sight of a polynomial, and sometimes it will remind me of what my intentions had been when I was 20. 

Then I'll remind myself that here and now is the only place I can live—not then and certainly not when.  And I'll know that I can, because I bulldozed my own walls and powered through to an unexpected and promising future.

 

Your story sad to tell, a teenage ne'er do well--most mixed up non-delinquent on the block!

After twenty years, I'm back in college.

In 1990, I started college on a substantial scholarship.  My life choices got in the way of studying, and I blew my scholarship within a year.  I tried, off and on, to finish what was originally a Communications degree, but I never quite got it together.  There was a lot of wasted time and money before I finally gave up, choosing to live my life with DH.  With the divorce came the realization that I would have to take care of myself long past the point of alimony or child support.

So as of last month, I'm back in school full time, enrolled at a local technical college to pursue a degree in Paralegal Studies.  Queen Frostine has said for years that I'd make a great attorney.  Given my attention to detail and my dogged curiosity, she thinks I'd be especially well-suited for the mechanics of the law life.  In my old life in financial planning, I spent a lot of time reviewing complicated estate and human resources documents, and I thoroughly enjoyed that process.  Writing Persona Non Grata brought entertainment law into my realm, and I ultimately finalized my divorce pro se (without an attorney). 

Being a paralegal seems like the natural and logical next step. 

But being back in school is weird.  When I was a college student in my late teens and early twenties, work/life balance was about little more than fitting classes in around a boyfriend or getting wasted.  Now at 41, I have not only my schedule of on-campus and online classes, homework, and real work, but also my sons' school and social activities to contend with.  And now DH has moved 300 miles away, which means I have the boys for the vast majority of their time.  Plus somewhere in there I have to take some time for me, to relax and socialize with my own peers and get recentered so that I can take on the constant demands of this life I am trying to rebuild.

The schoolwork thus far isn't terribly hard, though math is kicking my ass harder than it did when I was 18.  The courseload for this first semester includes some pretty interesting (and sometimes infuriating) introductions to sociology, humanities, and the law.  All too often I am fascinated by some random thought in a discussion group or textbook and find myself off on a tangent, researching the fundamentals of space law or Goffman's dramaturigcal perspective. 

And now with a brilliantly gifted 8^th grader who is naturally inclined to the same slacking I was in middle school, I am paranoid about his life choices.  I've always said I didn't care what my children did for a living, as long as they were happy.  While I know that my prior choices led me to the place and time of having my sons when I did, I am also painfully aware that we are in a financial bind in part as consequence of those choices. 

Had I applied myself and finished my degree when that was supposed to be my main priority, my life would be very different.  I might be better prepared to handle the financial fallout of divorce in my 40s, but I also might not have had these children.  I probably would've gone on to have kids, but Max and Tricky could only be who they are because they were conceived and born at their respective moments in history. 

I can't get caught up in what might have been or should have been; I live in the here and now, both as a result of and in defiance of my past.  All I can do now is work my ass off to provide better opportunities for my kids but also for myself.  This is part of learning to take care of myself in a whole new way. 

When it feels overwhelming, I have to remind myself that this won't last forever.  In the same way that the boys will age and grow—bringing an end to child support and the necessity of complete financial self-sufficiency—I will age and grow, getting through this process and reaping the rewards that I can on the other side. 

 

Throw your soul through every open door.

Every day when I'm working at my desk, I see this magnet over my monitor: WHAT WOULD YOU ATTEMPT TO DO IF YOU KNEW YOU COULD NOT FAIL?  It sits alongside my Alice's Adventures in Wonderland magnets, including one about believing in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

I've been thinking a lot about this question lately.  I posed it on my Facebook fan page a couple of days ago, and I've asked a couple of other people what their response would be.  Some would open businesses, like bars or restaurants or floral shops, and some would have loftier aspirations, including saving the world.  At least one person told me he didn't know if he could really bother to think about it to answer, simply because he's so pragmatic as to realize that everyone would eventually fail at everything, given enough time.  (An infinite number of typing monkeys, I suppose.)

Fear of failure drove me to be a slacker, to be a highly gifted underachiever.  When I was finally challenged to do my true best, I quickly realized it was a much softer fall from Near-the-Bottom than from Near-the-Top.  I padded my ass, literally and figuratively, and did everything in my power not to be hurt, not to feel disappointment—whether from myself or from others. 

Living up to that fear meant I opted to ignore a lot of opportunities, though that also means I opted for other things, even if by default.  There are very few occurrences in my life that I felt were out of my control.  Of those few, there were even fewer that couldn't have been avoided in some way by my own prior choices.  Sometimes my choices were made to make my life easier, or at least less difficult or transitional.  Sometimes I made choices that I knew would be hard as hell but were for the best.  And every so often I would choose to do the unexpected—often because I was bored or distracted—even though I knew it was the bad choice, just because I needed something to be different. 

The thing about opportunities is that you don't always know them when you see them.  Sometimes you can only see those swinging doors in hindsight, often when it's too late to loop your path back before the seal is shut tight.  It's those truly momentous prospects that force the unexpected juncture, that dazzle you with enough giant, flashing arrows to turn your course into the Vegas Strip—those are the ones that offer the most to lose and to gain, sometimes simultaneously. 

This has been a few months of unexpected opportunities, certainly.  Some have come at me from the dark, almost like an angler fish taunting its prey with its bioluminescent lies.  Some have laid themselves carefully across my path and requested ever so politely that I give them a moment of their time.  And some have grabbed me and spun me around to face them, to look them in the eyes and pay attention to them, no matter how much I thought I wanted to look away. 

Regardless of how the opportunity presents itself, the ultimate choice is mine to make, alone.  So now I'm choosing not to be afraid of failure, not to let my self-doubt and fear influence me unduly.  I'm forcing myself to open my eyes, to pay closer attention to my surroundings so that I have the best chance possible of not missing those giant, flashing arrows.  I also have less ass now, literally and figuratively, and I know I'm much more likely to feel it fully when I fall. 

But I also know that the worst thing that happens, if I fall, is that I get scraped up, a little battered and bruised.  I will do my best to laugh boisterously about it while I'm dusting the bits of gravel from my scrapes.  After all, those bits came from the path I've made, and I'll use them again to keep laying my groundwork, stepping ever-so-excitedly forward to my next great experience.

Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?

I'm a bit of a slacker.  Some of you will read this and be surprised at that admission, and others will say, "Tell me something I don't know, Stephanie!"  But it's true.  Historically, I am the Queen of Skating By.  I went to a gifted magnet-type high school, where I was required to maintain a 2.5 GPA (on a 4.0 scale) to stay in the program.  I graduated with a 2.54 but still had high enough ACT scores to get an academic scholarship to college.  (I blew that after the first year because of the aforementioned skating by.) 

I go through cycles where I get a lot accomplished and am a powerhouse of productivity.  Seriously, I can be a force of nature.  I'm resourceful and dogged and smart.  I will do my best to prevail and often turn tasks into a game, to see how well or how quickly they can be done.  I think that's something most gifted kids learn to do fairly early, if for no other reason than to quiet the boredom of the traditional classroom. 

Other times, I will let everything slide.  I'll find myself days behind on a project or chores or whatever, and then I'm racing to catch up at the last minute.  Unfortunately, I also picked up the great gift of working extremely well under pressure and with limited time.  The combination of skills means I tend to leave things to the last damn minute, then exhaust myself in a flourish to get them done.  Usually they'll be done well, and I get a rush from the intensity of the challenge.  It's kind of an exhilarating game, really.

I'm also a little distractible.  (Shocking, I know.)  I'm impatient and a little manic at times, which is usually when I get a lot accomplished.  I will forge my path and get things done as efficiently as possible, but also as stylishly as possible so it looks good, too.  (I can bring home the bacon AND fry it up in a pan!)  As I've said before, my mind will flit from thing to thing, like a hummingbird. 

 

There's this other thing, that I like to see how things work, how they fit together, how they connect with everything around them.  I'm really, really good at puzzles of all kinds.  I always have been.  I can see several steps ahead, moving in and out of the process to gauge where the end will be.  I am very adept at predicting the End Game.  It's a bit savant-ish at times.

So I'll be in a situation, in a process, and be looking ahead to see how it will end.  If I consistently see the same end, am confident that I know where it's going, I get bored.  I quit.  The challenge is gone, so what's the point in continuing?  And don't try to tell me that the point is to see it through to completion; I've finished a lot of things in my life and have no sense of lack of accomplishment.

These are the reasons why I didn't graduate from college, why I quit playing MYST after the first two areas of the game were solved, and why there's a stack of books in my house that are half-finished. 

Being a slacker doesn't make me a bad person, certainly, or even a poorly-directed person.  Unfortunately there are a lot of gifted kids who fall into the category of Perpetual Underachiever.  I know several of my lackadaisical cohorts who will be reading this and nodding their heads in emphatic agreement.  I also think there's some truth to Gen X'ers being perhaps a bit more prone to slacking, at least from the outside perspective. 

When Generation X (Yes, I know it wasn't coined by Douglas Coupland or Billy Idol.) became the collective moniker for my friends and I--essentially kids of the 60's and 70's--it eventually took on a tone of derision.  We were described as not caring, not giving a damn about anything, and just down-right lazy.  Sure, I have contemporaries like that; I've been all of those things at various points in my life.  The reality, as I see it, is that we're picky about what we deem worthy of the effort.  We're very careful to choose just the right things that deserve the expenditure of our Energy of Success.  If the end result isn't worth the trouble, why go through the process?

I pick and choose regularly, and I'm becoming more adept at turning things away before I delve into them too deeply.  Honestly, it takes a lot for anything to make an impression on my hummingbird-wing-buzzing brain.  But when I find something that does grab my attention, I will spend an extraordinary amount of energy in understanding it fully.  I will be completely engrossed in it to see what makes it work, and where it's going, and how it impacts its own minute or enormous world. 

I am most likely to be fascinated by why it attracts and impacts me and the process by which I come to fully understand it.  It could be a book, a song, a person; if it can stop me in my tracks and turn me completely around to face it, it's worth my time and energy to explore it further.  I will do everything in my power to see it through to the end, to immerse myself in it until I fully understand it.  There's a beauty and a sensuality in that immersion.  Both emotionally and cerebrally, it can be captivating and rapturous.

Other people crave travel and seeing as many different places and things as possible.   Some collect things, objects to remind them of what they love and what they've done.  I know a couple of people who collect knowledge, as that's what's most valued in their personal, psychic worlds.  For me, it's the understanding of the experience, the complete appreciation for a complex, non-temporal moment of time and thought.

Sometimes it can make me seem a little obsessive.  If something external distracts me, pushes me off course from being able to see, or get, to the end of the process of experiential enlightenment, it makes me irritable and defensive and reactive.  I've learned over time to inhibit the constant bombardment of external stimuli that rails at me.  When I find something so exquisite that it deserves my undivided attention, it's almost insulting when I'm asked to put it away or leave it alone.  God help the person who tries to forcibly take it from me. 

Eventually I will work through my fixation and find a balance between obsession and discard.  An equilibrium, if you will.  I do actually have a happy medium; it just takes me a bit longer than most to find it.  Sometimes my own muchness gets in my way, but it's a great ride if I can just hold on to the very end.