“The people who influenced me the most were the ones who said I’d never make it. They gave me a thirst for revenge.” – Colin Mochrie

thebibliosphere:

One of the memories that really stuck with me from high school was when I was taking Advanced Literature and everyone else in the class was excused to attend a rehearsal for an awards ceremony and it was just me and the teacher, who already thought I didn’t belong in her class because I “wasn’t academically gifted enough” but had somehow managed to scrape enough points together to get in. For the first hour she left me alone, so I carried on writing a personal short story I had started the year before, which my previous teacher was still keen to read. When the second hour rolled around she eventually deigned to pay attention to me and told me to “stop doodling you might learn something” and handed me a copy of Emma by Jane Austen and asked if I’d read it. When I told her no she made an actual disgusted grunting sound and asked me if I at least knew what it was about.

I remember this moment so well because my previous English teacher walked in when this was happening, just in time to hear me reply “Yes Miss, it’s about the dangers of hubris and treating other people as inferior to you out of a misguided sense of entitlement. Like most unlikable people do.” and she just looked at me, as though I’d slapped her, meanwhile Mr G. had turned his back and was making coughing noises that sounded very much like laughter.

Later on that day, when I handed over my short story to Mr G., he asked me how it was going in Advanced Lit and and I told him honestly, that I hated it. He made a tisking sound and said “You can drop out you know, but then she’ll have won. She’s already petitioning to have you removed.” When I asked why he told me that she’d brought my creative folio up before the head of department, insisting that it was plagiarism because I wasn’t smart enough to have written it myself. She couldn’t prove it of course, but she was bitter about it all the same, as though ones ability to remember pre-analyzed texts and spout regurgitated theories about them was somehow indicative of intelligence and capability.

And that pretty much set the tone for the rest of my academic career. Teachers always telling my parents I would be brilliant if only I applied myself, not knowing that I’d developed my first stress ulcer at the age of seventeen from trying so hard to be good at what they wanted me to do but always just scraping by in the exams. Professors telling me they were shocked because most of the things I said in class were very intelligent and well spoken, but my exams were abysmal. I had one professor tell me that the bad thing about the Scottish education system being free, was that people who ought not to seek higher education were able to do so and were ultimately a detriment to the system as a whole. I still remember the way he tried to explain that in front of the board after I complained about him. (He was disciplined, in case you were wondering)

It wasn’t until I was graduating, )with honors, I might add) that one of my professors took me aside and asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him I was probably going to go into teaching and he shook his head and told me it’d be a waste of a career, which I acknowledged as a fact, having been told it for many years. Sensing he’d said something wrong he probed further until I admitted I knew I wasn’t as smart as I ought to be on paper. When he asked for further clarification I told him he didn’t have to humor me, I knew my writing was sub par and I’d only just managed to attain honors with my degree, which frankly had been more stress than anything else.

He blinked at me once or twice, looked over the top of my head and then back down and said “Your writing is some of the best I’ve ever encountered, you’re just not meant to waste it on regurgitating essays for points.” Then he smiled the biggest craziest smile and said “Fiona, darling, fuck the system. Be a writer.”

I mean I don’t think Professor Sawday meant “write original hardcore consensual BDSM in space sex novels” when he said that, but damn, I’m good at it.