I wanted to be smarter than that.
- this one is a bit all over the place.
There are many vivid memories of me sitting in classrooms, overly critical and feeling just bitter enough that it blinded me. Sometimes, in my pursuit to find compensation for the years of silence and obedience, I became lost in the relentless desire to be fed. I was consistently and ruthlessly ripping apart my teachers in extreme distaste, while they taught me about a grotesque and ugly history. But, I think what truly shattered my heart was the painful realization that the narratives they imparted were nothing but haunting echoes of my own existence.
It never felt right to have my misplaced arrogance (sometimes a weird-kind-of pride) act as this shield. What I have learned over the years is the obvious: confidence cannot mean to not care / and the not-so-obvious: confidence cannot mean to care about everything. Maybe by narrowing down what confidence is not, I’ll figure out what it is.
I know I have talked about this before, but for so long, my intelligence felt like currency. And as I comb through my “glory” (ironic word choice here, high school was everything but glorious for me) days of obsessive high school notes, and long unnecessary essays sometimes written in Spanish about “eco-cities”, I quietly believe that maybe I didn’t spend enough of it. I wrote about this dilemma in my diary today but in a more reassuring tone. I explained to myself that maybe it is true that the girl I was back then isn’t gone, but it feels weird to look up to her now. Especially when all she would do is dream about the kind of person I would become today. Regretful? Maybe. Guilty? Extremely. I feel extremely guilty about all of it.
