Confession: I got through highschool mostly by sleeping through class. Not all classes, all the time, but enough to be voted ‘Most likely to fall asleep’ in our highschool yearbook.
I don’t know how I did it. Ok, I kind of know how I did it. At least, now I know. Not that I knew then.
Back then I just thought I was smart, or lucky, or both. Because I’d sleep through class and still be able to get the answer right when the teacher called on me.
Like that one time in AP Physics when I was somewhere in dreamland and Mr. Mulholland posed a question about something that I can’t even remember, but my hand shot up while my left ear stayed glued to the desk, and when he dubiously called on me, words tumbled out of my mouth that added up to ‘correct’.
His jaw dropped. My classmates teetered on the edge of a giggle, and my hand lay back to rest on the desk as I went back to sleep.
I think the technical term is claircognizance. A ‘knowing’ that comes without having to ‘think’ about it.
I think that 16-year-old who slept her way to an Ivy League education was not lucky or smart, just plugged in to a socket that she didn’t know existed. Because they don’t teach you about meta-physics, even in the Advanced Placement class. And they don’t teach you how to plug-in to the Constant Consciousness current as you’re decoding zeroes and ones in your 3rd year of electronics.
And so began an overdeveloped reliance on an underdeveloped skill, that looks like jumping in the deep end without really knowing how to swim.
Like, ‘I know! I’m gonna write a book!’
So now that 16 year-old is almost 42, and there are things she actually wants to learn. And it’s frustrating when the answers don’t just ‘come’. And she has to learn the skill of ‘looking things up’. And when she does, it’s even more frustrating when things don’t just ‘click’; when her hand isn’t shooting up into the air on impulse because she has to give some time for the pieces to fall into place, and God-forbid, practice.
Last week I googled, ‘how to write a memoir’.
Guess what? There’s people that have done this before. And they have something useful to say about it. And even better, when I can get over my tantrum that learning the craft is ‘taking too long’, I find my arms windmilling out in front of me and my legs doing a slight flutter kick, and all of a sudden I realize, ‘Oh! This is what it’s like to swim!’
Fancy that.
That’s my story for today.
I re-read it and the first thing that comes to mind is, wait, how did you not know you weren’t swimming in the first place?
But that’s just me.
Where does this story take you? Tell me in the comments below. I’d love to know!
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