Looking at college websites is not good for my mental health.

[tenlittlebullets]

Dear self,

Breathe. Fucking breathe. If the idiots you went to high school with could all get into college, then you can find a school that will let you transfer into their computer science department. Even if you didn't take any CS or higher-level math courses back when you were at Simon's Rock drinking the liberal-arts kool-aid. You were one of the smart kids in high school; all that bullshit on college websites about "self-motivated learners" and "academic excellence" is meant to weed out the school-hating dumbshits, not the people who hand-code the HTML and CSS and JavaScript on the website they made to house their Victor Hugo translations.

(I'm still trying to decide what the most damaging part of my two years at Simon's Rock was. At the moment, I'm thinking it was the experience of being, for the first time in my life, That Kid. The slow one. Who sits in the back not saying anything. And I know, in my head, that I'm not dumb and that there was a fundamental disconnect between the way I think and the way they wanted me to think... but the experience of being That Kid and feeling dumb has fucked up my perception of my own intelligence.)

And the first person to tell me I'm an arrogant bitch for reassuring myself that I am, in fact, smarter than most of my peers will get smacked in the face.

Edit: And furthermore, self, it's not like you flunked out of community college. You did well in high school--including two computer science courses--left high school two years early to go to a liberal arts college, and now you have an associate's degree and a fairly respectable 2.93 GPA. You are the only one who thinks you are dumb.

Comments

[toi-marguerite.livejournal.com]

... yeah, I think you are the only person who thinks you're dumb. You've done so freaking much I am awed and dumbstruck whenever I visit your website. It's amazing that you alone did everything on that site.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

See, I look at the website and think "You lazy whore, that's it? Aren't you ever going to do more translations? Transcriptions? Cast recording reviews? Write fic?" But that's the good kind of self-deprecation, the kind that makes me do stuff. It's not the paralyzing feeling that I may not be stupid but oh god my brain does not work the way academia (read: Simon's Rock) wants it to work and obviously I will get the same You Are Dumb feelings at whatever school I transfer to if they'll even accept such a royal fuckup in the first place--

And yep. Back to the panic place.

[just-marzipan.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's arrogant to remind yourself that you're smarter than people. There's a guy in my seminar who is very clever but whom I really hate and I daily remind myself that he is actually no smarter than me just because he can use big words and quote Nietzsche.

Plus, I am quite often in awe of your knowledge of things. So please don't go thinking you're dumb. (Um. I hope this was encouraging? I went through the same sort of thing while applying to Cambridge).