We Still Burn Witches At The Stake.

My mother is insecure about her intelligence. I understand why. For most of her young life, she was considered the vain one in her family, and once she married my father, she married into a culture that considered the (lack of) intelligence in women a punchline to every joke. For years, our household encouraged us to make fun of our mother for being stupid or ignorant, and when she finally couldn’t take it anymore, she became violently defensive of any perceived or real attack on her intelligence.

I was in the crossfire.

On the one hand, my mother is the sole reason why I am so independent and dedicated to learning, she raised me with a singular goal, to be financially independent and more accomplished than the men in my life so I didn’t have to take anyone’s shit, but on the other hand, she also hated my intelligence. To this day, she insists that she doesn’t understand anything I say, and that started when I was very young. Each time I would open my mouth, she would tell me that no one gets it and no one wants to hear it. I would try to talk about things I had read, she would tell me I was showing off. I would discuss things with people, she would tell me I was trying to make her feel dumb by doing it. My grades were never allowed to slip below top of the class, but when I was top of the class, she would tell me that I did it to show other people down. She insisted, for a decade, that I would be unlovable, unwanted, friendless and abhorrent if I continued to behave like I was being smart.

Tragically, she was right about some things.

Intelligence is a difficult subject to discuss not only because I am reluctant to define it as a monolith but also because it is one of those subjects where in order to discuss your personal relationship with it, you first have to define yourself as such. I feel uncomfortable with that. It’s not that I do not believe I am smart, it’s more that I have always found that intelligence of some kind resides within all people, and I have always been able to find it, and it is unsettling to attribute to one’s own self, a trait that feels like you’re calling yourself special. Beauty is the subject of odes so long as they are written by the beholder, it’s narcissism when acknowledged by the beautiful themselves, and so with intelligence. It’s all good when someone else calls you that, but if you have awareness of it or take cognizance, you are arrogant. If you’re an intelligent woman being called arrogant is probably a way of life for you.

And often, it is not about what you did to show them that, they believe it because they think that the act of you living your life as yourself is tantamount to showing them down, and in that, it becomes less important how you define intelligence, and more important how it is socially defined. The things for which they hate you, aren’t the parameters of intelligence on which you are acting. Let me give you some examples. My former partner hated that I made as much money as I did when I was younger than him, even though he lived off that money, and whenever I got promoted or got a big story, he would get violent and emotionally dismissive. He would tell me I was arrogant, that I did these things only to show him that I was smarter than him and that I looked down on him. The main goal of his life was to have me be under-employed, he thought I should teach elementary school because he believed that was the obscurity in which I would feel safe to him (and to be clear, that is not how I feel about teaching). Turns out, being financially independent does not keep you from putting up with shit.

The first time I ever got promoted over a man, the rumours that I had slept my way into the job were instant. Whenever I have ever received an award or accolade, I’ve been stressed and at times, I even hid it from all the people in my life, because in my experience when people know that, first they congratulate you and then they begin to behave as if you did it just to show them down. No matter what you say or do, they always come back to tell you that you think so much of yourself because of xyz evidence of your intelligence. There are the little ways too. A random clerk in a government university office refused to process my admission paperwork because I knew a rule he did not know, and to him that meant I was being too cocky. A different random person refused to release my own documents to me because she didn’t like my attitude, she was ready to dismiss the whole thing because she just assumed I had not filed correctly, but when I told her that I had and she just needed to check, she got livid and told me she wasn’t used to girls behaving like me. A teacher at my kid’s school is currently defending the right to segregate students by gender because I complained and when he misquoted the constitution, I corrected him. Thousands of people read my writing on multiple platforms, but the same people, when they meet me in person, behave as if I have done something bad to them. At one point, a person at a munch to whom I said hi, responded with, “I’m not going to put you on a pedestal.” All I said was hi and I had never met this person before in my life, or spoken with them. I had no idea they even knew me. To say nothing of the thousand times a day your credentials are dismissed by people who know better because they feel they do.

It's starting to sound whiny. I feel it. I feel like I should not complain, or the complaint is too petty and I should just be happy and say nothing. I should focus on the good things. I shouldn’t let these people bother me. Except, except. It’s consequential?

On a daily basis, at least half the people who stand in your way, do so because they object to you, not to doing what you need done. The school teacher (and the principal) admits that there is no school policy that advises separation of and non-communication between genders (and if I were to represent it as such, they would deny they said that), but they won’t relent on their right to enforce it should they choose and that’s because they are annoyed by me. Everything is a fight when you, as a woman, are perceived to be arrogant, and when you do fight, the world around you tells you that you just cannot let anything go, you must prove a point and ultimately, it’s about your ego and ego is the most disgusting thing a woman can have. I could “let it be” but these people educate my child, I have genuine stake in this, how can I let it go? It’s consequential.

Instead, I let go of my desire to be likeable to people. It is not without reason that I am most comfortable communicating with people at the distance an audience enables. On a mic, I feel safe, but beside you, I feel like it is just a matter of time before I am attacked or adjudged as arrogant. When you read me, there is a much higher chance that you are listening to me, as opposed to reacting to me, and I am genuinely afraid of the reactions. I’m going to be childishly emotional for a second, I really do want to be heard. I do believe I have good ideas and I get genuinely excited to share things I have worked out in my head or learnt about, with other people. That’s what was happening when I was a kid too, I was not trying to make my mother feel stupid, I was trying to show her the awesome thing I had learnt. For years, I didn’t even understand why she was so upset by that. I couldn’t understand why using new words or telling her my ideas or writing a poem made her so angry.

I get it now.

Aside from the personal insecurity, she was trying to keep me from alienating people. I don’t mean, at all, that I am so smart no on can talk to me, I mean that when you become self-aware of your power and rights as a woman, you behave in ways that make men feel encroached, and she warned me against it constantly. She told me to be smart but also to be nice, to never show my intelligence, to never be proud of it, to not argue with people (you know you are right, why do you need to argue?), not to tell my partners if I made more money than them in the future, to be professionally successful but to also keep a home really nice so no one could ever fault me for anything. I didn’t do any of that, and she was right, I alienated many people. I even managed to alienate people I had never met. You could say those people shouldn’t be in your life anyway, and I probably agree, but there are days when you know in your bones that you stand alone and those days feel sad.