At seventeen, I used to love
being the fastest jab
at the rec center,
except the problem
with being the fastest at
something often means
you’re always waiting for
someone much slower
who can tire you out
by never arriving on time.
Then in my twenties
I seemed to be really fast at
critically analyzing a text
with precision and acuity,
arriving at insights
about language
often overlooked by my peers,
a quality that made me
look arrogant and conceited,
initially, according to one of my
former poetry colleagues.
I hated how you’d sit
in the back of the class
and drop an interpretation
that made all of us look
like idiots,
I remember him saying.
My thirties and forties
were no different,
as I was frequently criticized
or threatened in a veiled
manner for being intelligent.
“I heard you’re smart,”
a boss once said to me.
I don’t think I’m that smart,
I told her, and she replied
by saying she meant
I corrected other’s definitions
of me without fear of retaliation
in ways that couldn’t be argued.
You try that with me
and you’re gone, she said.
At six my mother would
regularly beat me
for asking why about her
directions and explanations
incessantly, and
my grandparents
used to reassure me
none of it was my fault,
that she misperceived
my questions for talking back
and that I was just a precocious
and analytically-minded kid
with a tenacious and
uncompromising curiosity,
a skill and award-worthy note,
that, while receiving honors
for it throughout my life,
also got me on the couch
or literally thrown out
into the cold more times than
the years that make up my age,
by girlfriends, and even my ex,
who got so sick of me being
accurate, even my silence
started to be confused for
an attack of clarification.
Now, which is to say
for the last two decades,
I work a day job helping
children with disabilities,
and I generally keep
my lightning fast curiosities
relegated to the writing
of my poetry
from the safety of my apartment,
where I know nobody
will feel threatened by
my language usage,
and when others ask me
what I’m doing this weekend
I basically lie and tell them
just chores and stuff,
though I’m really
sitting at my desk writing,
a poet masquerading
as a self-certified lawyer,
once again, proving them wrong
to feel like I still have a place
here, and that it’s still
a knockout to be the fastest.
I wrote this poem after thinking about why working with others who have a slower emotional processing speed than I do has been such a challenge for me while working as a paraeducator, and how the subject of timing in meeting a goal sort of plays into that. Though as I got into the poem I realized I was really writing about my feelings toward my own intellectual shaming throughout my own life, and how I’ve learned to adapt in society to it’s rank normalization, rather than get lost in a pissing match of who’s going to shame who better, with one-directional authoritarian figures who, in my experience, are usually the ones doling it out first.