Please Don't Let Me Be Understood

Eh. Perhaps I should have worried more. I scored an 1060 on the GRE -- 580 on the verbal and 480 on the quantitive. I'm really surprised about the verbal. I never scored below 90% on the practice tests. I don't have the results of the writing test, but I'm fairly sure I did well there, at least a 5. Hopefully the subject test will go better.

I'm disappointed, and worried. I feel like I'm an orphan trying to get adopted. Please sir, I promise I'll be good. I remember having these same feelings of inadequacy when I started apprenticing at a Salon for the first time. Looking back at that experience I can see how much I shortchanged myself. I don't want to do the same with graduate school -- but I can't help imagining that I'm going to be competing with people who not only have brilliant ideas, but also have impeccable writing skills. I didn't even go to high school; I went fifteen years between grammar courses -- until last summer the last time I had been in a grammar class was 1992, and I never made it to diagramming sentences. Even now, rules of syntax get stored under short term status and at some point disappear to make way for new information I find sort of interesting but isn't literature, like the history of geologic time (fascinating, really, but I would send a look-a-like to this class if I could -- without a feeling one shred of guilt). I've always envied people who seem to have it all -- a great balance of creative ideas and the ability to work with numbers...and stuff. How wonderful to have the idea and be able to express it well. My therapist tells me that I believe myself misunderstood -- so perhaps I have actually wired my brain to dismiss structure in order to lower the chances of being understood. Then I can recognize myself and shift blame and forsake responsibility and all of that stuff of suffering.

But you don't want to know all of my secrets. Just thank you to everyone who has shown me support and wished me well. I'm scared to death, but I can't quit now.

Also -- if I have to hear one more person in my Women's Studies class begin a sentence with "as a woman..." I think I'm going to scream. You are not a woman! You are playing one on T.V.!