Who most people think YOU are 90% of the time is not really who YOU are. But that’s okay, what matters is that you know who YOU are.
I enjoy taking long walks and seize every opportunity to do so several times a week. On one such walk, a friend who’d asked to come along turned to me suddenly and said. ‘It’s funny how you can switch from rib-cracking humour to deep intensity, Sarah. You can be quite intense sometimes.’
It wasn’t the first time someone had said anything about me.
Over the years, I have realised that it is sometimes not a compliment when people call me ‘intense’. Even before they added, ‘why are you always frowning? Don’t step into my classroom looking like that!’ I knew this back in those days in Lagos too, when my teachers said, ‘You’re a serious-looking child.’ I bet they thought they were trying to help as well. But their comment succeeded in making me even more afraid and unsure. The way I understood it then, ‘serious’ and ‘intense’ meant I was abnormal. In those days, I wanted desperately to be normal. Perhaps Aunty would not be so unkind to me if I were normal — if I were playful and laughing like other children?
There’s nothing wrong with having a severe demeanour. This was something I had to learn when I began to discover myself. But before then, in addition to dealing with the low self-esteem brought about by Aunty constant ‘you’re nothing and will never amount to anything,’ I had to also deal with feeling abnormal just because I wasn’t always laughing and playful like other children.
Women (and female children) are often made to feel as if there’s something wrong with having a ‘serious’ personality. Not so in male children and men. With them, serious’ and ‘intense’ are regarded as positive traits. One of the synonyms for the word ‘intense’, when used to describe a man, is ‘brooding.’ A ‘brooding man’ in the male lexicon is a man who is ‘attractive’ (sexually and physically). In a woman, not so. If you are ‘intense and serious, it’s usually a polite way of saying that you are ‘manly and unattractive.’
Although I was aware that it was not callously meant, my teacher’s comment that I was ‘too serious’ succeeded in making me feel even more unworthy. At a time when young girls my age were beginning to be aware of their femininity, telling me I was ‘too serious’ made me feel like I did not belong. It is hard to accord one child much attention if you are a public school teacher with a classroom of thirty children or more pupils to see to, I guess. But I often wonder how she could not have sensed that something was drastically wrong with this ‘jumpy’ and ‘moody’ looking child, how she could not have perceived that there was a reason behind my earnest disposition. I mean, there I was, a child with rarely an adult coming to school to check on how I was progressing, even on a parent/guardian/teachers conference day. Furthermore, because I had to finish my housework and wash up after everyone every day before heading to school, I was almost always late, arriving sometimes long after the first class of the day was in session. Which, as was the rule of public school at that time, meant I had to stretch out my palms to receive the mandatory three to six lashes of the cane for lateness.
And then there were the letters I was given to ask my parents or guardian to visit the school and explain why I was frequently late. Did my teacher never wonder why those letters never got responded to? The conclusion I arrive at today is that my being a good pupil perhaps had more to answer for that. Because despite my’ tardiness,’ I consistently scored satisfactory grades and went home at the end of each term with a glowing report card.
The irony of appearances and perceptions, you could say. Based on how seriously I took my studies, my teachers should have known that I was not of a tardy disposition. But they were too caught up in interpreting only what their eyes could see.
