Uncovered

From a very young age I learned the importance of knowledge; mainly because I discovered that when you couldn't verbalize an experience or emotion, the world punished you.  It was your sister who started it, but you who got the spanking; there was a real sorrow in your heart or pain in your body, but you were told to go to your room and cry because the adults around you didn't want to hear about it.  I hated childhood, because it was so isolating; I would never go back.  The world does not bend to understand the heart of a child, it works instead to bend the heart of her or him.

So, I learned to read when I was three years old and by age eight was reading everything I could get my hands on, including my mother's 20-year collection of Reader's Digest.  I didn't know what sex was, but I was reading about kidnapping and rape when I ought to have been reading about Barbar the Elephant and Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

Thus it began: my life-long project of grabbing Knowledge and wrapping it around me as a cloak against the winds and the rain of the angry world.  In adulthood I have pursued subjects at which I excel, in which I can own my coveted Knowledge.  I write, because I read, and I understand the written word. I am a linguist, because I understand people's hearts and can wrap my own heart around their burning need to communicate, to be heard.  I travel, because it gives me Knowledge of the world and its people, which in turn makes me a better linguist, which in turn makes me a better writer.  I have jumped off cliffs and lived in boldness in so many ways, but always in ways that produced more Knowledge, without too much pain to myself.

And now I am 31, needing a more steady income than being able to pick out an accent in a crowd can give me.  So I am back in school to become a sonographer.  Great income, get to work with people (which I'm relatively good at), and have travel/ministry opportunities.  It's a good path for me.

But.

The program requires physics, and physics requires algebra, and I haven't taken algebra in 10 years.  Not only that, after I finished algebra at the age of 21, I turned and started running away from it as fast as I possibly could, because I didn't understand it and couldn't (quickly) excel. In short, it was too painful.

So this summer as I study physics, my cloak of The Right Answer which has protected me for so many years has been stripped from my shoulders, and I am found beneath it to be naked and three-years-old, shivering and crying.