The fact that I’m a thinker and not a feeler as such has no doubt caused me untold troubles. Even now, that I have made another breakthrough in my thinking, leaving me higher on the mountain of thought, on a safe ledge, I feel rather tired. It’s as if gravity wants me going the other way and fast. Thinking is the air I breathe, the food I eat. Yet I come from the kind of culture that feels it is a betrayal for a female like me to think. Thus the development of thinking has for me been a long, arduous, and very solitary process. The breakthrough recently was the realisation that I now had the tools to say what I think without emitting a deep sigh at the gap between the reader’s experiences and mine, a gap which previously I’d thought could not be bridged with words. I now see that one can write clearly in such a way that at least provides a conceptual map for the reader, even if they haven’t experienced everything I have to say.
The opposition to my being a thinker goes way back, it seems. I remember lounging forwards over the back of the driver’s bench seat in the old car, asking questions. “Why is it that…?” and “Why do you think…?”
“Be quiet!” snapped my mother. “You ask too many questions.”
I felt like I’d been deprived of air.
I grew up relatively ignorant about all sorts of things. I had the mental machine power, but not the grist to work with.
There were things that I was expected to know naturally, as if by virtue of something essential at work, like biology. I was supposed to know what it was politic to say, and when to say it or when to keep quiet. If rage descended upon me, I had made a mistake.
My father didn’t believe that women could think. They had to be slapped down enough so that they weren’t precocious. It turns out that I reminded him of his overbearing mother.
He decided that I couldn’t navigate my way through regular workaday world because I was exhibiting the typical female traits of non-thinking. The only thing for it was to beat me down to make me see sense.
Thew problem, as it appeared to him, was despite having completed a Bachelor’s degree, and having been independent in the world for quite some time, I “couldn’t even speak properly” (much less, think). To him, I represented everything that was wrong with the world and with his own ability to come to terms with it. I was the externalisation — the manifestation of the inner symptom — of his own distress. (It would have been unseemly, obviously, for such distress to have taken a male form.)
And then, the old school friends — and once again, I have transformed myself into a thinker, against what would forge bonds and unity. I cannot send any more fuzzy tokens on facebook. I’m all out of trying to form connections in that way. And the other childish self — the one I used to be — is mocking at me now and proclaiming that I have betrayed my roots. How dare I have turned into another person, thinking too much? I’ll surely have to pay a price for falsifying the books. No person has more than one personality throughout their life, says common sense.
And why persist with something difficult, when sending fuzzy gifts is easy, and causes no stress or pain? I have been branded with a red markof perversity: I’m evil in relation to my past.
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