Wrangler Dani

I was a freshman (no, I’m not going to say first-year, how insecure do modern educators think young women are, anyway?) in college, taking a speech class. I hated the class, it was three times a week and nearly useless – our instructor was a pleasant, shallow blonde who seemed to be less than five years our senior and had little interest in our lives or our improvement.

We were supposed to give a presentation on “how to do something” – make coffee, knit a scarf, drive a stick-shift.

I chose “how to break a horse”.

To be fair, I wasn’t going for the shock-factor or trying to be outrageous, this was really something I had knowledge in and passion for. However, I overestimated my fellow-students openness of mind. Halfway through my presentation I felt their eyes glazing over with the effort of understanding a world so vastly different from their own. Our teacher smirked openly in the back of the room, assuming that I was making the whole story up in an effort to sound cool or unique.

The truth was, I would have rather been anything other than unique at that moment. I felt naked. I noticed that I had worn boots to class (trying to keep with my theme) and that all of my classmates were in sandals. My jeans were suddenly too tight, my hair too long, I felt shrill and skinny and way too easy to see through. I had just revealed a passion to a room of bored strangers and they were allowing it to fly right over their heads and crash into the chalkboard at the back of the room, not noticing that my heart was flying and falling with it.

I wished that I had talked about how to bake a cake or grow a cactus, anything besides this.

My speech over, I slunk back to my seat and stared dutifully down at my notebook, feeling unexplainable dismay. I would not give speeches about anything personal for the rest of the semester.

Being unseen is painful. Being seen and not understood or given worth is even worse.