The Impact Of The Secrets You Keep

My memories have been more vivid lately. Breaking through the haze of survival are some of my earliest vignettes of happiness, but also of shame. Over dinner one night with my boyfriend, I picked up a french fry and plopped down a memory.

“You know, when I was in elementary school I was so embarrassed because I always confused numbers,” I chewed on the thought and the fry.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

The way some need a breath to tell time when looking at a clock, I had to give myself a moment when someone says more than double digits.

“You just said eleven-thousand and twenty-five hundred back to back. I had to stop, picture the numbers in my head, and unscramble them because at first I saw 1,100 and 25,000.”

It didn’t feel like a big deal when I said it out-loud now, but this was my first memory of a shameful thing I worked really hard to hide and pretend didn’t exist. Instead of asking for time, giving myself space to think, or admitting that I needed more than maybe someone else did, math became one of the roots for a life built on feeling frantic for the sake of appearing put together.

It mattered to me back then to not get figured out by others. Imposter syndrome before imposter syndrome was in my vernacular. Over the years, I traded feeling…