A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
My Dear Friend,
I didn’t have surgery in 2007.
You could be forgiven for thinking I did, because I might have told you I did. I can’t remember if I told you, but I know for sure that I told my English professor that I was going to have the surgery, and that a classmate overheard, and that, like these things do, the lie ballooned. It ballooned to the point that I physically cut and bandaged myself so that it would look like I had undergone minor surgery. I researched the type of bandage you’d need for finger surgery (?!), and where a surgeon would make an incision if a portion of your finger needed to be physically reconstructed. Which, by the way, it probably wouldn’t. Finger surgery isn’t terribly common.
There’s a good chance my English professor knew that, but I didn’t suspect she knew it. I looked up the names of plastic surgeons in Walla Walla so I could say things like, “Dr. Shae said that everything is looking good” for when the English professor would ask how I was feeling. Which she never did, because, like I said, I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying. I’m pretty sure about that NOW. At the time, I thought I had created a lie that had no holes.
I can’t remember the assignment I needed an extension on, but that’s what was going on, if you hadn’t figured that out already. The lengths I went to to construct this lie (I ACTUALLY CUT MY ACTUAL FINGER OPEN SO IT WOULD APPEAR SWOLLEN!?!) suggest that I had already asked for a family-emergency extension in this class, or a mental-health emergency extension. Without fail, I had one family emergency or one mental health emergency in every class I ever took for all of college. These types of emergencies are easy enough to rationalize as being true: someone in my family inevitably really WAS having a hard time and I really WAS on the phone with my mom a lot; I really WAS crying all night long and into the weekend about who could say what. The vagueness of these emergencies made them feel like they weren’t exactly lies.
Like, in third grade, I came to school sobbing, and told all my teachers that my best friend had died that morning and that I was going to need some time and space. I cried all day long, and eventually was called into the counselor’s office. The counselor very gently told me that they’d called my mom to check in about my best friend’s death, but that my mom had informed them that actually, it had only been my rat, Marbles, who had not woken up that morning. A big part of me had known that telling my teachers that my pet rat had died would not make them understand the grief I was experiencing, so I knew how I had to frame it. By saying I’d lost my best friend, my teachers had cooed at me and let me sit inside during recess to read Babysitter’s Club books alone. Now I was in trouble for lying. I said to the counselor, “But I wasn’t lying.” Which I wasn’t! I loved that rat. It was good if you always had plausible deniability.
The finger surgery was trickier, because it was almost totally untrue. I had carpal tunnel, because I’d pulled too many all-nighters and consumed too many energy drinks, but I had not, as insinuated, crushed my left pinkie under a falling piece of an abandoned tractor on some railroad tracks. The thing was, I needed a few days to finish my English paper. I needed the days because I was the editor of the school paper, which meant that I stayed up every Wednesday night all night to make sure the paper got completed and off to the printing press, and I’d taken on a job as a cub reporter for the local newspaper, and these things were more important to me than Chaucer. This was not something I wanted to tell my English professor. I needed something that would give me exactly two weeks of extra time, and so here was my thinking:
I had not yet had a medical emergency. Virulent illness would require acting skills that I didn’t have, and plus, I wouldn’t be allowed to be seen on campus, which was out of the question, because I had a lot of campus-related things to do. Surgery required recovery time, and there were such things as minor surgeries — I’d had one the summer before in the form of a wisdom tooth extraction. Wisdom teeth would be perfect, but I’d already had them removed, and had blogged about it, so the risk was too great for getting caught. What else could you get surgery for? An ankle? But then I wouldn’t be able to walk for a long time. A wrist? Writing would be out of the question for much longer than two weeks. But a finger was perfect, because it was small enough that even without my pinkie I should be able to squeeze out a Word Doc, and since it was surgery, it still had the potential for complications or at least the types of unexpected problems that English professors knew nothing about. It felt fail-safe.
The amount of time I spent researching finger surgeries, you do not need to remind me, was time I could have been writing about Chaucer.
The professor was nice about it, and gave me the extension, because actually, professors usually will give you the extension. And here’s what I learned: if you lie really well, you can graduate from college with Honors, even if you didn’t really earn it. In other words: You technically graduated college, Sophie. But you didn’t really earn it. And, because I learned lying early on, I added that secret truth to a list of secret truths that no one knew but me. Here are a few more:
No one would love the version of you that is sad for the REAL reasons you’re sad. They love the sad stories you make up. Your truth isn’t sad enough. You overreact.
You don’t work hard enough to be a good student, piano player, employee, athlete, artist, or journalist.
You aren’t actually very smart.
You don’t apply yourself adequately.
The way you look when you just get out of the shower is hideously ugly.
Other people are capable. Other people have earned their place in the world. Other people are deserving of attention and accolades. You are none of these things.
You are not worthy of love. You are barely worthy of life.
This is the unfortunate by-product of lying to get what you want: you get what you want, but the person who gets to enjoy it is not the person you actually are.
It’s finals season, and so my students are lying to me a lot more than they normally do. At the beginning of the year, I beg them not to do this. “Please,” I say. “Don’t tell me you have a family emergency. Tell me you’re overwhelmed because you have too much work. Tell me you stayed out all weekend and you have to catch up on sleep. Tell me the thing that’s true. If you tell me what’s true, we can figure out what you actually need in order to make up the work.” A person who has just had finger surgery needs a different accommodation than a person who has pulled six all-nights in two weeks, for whatever reason. A person who is grieving over a dead grandparent might need to go home and disconnect from the world of school for a week or two, and that should be ok and allowed; while a person who is mentally overloaded and scream-crying into her empty box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (raises hand) might need an appointment with an on-campus counselor and a scaffolded work plan for a final project.
But the students lie anyway. How do I know they are lying? I wish it wasn’t totally obvious, but it is totally obvious. I had to change a performance date recently (due to forces outside my control), and a student’s face glazed over for a while, then they furiously typed on their phone, then they raised their hand and said, “Actually, I have a dentist appointment at that time.”
Me: At night?
Them: Yes?
Me: Who is your dentist who is open at night?
Them: Oh, um, you don’t know them.
Me: Is it, like, a routine cleaning?
Them: It’s my wisdom teeth.
Me: … So, you’ll be out of school for the next three days anyway then, right?
Them: Oh. I don’t know?
In another class, a student who had dropped off for four weeks and hadn’t responded to my multiple emails or progress reports suddenly sent me an email out of the blue with the subject line, “Have you been getting my emails?” Apparently, Gmail had been deleting all the emails they’d been receiving, and all the emails they’d been SENDING. Apparently, Canvas, our online classroom system, had been “eating” all their assignments. They’d been turning them in, they promised, but Canvas was just deleting them. Don’t worry, the student was going to go talk to IT about this.
I read this email, and I felt so profoundly sad. It felt like I was reading an email from a past version of myself who felt like she had to invent an impossible story, because whatever the truth was would have been insufficient.
And, like, let’s be real: a lot of the time, the truth is insufficient. That’s why we’re so terrified of telling it. In the chapter I return to most in All About Love (the one about honesty), bell hooks writes, “In far too many cases children are punished in circumstances where they respond with honesty to a question posed by an adult authority figure. It is impressed on their consciousness early on, then, that telling the truth will cause pain. And so they learn that lying is a way to avoid being hurt and hurting others.” I do have students who tell the truth, and it is grating. “I stayed up all night last night with my friends,” I have had a student tell me. “I just didn’t do my work for this class.” I’ve felt disrespected and hurt, and my regard for the student changed. The truth isn’t always kind, and sometimes it’s hurtful. When your truth hurts other people, there are consequences. We are taught that consequences should always be avoided.
Then I have students who tell me the truth, and whose truth is inconvenient for me, but with whom I feel closer and more impressed because they’ve done the hard work of telling me what I didn’t want to hear. For example: “My parents are coming into town, and I know I’m not going to do this assignment as well as I’d like to do it this week. Can I get it to you next Wednesday instead?” For me, that’s always going to be a yes. I love that self-awareness, and I definitely want to live in a world where people can rest and relax when their parents are in town. For other teachers, it will always be a no. They want students to be prepared for the big, scary world where deadlines are deadlines and work needs to be a priority. And when you do the vulnerable thing and ask for the extension, and you get the no, it sucks.
If you are one of those adults who wants to prepare children for how hard the world out there is: look, I get it. The world can be hard, and cruel, and crushing. But also, the world is changing. And it should change. But it won’t change if we don’t change it. It is up to us to make it safe for other people — especially people who have less power than we have — to tell us the truth.
I made the email student stay after class, and I talked to them for an hour. They cried, and at the end of the conversation, I imagine they probably hated me. More than one time, I said, “Nothing you say right now will make me think any less of you. You aren’t going to get into any trouble.” More than one time, they doubled down on their lie. Eventually, it all came crashing down, and the bottom line emerged: they hadn’t learned the course objectives because the semester had gotten way too busy. I wished they had come to me sooner. But I also understood the deep shame that would get in the way of someone saying, “I really need help. I’m in over my head” — especially a kid who was as bright and assertive and energetic and eagerly intelligent as this kid so clearly was.
The truth is, the typical college load is too much for a normal person. I’m talking about a 16-credit load with an on-campus job and a robust-enough social life. Then you have to be feeding yourself and managing your personal health for the first time in your life, too. Most people actually can’t do it on their own. They take drugs (Adderall is very popular) or outsource work (why do you think colleges are so panicked about Chat GPT?) or abuse their bodies in order to make it through the semester. Or they lie.
There are maybe, maybe, people who really are able to sleep four hours a night and do 12 routines a day and maximize all their time and energy and work work work all the time while staying relatively sane and healthy. But most people aren’t like that, and that is simply not a moral failing. There is nothing wrong with a kid who needed to decompress for a day playing video games because their Art History final was too much for them. It makes sense that my class fell by the wayside; I give off “nice teacher” vibes, and I get that feedback a lot. The problem, I told this kid, was that they weren’t going to get what they paid for out of my class. It felt so unfair to them, to have to put in all that time and energy, just to lie and cheat their way to a passing grade, without ever getting the opportunity to learn the skills they were supposed to learn. That doesn’t actually affect me at all. But it really sucks for them.
But enough about this kid. I want to tell you about me. I want to tell you that I didn’t get everything I deserved to get out of college, because I didn’t tell my professors the truth about what I needed. I wanted them to like me and think that I was smart. That felt more important than learning the hard things they had to teach me, so I picked papers and projects that felt easy. And more importantly, I left college not really believing that I could do anything. All I’d proved was that I could cut and bandage my finger.
There are some unsung gifts that come from telling the truth. If you tell someone the truth about why you can’t do something, and they never talk to you again, then you never have to talk to that judgmental person again. If you tell someone the truth about how you’re feeling, and they roll their eyes, then you get to spend your precious, precious Earth-time finding people who will love you for all your feelings. If you tell someone the truth about the little things that are getting in your way, then people get to see that actually, there are other people out there who don’t have it all figured out; who are struggling in small ways; whose truth is less sexy than on TV, and who aren’t afraid to tell it anyway.
And if you have to tell the truth, and it’s hard, then it will hurt. May it hurt as much as it’s worth. There are consequences for our actions. My hope is to live among people who are well-versed in the art of forgiveness; who can hold the truth, express the way it affects them, accept your apology, and let it go. And I’ll be the first to say that we do need to build that world from the ground up. But isn’t it something that’s worth building?
I love you (and that’s true).
Warmly,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
I should tell you, I think, that T said her first sentence while her aunt Jess was visiting. It was, “Here you go.” I still don’t know what T was handing Jess when she said “Here you go” AND “You’re welcome,” but nevertheless, this is a language marker.
Another important point: we learned that the Batman sandals she inherited at a recent Swap & Play light up. I found this out when I threw them with too much force on the ground, which just goes to show that sometimes it’s important to throw things, because they might light up. I started the Swap & Play for neighborhood families to meet once a month and bring their old clothes and toys, so we could pool them and trade them; and the kids could play too. I don’t know how well it’s going. I’m trying to build community, and I have this idea that it should be easy and happy and that everyone should love it, but my daughter is often scream-crying these days, and trying to run down the sidewalk and into the street. And I think I might be high-maintenance as a person in general, and I find that I don’t get to talk to all the parents, so I don’t know if they’re really having a good time? But I WANT to be a breezy, community-having type of mom. I WANT to be this. I think I try to PROJECT this. (I am pretty sure no one around me is fooled.) In truth, I am so exhausted, so totally bone tired that I haven’t cried in literal weeks because I don’t have the energy for it anymore.
This Week In Sophie
Chicago! Tomorrow night! Come see a conversation between myself and Tove Danovich, whose book, Under the Henfluence, I very legitimately loved very very much. Register here!
Or, come out next week for this week! (Another truly excellent book):
Alllllsoooo!
There is a new in-the-mail shipment coming in TWO WEEKS! I have some prints and stickers to send to folks on the “founding member” level (many of whom just marked their one year anniversary with me. THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE! I can’t believe there’s been a whole year of Erin.) To snag that deal, sign up for the “founding member” tier, and you can change the price to anything above $50. It defaults to $250, but you can type in whatever you want above the yearly price.
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She was handing me one of those sticks with a bell on the end of it, from the baby musical instrument basket. 🧡
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