Insecure - Tom Hiddleston Imagines Geared Towards Battling Insecurities

Personal Thoughts for: "You're Such a Nerd," "You're So Stupid"

During this time too, fifth grade was tracked, but this time in reading and math, and once again, your homegirl was placed in the highest level of classes. (You see where this is going, right?) Also, I did knitting club and book club, which also fostered my love for books (and food, there was a lot of food).

Middle school, everything's tracked. There's honors classes for math and English, and, based on my track record, guess where I ended up? And the part I don't understand is that everyone is that class was supposed to be labeled as the "smart" kids, so why people picked on me for being among the top of the class is beyond me. By eighth grade, I had to drop one of the honors classes because, for that year, I got accepted into accelerated art, and with the scheduling, I couldn't do that, orchestra, honors math, honors English, and Earth Science (which was high school level) all at once. So I dropped the science because, hey, I'll just do that next year in high school.

To this day, I wish I had taken that class then and dropped lunch or something. I got, literally, hundreds and above in that class (extra credit), and what made it worse was the teacher constantly had the grades hung up on the wall. The purpose was to see what you were missing and see how you were doing, but it turned into a competition. Everyone wanted me for labs and for my notes, but when it came to receiving grades, I was bullied for being on top. I even was made fun of for getting a hundred on the regents and final, and I'm still trying to figure out why it's such a bad thing to say when they asked me how I did and it was the teacher, not me, who put up the grades to begin with.

Other than that, the only other bad experience, when it comes to being smart in high school, is junior year. It was the first day of classes, and I walked into my APUSH (Advanced Placement (AP) United States (US) History) class. By now, every student knew who I was and that I was one of the top people in the school. The teacher, in front of the entire class, asked what I was doing there: because I was the only black kid in the class.

And this comment didn't tick me off because he was being racist towards me, like because I was black, I couldn't be smart. It ticked me off because I was there primarily because someone had a similar attitude towards my family member, and that trickled down into putting me in that desk chair. I've always had that pressure to do well, and by him saying that, it was like that pressure was intensified for that particular class. The only nice thing I have to say about that teacher is that he introduced us to Hamilton before it went big, but otherwise, he made me feel so uncomfortable.

There's a lot more than went on in high school, but I'll get to some of that later.

It came time to choosing colleges, and I applied and got accepted into the top ones in the country. I ended up being enrolled in one of them (still am), and in the back of my mind, I've always questioned if this school accepted me because of my grades or because of my color, as the year prior they had a problem with not enrolling a lot of minorities. Anyway, so with my classes, the pressure is amped, I do well, and still, even in one of the most acclaimed intellectual colleges of the country, I hear students talking behind my back.

I'm just trying to do well, I have my mom on my back, she makes me feel like I'm the spokesperson for my family, society makes me feel like I'm the spokesperson for my race/ethnicity, and it's not like I was a nerd entirely by choice, so why is it that when I'm doing my best, which is what I'm supposed to be doing, why is it that that's still so utterly wrong?

~

"You're So Stupid"

Which brings me to this. Despite the rant above, when I do perform poorly, they make you feel like you're the stupidest person ever to exist.

Remember that fifth grade test I mentioned? It was on the parts of the brain, and I had left during that lesson for my violin lesson, so the next day, there was a pop quiz, and I bombed it. The same happened that same day for a test on the preamble, where we needed to memorize it word for word. Completely botched it.

When you get a bad grade, you just want to put it away and forget about it. But I went to the bathroom when the tests were being passed back out, and they were waving my grades around, making fun of the fact that I utterly failed both tests. They didn't let it go for a week, and even the teacher, who didn't like me very much, got in on it.

In junior and senior year, there was more stuff that happened, but it's more relevant for one of the other imagines in here, so I'm going to stop right there.

But that feeling, I hate that feeling, that you've not just failed, but that you've become a failure or more of a failure. I felt that I let more than just myself down. I dreaded showing my mom those two grades, and it was not pretty in the "Fury" household. The same happened for a sixth grade math test; one of the most terrifying feelings of my life.

But all to say that the pressure was and still is so intense. I've had it ever since I was born, and it's hardly ever been relieved. There's bullying on both ends, and even the middle, of the spectrum. Everyone says that no one's perfect, yet we make fun of each other for being exactly that. Maybe mine is that I'm not smart all the time and that I do stupid things a lot (more often that you think), and theirs is that they can't be supporting to people who feel, in many senses, hopeless. It's bizarre to me, always has been. But I guess the fact that no one else is perfect to is solace because there's always someone who not only can relate to your (")imperfection("), but they can help you cope.