The Veil/On Speaking Badly, part 2

Sometimes, in writing workshops, people will just start evaluating your character! It's sort of hard to tell if this is cute or offensive. Especially given the evaluation I received last night:

"Amanda speaks from behind this veil of shyness and uncertainty, and, like, in class she's always apologizing and you think she's just rambling, but the veil is deceptive; behind it there's this brute force of powerful honesty."

No, I fucking don't know how people can say this stuff out loud. Veil? Am I Sirius Black? I'm not even exactly saying it's a bad thing to say, but just that I'm impressed that someone can come up with an image so fast and just spit it out and have it mean something right away. Or even if he wrote it down first, how did he deliver it in a way that didn't sound scripted?

And therein lies the problem.

I am not the way I talk. I just want to say that, over and over again. I mean, there are some classes where I would describe myself as shy but this isn't one of them. Sometimes I don't do the reading, so I don't talk then. I talk during workshops. I say stuff. Even in classes where I don't talk, it's not like talking makes me terrified. I just know I'm a shitty talker, that I sort of mumble a bunch of words, as simple as possible, definitely not anything as smart as talking about a veil--I mean, any attempt to use creative language just turns into me sounding the way people with schizophrenia talk in my Abnormal Psych textbook. Is it disorganized speech if you're capable of speaking normally if you plan it out beforehand? Well, it doesn't really matter, I can't exactly plan for every topic that could possibly arise. So it comes out like this, or not at all.

But I'm not. Fucking. Shy.

This is a situation I'm kind of prone to, where I make a really mean blog post about someone who I actually have no problem with in Real Life. This guy in my class is a really good writer and seems nice. I don't doubt he meant what he said completely positively. But it's kind of weird to have your speech issues characterized as "shyness" and a "veil." And the fact that you don't lie (which isn't a choice) characterized as some sort of accomplishment or virtue. I don't know. I mean, my story wasn't very good and I understand that a lot of people were saying it was "honest" maybe as a way of being tactful. That's fine. But that doesn't mean I have to be told that I'm honest.

If I just say what I think, people tend to laugh because it's so plain and brief--and that is maybe part of why I say so many ums and apologize so much, just to kind of mask it and pad it a little. But I'm so fucking careful about what I say in class! I can't believe someone still thinks it's rambling.

As you can probably imagine, I spend most of my time in class feeling incredibly stupid. And then, sometimes, it just hits me, when some jargony English major says, "Why are you so sure the speaker of this poem is a woman?" when the poem is about being pregnant--I'm actually smarter than some of them. It's just the way I talk. I remember when I realized last year, in my Aeneid class, that my professor's look of bafflement didn't mean my translation was actually bad. He was just knocked off balance by The Veil.

I'm sort of joking calling it The Veil, of course; it's not a way of hiding any more than any other way of talking is. It's kind of stupid that my inability to adjust to the way people are supposed to talk in different settings, and the fact that I think of content more slowly and tend to have to cover for that by any means necessary, are seen as being some sort of disguise. Other people talk differently in class and out of class, and even in different classes. Isn't that more of a disguise? If you're going to call anyone's way of being a disguise, I mean.

Just like I'm stuck sounding stupid, there are presumably ASD people who are stuck sounding smart. Actually, no presumably about it, I just met one. He can do pretty much everything I can't, and I'm sort of jealous, but on the other hand he probably doesn't get half as much free stuff as I do. In non-academic contexts, the way I talk can read as very charming.