I'll never forget the moment I realized I would never be viewed as the smart one. "Leah, I'm sorry but you're just stupid, my 8th-grade math teacher said to me through 99 cent lipstick stained teeth and a crinkled stare. My eyes pooled with boiling hot tears as I realized was what I thought was my truth. I wasn't good enough to make the advanced math class. I wasn't good enough to make the regular one either. No, I was placed in "the A team" a group of 4 individuals that were singled out as the unintelligent potatoes of 8th-grade pre-algebra. Fun fact: we weren't taught it. She retaught 6th-grade math thus never giving me the skills of pre-algebra leading to me eventually failing real algebra when I got to high school. Which trailed into a hatred of math and an awful self-esteem problem that has now followed me into my twenties.

I am not dumb. I am dyslexic only with numbers and had satan's gatekeeper for a teacher in grade school. So why in college am I still viewed as unintelligent by my peers? I have an outstanding vocabulary and can name any fact from just about everything from the French Revolution to the Vietnam War. I wrote a 15 chapter book on a typewriter when I was eleven and was published in a poetry book when I was twelve. But I'm dumb, right? Is it because I'm "the funny one"? No, it's because I can't do a simple fraction. Because you're only considered smart if you're good at math and science and I am so exhausted of this stigma that because I am a humanities major I am not intelligent. Ask me the doctors names that performed experimental torture in Auschwitz. Ask me what coruscating means or how to spell almost any word. But ask me what 25 + 989 is or literally any basic math problem and I cannot do it.

My friends call me "weird" because I know all these random facts. But they don't consider it weird to know how to do a hard division problem in a matter of seconds. Then it's cool. Then you're considered worthy because you're of some use. Well, I am telling you now that math has not helped me once in my d*mn life. You want to know what has? Reading. Reading taught me almost every life lesson and value I have for myself besides the ones my parents instilled in me. It gave me a creative mind that never stops moving. It gave me a vast vocabulary and vital need for correct pronunciation. Which may make me seem like a pretentious douche on occasion but if there's a right way to say something why would you not want to know? My 8th-grade math teacher broke my spirit when she called me stupid at such an impressionable age. 13 years old and I thought I was not worthy of being called intelligent. I may not be able to round all the time and I'm pretty awful at science too but what I am good at matters. My choice to be a communications major was not taking the easy way out. It was a well thought out decision that I made to further my career as a writer. It is so frustrating to me to have people look down upon that as a career path because it isn't related to science or math. Mark Twain once said, "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." And I realized that day in 8th grade with my blue banded braces and broken spirit that my why was never going to be that I was the next Steve Jobs. I'm never going to find a cure for cancer and I'm never going to even get a B in college math. But I am going to write something worth reading. I'm going to speak as eloquently as I can as often as I can until people get it through their thick skulls that I am not an afterthought because I cannot simplify a fraction without a calculator. So, Mrs. Callaghan, I'm doing pretty okay for someone that's "stupid".