Well here we are again, you and I. But mostly me. It is the end of February and yet again I’m making my goal in the barely nick of time. This month I’ve been facing some hard demons. I have been facing my own ignorance and believe you me, it hasn’t been a pretty month. Normally I can sit and write these and LOL (that means Laugh Out Loud, Bapa, google it) by the end with some lighthearted ending. But in all honestly, I’ve been facing this weird feeling that I’m actually pretty ignorant in the world and it is a full 180 of what I’ve wanted to be, and what I like to present myself as. Before you huff, I know I’m smart… I do know that. But I think I might actually be a little dense sometimes. I fancy myself knowledgeable and emotionally intelligent, but over the last few weeks and opening up some past doors that I had forgotten I had metaphorically spackled and wallpapered, to try and hide forever I am realizing… well… I guess realizing all the things I’m about to blather on about. Hope you had some free time!

 I’ve been facing this all for a multitude of reasons, but the chain reaction started due to the fact that I recently had an old friend from Japan come to Oregon to see me and I took her to the beach. It was COLD but beautiful and this beach, as most in Oregon, there was foam rolling across the sand. To me it felt normal so I smugly walked staring dreamily at Hay Stack rock and humming some innocuous tune thinking about how pensive and cool I must look when I suddenly heard a screech.

            “Kallie, Kallie! Nani Ga? What is this?”

            “Sea Foam.”

            “Nani Ga?” (What is it?)

            “Sea foam! Seam foam is…” aaaand up pops the spinning rainbow wheel over my head as my brain thinks. I sat there with this dumbfounded look with a half-smile as I reach into the bowels of my mind trying to think… sea foam… Little Kallies all frantically scurry around finding que cards that I, as the mastermind, have to deny one by one like the CEO in a last min brain storming session. Master mind Kallie sits thoughtfully at the head of the conference table with a quizzical look and que cards pop up. Sea Foam: Proof Little Mermaid does laundry? No. Extraneous whale sperm that has made it to the shore? Unlikely, but I don’t know enough about whales to dispute it; let’s table that. Bubble bath drainage from the entire world? Only in Oregon? Be Serious! A color to paint your nails to impress a boy who likes green? Yes… but wrong context, and we aren’t ready to talk about that yet. Sea foam…. FUCK.

“Sea Foam is like…. The kelp… the Nori is oily and it kind of washes up… You know, I don’t know” I finally spit out. Ayumi san nods thoughtfully as if she understood anything of what I just said. I had forgotten this feeling. In all my nostalgia of traveling, in all my thinking about the delicious food, I had forgotten the feeling of disappointing people for not knowing something. As a TEFL teacher, you’re expected to know things: Why Mars isn’t habitable, the names of each species of shark, what sort of breakfast they eat in the south, and what sea foam is. I can’t count the number of times the same disappointed flicker goes in and out of a student’s eyes. The disappointment that this person whom you look up to, who speaks the language you’re learning, who is more well-traveled than you, but doesn’t know the answer to your question… that is like learning that the easter bunny doesn’t actually say bok-bok and that is, in fact, just a candy gimmick.

It was just as quickly as I imagined that look of disappointment that she immediately moved on to asking the next question and it dawned on me… no one was disappointed in me but me. That feeling of superiority I felt was a false God that I was narcissistically holding a mirror up to. Why would anyone care that I can’t name all the members of Nirvana? How would me not knowing the entire collection of Charles Dickens off the top of my head really affect a friend, family member, co-worker, or random person doing surveys on the street? Is it really that big of a deal that I hardly know the Periodic Table? No. No one cares, kiddo, and that is my issue. For years I have held on to being the smartest, most clever witch of my age but in reality… I’m not. It isn’t imposter syndrome, exactly, but it is more me facing my own reality. I know a lot, and I know a lot of cool shit, but I don’t know everything, and I think I’m very slowly coming to terms with the fact that I don’t have to. I don’t have to be interesting to everyone, in fact, I don’t have to be interesting to anyone by myself. The last few years, especially, I’ve been killing myself trying to learn as much as humanly possible to keep up with a world that is moving so quickly on without me. I feel left out, left behind, and unable to keep up. I start to panic and my mind races as I try and learn everything for everyone and be something to at least every person I’ve ever known or cross paths with. I try and try but the thing is.. I think that only I care. Only I care that I don’t know as much as I’d like.

It is painful, as I think it has effected some of the most important relationships in my life more than I’d like to admit… here I am again, dear friends and family, to admit my very human fallibility. To tell you that I am not perfect and I’m not even that clever. I’m not a fake nor a fraud and I won’t sit here and belittle myself to the point that I don’t know anything, but the truth is very close to that. There is so much that I don’t know, and even more that I don’t know that I don’t know and I’m learning how to come to terms with that. I would like to know how to find a healthy balance of endless curiosity, and humility; of knowing a lot, but being able to admit that I won’t ever know everything.

This post is basically how my mind is working recently; disorganized, scattered, and with way too many metaphors and analogies. But I will end it here as this, folks, was most of my December, January, and here we are in February thinking long and hard in the shortest month about my place in this world. Light stuff amidst some dark and heavy shit in the world currently.