Plastics -Lucy Whitman Sandmeyer

When I was young, I was definitely not a perfectionist. My sister had neat handwriting and wore cardigans and just had everything together while the only homework I got done was my independent reading. She seemed to breeze through things that challenged me: getting my homework done, staying organized, caring. I would get stuck. When I was learning about multiplying two digit numbers, I couldn’t figure out which one needed to go on top so I freaked. Instead of trying out the possibilities, I gave up. I didn’t get a lecture from my parents about perseverance, I got a tactic: make it up. Seriously, this has been the secret of my academic development. Once you make something up enough, you get better at it, and you get right (as long as you learn what’s right to begin with). It’s not that I’ve really gotten better at math. It’s just that I’ve gotten better at making it up. Just as people say, the longer you fake it, the more you become it. That’s not to say the only improvements I’ve made in school or elsewhere stem from initial bullshit, but that’s how I react generally when I’m bad a something and, so far, it’s gone pretty well.