Dear Lucy,
I’ve been cursed throughout my life with unwelcome assumptions of intelligence.
I never discouraged it mind you. Clever people treat me like I’m one of them and of course, my ego kicks in and along I play. I’m an intellectual Chamaeleon. In my corporate career I was excellent at it; answering questions with questions and the like. People generally just want you to agree with them so nodding along with a knowing look can take you a long way.
Sometimes though, my inner fool threatened to blow my cover. I once said, in a panic, "I'm just a listener inn-er!" This was on a teleconference I was attending in someone else's place. As I understood it, I was just there to show that Global were on the call – virtual nodding along - not to actually contribute and so this, to my horror, was my response.
It did go down in history amongst my team as one of the more ridiculous things I’d said though it didn’t top my impersonating a steam engine when my boss introduced me to her new boss and said I was the engine room of the global team. I bent my knees up and down and everything. My boss nearly soiled herself laughing, her new boss must have questioned his new choice of employer.
Another time I was almost rumbled was during a meeting I was taking on behalf of my boss who was stuck commuting in from the Netherlands. It was a meeting with an economics academic and our research agency. I had hoped that the agency would do the heavy lifting but unfortunately, my tactic of adding the reddest of lipstick and removing my glasses (so that I'd look less clever – to womankind and especially the suffragettes, I apologise), backfired and the academic ONLY addressed me. Even when the agency asked the academic a question, he turned to me to answer.
My ‘knowing nodding’ and urgent sounding “Mmmms” were taken to a new level that day.
It’s not just in matters of business that I’m a bit slow. As you well know, academia has always been a puzzlement to me despite another assumption; that I’m well educated and went to university, which of course, I didn’t. I feel like I have Academia-lexia. Do you remember when I tried to help Amy with her homework when she was 11, I looked at you helplessly, saying with despair, “I’ve read the passage and the questions, but I just don’t know what they want from me!/Amy.”
In other areas too, I’m just as flawed. I still don’t know if my uterus and my womb are the same thing. I thought Silicon Valley was a place in California where people went to have plastic surgery and I once believed my coat (purchased from a slightly fancier shop than usual) had 'fake pockets.' I was rather proud of my fancy fake pockets until someone enlightened me to their purpose - to keep their shape on the shop floor… So, they were stitched, not fake. Proof that yet another assumption about me isn’t true, that I’m posh.
I worry less these days and have reconciled myself with my limitations even if others refuse to see them. I’ve learned that there are different kinds of intelligence and to celebrate my first class nodding along abilities, which, let’s face it, got me more than one promotion along the way.
So instead of feeling like an imposter, if I catch myself on a Zoom call looking all knowing about something to do with the environment or the state of the economy, I smile and think to myself, “Not bad Pearce, not bad at all.”
And just in case you’re not sure either, I finally Googled uterus and womb and they are the same thing.
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