About a time where I thought I was hot shit, until I realized I am definitely not. Please wait until the end… I promise you, my articles (and life) ALWAYS circle back to tarot.
As I was finishing college, I realized after a conversation with the bursar’s office that I would be 3 credits shy of getting my BA, despite overloading my schedule to a whopping 23 credits one semester. Yeah, you heard that right—I took 23 credits in one semester while a normal class load for a college semester totals 12 to 14 credits. So yeah… even with working my buns off, I was still not going to graduate on time.
Why was this so? Well, this little sheltered girl got the taste of freedom her freshman year and instead of attending classes I slept through them and partied a little too hard.. oh, and failed calculus. Yeah, I was taking calculus freshman year, first semester. My GPA took a huge nosedive: high school graduation I had a 3.5 ish, and after the first semester of college, I had a lovely 1.57. Eek. It wasn’t that I was dumb, I was just lazy and I never had to work for a good grade my entire life: until college. I digress.
So, I busted my butt in college after that flawed first semester to push myself back to the good grades that I knew that I had in me, and the willpower to sit down and get the work done without my parents looking over my shoulder to do it. And even after busting my butt, my efforts weren’t good enough. Still shy those 3 credits.
When I came home from college, I made arrangements to go to the local community college to make up the small deficit of credits I had left, after a conversation with the bursar’s office about waiving those three tiny credits well.. didn’t work out in my favor. What to take? I wanted a class that would be easy, but there were no easy classes that were offered to give me the amount of credits I needed. I figured it would be easy to make up those 3 measly credits at the local community college over the summer, but 3 is an odd duck of a number, and there weren’t many 2 or 1 credit classes. I ended up taking Sociology as one class and Composition and Literature as the other class.
The “easy” class to me was Composition and Literature, and that’s the class that I’m going to talk to you about today. Sociology was surprisingly hard, as it was about Marriage and the Family… finding out that we are biologically predisposed to be attracted to people that remind us of our mothers and our fathers? Yikes, I’m not sure I WANT to graduate college if this is the cost!
Anyway, Comp and Literature. As an English major, would you believe I NEVER had to take a single Comp and Lit class during my main college years? It’s true. I have my suspicions that the day I walked into the Intermediate Creative Writing class and gave my writing portfolio to my professor, the strength of my writing portfolio ticked some kind of unseen and unsaid box that indicated that I never had to take a Comp and Lit or beginner anything type of class for writing or literature.
So when I walked into Composition and Literature 101 (yeah, really) at the community college. My professor there was having to explain what the differences between similes and metaphors were… I nearly got up and walked out… I didn’t know if I could handle something SO beginner.
I felt like Hermione Granger, my hand kept shooting up every time, and I was starting to get glares in just the same way from my other classmates. Yeah, I felt it, and I knew I was being a snob, but I didn’t care. What was wrong with THEM? Didn’t they freaking GET IT?
The teacher didn’t know what to do with me, and felt the pressure I’m sure of having to stand in the front of the room and try to teach all of them and ME, the know-it-all. Have you ever tried to teach a know-it-all? Yeah, we can be pretty insufferable. She looked at me as if I had five heads most of the time. The looks she gave me were mostly, “Where’s Ashton Kutcher? Because I think I’m getting punked.” Because really, what English major from a 4 year college comes into a local college and takes what basically boils down to an introductory course in English? This gal, that’s who.
After a few weeks of reading and analyzing literature, using a book from St. Martins Press, it was time for us to do our own writing (the composition portion of the course). The writing I was most proud of was my personal essay entitled “Daddy’s Little Girl”: an ironic nod to my troubled relationship with my then-estranged father [who unexpectedly passed away a little over two months ago]. Got a good grade on it, and the teacher noted a few ways that I could have done “more” to it (none of which I agreed with, of course… what the hell did SHE know?).
Most of the time in the class, I was subconsciously looking down on every single student, thinking that I must be a better writer than all of them combined. This fact never surfaced to my conscious level until my teacher made an announcement…
“There was one person’s writing here I found especially profound and moving. I would like to ask this person to read it aloud, if they are willing…” As my butt rose in my chair unconsciously bidden, I felt dashed by cold water when she said someone else’s name. My tailbone thunked back down in the chair so hard it hurt. WHO WAS A BETTER WRITER IN THIS CLASS THAN ME?, I roared in my head. Doesn’t know the difference between simile and metaphor, and they’re a BETTER WRITER?! Incredulous, I turned around to look at the someone, and they began reading their piece. When they finished, I had tears rolling down my cheeks.
I was in shock. This person’s writing was better than mine. By far. And no, this person had not already gone to a 4-year college. This person was either naturally talented, or they worked hard at it. Probably both.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. I felt like an abject failure. They were SO GOOD. And I was SO JUDGMENTAL.
We all have moments where our confidence gets shaken. We experience doubt in our abilities. Sometimes this comes when we compare ourselves to others: what we perceive their talents to be, their personality traits, their style, or even their timeline. We see others hit milestones that we thought we would have accomplished already in our own lives, and we experience the feeling of being not good enough in comparison… that there must be something wrong with us because we haven’t jumped that hurdle yet.
Here’s the thing about assholes. Sometimes they really don’t know that they are being assholes. And me in Comp and Lit, up to that point? I was an asshole with a capital A.
So that “easy” class? Wasn’t so easy. I ate a whole lotta humble pie on that day, and I tried my hardest to not be such a judgmental prick.
Because know-it-alls? Usually don’t end up knowing a heck of a lot.
In my tarot practice, I walk that fine line between expert and humble novice. Why? Well, I just prefer to not relive the smackdown of Comp and Lit all over again. You can still be an expert at something and have the same wisdom in knowing that in the grand scheme of things, you know very little, too. Two seemingly contradictory thoughts CAN exist at the same time, and you know what? They often do.
It’s nice to think of tarot readers and psychics as all knowing and omnipotent, seeing and knowing and hearing all… I can see there being a comfort in that. But let me burst that bubble: we’re not. We may ACT like know-it-alls, but we simply don’t know it all.
Yeah, I still have those moments of thinking I’m hot shit. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, if I learned my lesson thoroughly and all the way through. But nope. I’ll have those moments of “I’m past this” or “I’m above it all” and then along walks a situation that basically says to me, “hahahhaa, no, you’re not!” And the situation is right. But I’m learning more each time, getting a little better with every “test” situation.
Blessings,
~*~Hilary~*~
www.tarotbyhilary.com
hilary@tarotbyhilary.com
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© Hilary Parry Haggerty | Tarot by Hilary
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