They found me on an average stroll through Urban Outfitters. With no luck in the clothing department, I began mindlessly thumbing through the racks of neon sunglasses. One pair in particular beckoned me, though it was the plainest of the bunch: they were faux reading glasses with black frames and clear lenses. I pulled them on like armor. My metamorphosis had finally arrived. I was no longer the airhead, I was the coveted, feared, admired intellectual. I immediately bought them.
The glasses were more than just my latest accessory. They represented a long awaited solution to a decade-long internal battle that stretched back to one fateful day in seventh grade English class.
Miss Baker was the kind of English teacher who had cats. Lots of them. While she had her friendly moments, which included treating her students to stale, generic-brand candy leftover from Halloweens past, she was the kind of teacher who got some kind of pleasure from pouring salt in the hormonal wounds of her pubescent students.I fell victim to her sick game when I boldly disagreed with her evaluation of Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“But what she really wants is her father’s approval, don’t you think?” I questioned, in an attempt to show her my genuine intellectual curiosity. Instead of encouraging my budding literary criticism skills, Miss Baker simply bristled: “Sometimes, you’re truly an airhead, Julia.”
Years later, I’m an English concentrator at Harvard. Boy, did I show her! But sometimes I wonder if my decision to concentrate in English, or maybe every decision I’ve ever made, has been an attempt to show Miss Baker that I’m not, in fact, an airhead. For the past ten years, I’ve been blindly guided by the deep need to prove the Miss Bakers of the world wrong.
Even though I’ve made it this far, I am nevertheless still irked by that horrible sense of insecurity that Miss Baker instilled within me. It’s a common enough theme at Harvard: no matter how confident their facade, most people don’t think they deserve to be here. An airhead like me certainly doesn’t.
For me, this insecurity results in a daily battle against the airheaded seventh-grade Julia. Note to self: appear brooding in English seminar even if have not completed reading. Note to self: Pamplona is for hipsters only, do not go there in workout clothes; hipsters don’t work out. The list goes on.
After ten years of constant suppression of my airheadedness, I was starting to feel the emotional wear and tear of this battle of attrition. That’s when the glasses found me, just in time.
I admit it. The glasses were entirely fake. I have 20/20 vision. But for several weeks, I wore those lenses almost every day. And I wore them with pride. Having the glasses encouraged me to go to Lamont to do work, as though I simply belonged there now that I had the right equipment. I relished the moment when, curled up in a chair on the first floor reading room, engrossed in George Eliot, I slowly removed my glasses with a nonchalant sigh and rubbed by tired eyes, before carefully placing the glasses back on my head and returning to my book. That act wasn’t just for my own twisted self-satisfaction; it was a means of communicating to all the other four-eyed intellectuals in the library that I was one of them. It was a way of saying, “I know the trials of the intellectual, for I am one, too.”
I began to pity other girls who didn’t have glasses. Ha! How could those pedestrian fools be taken seriously in the world of academia, I would think to myself, fogging my spectacles and gingerly polishing them with my scarf.
The wake-up call came like any other average epiphany. I was leafing through US Weekly, alone in the privacy of my room, when I found myself reaching for my glasses as though I actually, physically needed them to read. With my hands on the pair, ready to put them on, I suddenly stopped myself. What was I DOING? It instantly dawned on me just how absurd the whole experiment had become. I had literally tricked myself into thinking that I needed these fake glasses to read about Jessica Simpson’s latest weight gain.
I put the glasses away for good.
This moment forced me to see what I should have seen all along: Nobody cared whether I was an airhead or not, with or without glasses. Most people didn’t even notice them. How could they not have witnessed my transition from airhead to academic? Either they thought I was an intellectual all along, or they still think I’m an airhead.
While I no longer wear the glasses, I somehow can’t bring myself to throw them away. They’re a reminder of the bittersweet, adolescent sense of insecurity that took me a decade to overcome; and its nice to be reminded of ones triumphs. Plus, I might need them in case I ever run into Miss Baker again.
—Julia M. Spiro ’10 is an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House. She’s not a natural blonde.
