I was younger than you, I believe, when I first realized the way I thought and felt things wasn't nearly the same as my peers, or my mother, or anyone else I'd ever met. Attempts at trying to get them to understand only resulted in increasing frustration, until I stopped bothering to try.
My mind works very, very quickly. Too quickly when I was a child, frankly, and I had no one who could keep up. Anyone I spoke to reacted to me as though I was strange. Sometimes they found it amusing, and when I stopped being so funny, they became angry or frightened. I was angry, but more than that, I was acutely aware that I was different from everyone around me.
[Not that they're different in the same way, but oh, god, does she ever know that aching loneliness that comes from being strange. Sometimes it was obvious. Sometimes it was less so, and those are the moments Rosalind hated the most: when it was some minor social cue, some easy thing that everyone in the world understood but her. Groups of girls giggling and gossiping, talking about their days, and it was never pointed, never personal, but for the life of Rosalind could never once understand the point.
It's isolating. And though she never cared, not really, not when there was science to do and physics to discover and she didn't even really like other people, it was still . . . it was still a failure in some small way.
Not that it matters now.]
But the secret, Mary . . . is that it doesn't matter.
You are you. And who you are is undoubtedly different from others. But people are ordinary and dull and petty, often concerned with nothing so much as their own vices and vanities. It's a point of pride to be different.
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My mind works very, very quickly. Too quickly when I was a child, frankly, and I had no one who could keep up. Anyone I spoke to reacted to me as though I was strange. Sometimes they found it amusing, and when I stopped being so funny, they became angry or frightened. I was angry, but more than that, I was acutely aware that I was different from everyone around me.
[Not that they're different in the same way, but oh, god, does she ever know that aching loneliness that comes from being strange. Sometimes it was obvious. Sometimes it was less so, and those are the moments Rosalind hated the most: when it was some minor social cue, some easy thing that everyone in the world understood but her. Groups of girls giggling and gossiping, talking about their days, and it was never pointed, never personal, but for the life of Rosalind could never once understand the point.
It's isolating. And though she never cared, not really, not when there was science to do and physics to discover and she didn't even really like other people, it was still . . . it was still a failure in some small way.
Not that it matters now.]
But the secret, Mary . . . is that it doesn't matter.
You are you. And who you are is undoubtedly different from others. But people are ordinary and dull and petty, often concerned with nothing so much as their own vices and vanities. It's a point of pride to be different.