Sorry for my disappearance as of late. I’ve been busy/not busy, lazy/not lazy and just tired, tired/not tired at all, but lazy instead. Updates may be few and far between for a while as I push on with some coursework pieces.
Anyway, though I didn’t attend it personally, the parents’ evening the other night raised the same points that have been thrust on me ever since I was in primary school.
“He’s constantly chatting in class, and he ends up missing important notes due to this.”
“There are several homework assignments that Chris has failed to produce.”
“He needs to get his head down, and put more effort into his work.”
“He’s a very intelligent boy, who, if he tried, can achieve top grades across the board.”
And, for the last couple of years:
“He tends to be sarcastic, which - though occasionally humorous - more often than not, verges on offensive.”
Well, I have no qualms with points 1 through 3, and 5, and they’re all spot on the mark. But number 4…I’ve heard this down the years, and I’ve never lived up to the mark. Either all the teachers that have said that about me have been correct, and I’m simply a perpetual underachiever, who is so lazy that he cruises by on the bare minimum; or it’s wrong, and I’m a lot less bright than people give me credit for. I prefer to believe the second theory, mainly because I’m hyper-critical of myself and a pessimist at heart. But in reality, it just makes more sense. Somehow, if I were that bright, I’d be able to snatch that A for Spanish without exerting too much energy. The situation so far? I’m not even close.
But enough about all that. What I was planning to talk about was something I would never have expected to hear. And it was nothing to do with my academic prowess (or failure, depending on how you look at it).
It was to do with my weight.
Now, when I started secondary school, I was somewhat large for my age. I’m not going to lie; I was a pretty chubby child back then. I didn’t even know I was fat at the time, either. Which was the worst thing. Jokes would be made about my size (as they would be made about the size of many others in my school year, too), and I’d brush them off, because I didn’t believe them to be accurate.
That meant that it wasn’t until roughly Year 9 that I began to see my error, and began shedding the pounds. By Year 11, I was a lot happier with my “proportions”. But according to my favourite teacher, during Year 12, I’d taken weight loss to a dangerous level; at some stage, she’d been worried about my health.
With that, I refer you back to my second paragraph: “Anyway, though I didn’t attend it personally, the parents’ evening …” What was said exactly is solely the knowledge of the teacher, and my parents. They returned home, and mentioned that “she had been worried about me”, regarding my appearance in Year 12. The assumption is that she supposed me to be – dare I suggest it – anorexic. And again, I cannot stress it enough; I wasn't there. This is an assumption.
But the more I thought about it, the less absurd the notion started to sound. She had commented that I’d lost a lot of weight on more than one instance. Not only that, my own sister proclaimed (within the household) that I must be suffering from a disorder, and urged me to eat more at home (I distinctly remember laughing that one off). And countless others mentioned I looked a lot thinner than before. Now, I’m still sure that most of the “thin” comments were complimentary, because they came from people who knew that I was rather large in the past. Yet reminiscing has brought back the memory of myself eating next to nothing for a 2 week period. Not only that, I was frequently skipping dinner, and had a lower appetite than usual. Did all of this coincide with the worries?
I wasn’t offended to hear this come up; just surprised. If the problem actually existed, it was in a mild form. Moreover, I briefly checked with a couple of people to see whether they thought I needed to gain some weight not too long, and whether they had thought I was anorexic. No answers were yeses.
