I grew up in a small town. You can get by if they accept you as sort of a mascot/walking encyclopaedia. That’s how I once got the entirety of Year 6 to come and defend me against the depredations of evil highschoolers.
That’s possible when people in your town see knowledge as something positive. I was (still am) socially awkward so the mascot strategy never worked. I tried the encyclopaedia one but turns out bigotted farmers are not fond of people who know things. The only way to stop being bullied was leaving the town when I was 18 to move to a big city.
Are you me? Moved from 3500 pop bumfuck Wisconsin to 3.5m pop Los Angeles at 18. Greatest decision I’ve ever made, although staying out ended up a harder challenge than I expected due to the aforementioned lack of and hostility toward knowledge and behavioral health care.
Yep, I definitely got lucky. And people certainly do not appreciate actual knowledge that defies their pre-existing beliefs.
It wasn’t all great.
But my particular type of weirdness, combined with a tendency to ignore or not recognise what would normally be humiliation, got me enough laughs that I could spout all sorts of facts about astronomy or whatever without being threatening to the ones that knew me best.
I grew up in a small town. You can get by if they accept you as sort of a mascot/walking encyclopaedia. That’s how I once got the entirety of Year 6 to come and defend me against the depredations of evil highschoolers.
That’s possible when people in your town see knowledge as something positive. I was (still am) socially awkward so the mascot strategy never worked. I tried the encyclopaedia one but turns out bigotted farmers are not fond of people who know things. The only way to stop being bullied was leaving the town when I was 18 to move to a big city.
Are you me? Moved from 3500 pop bumfuck Wisconsin to 3.5m pop Los Angeles at 18. Greatest decision I’ve ever made, although staying out ended up a harder challenge than I expected due to the aforementioned lack of and hostility toward knowledge and behavioral health care.
Yep, I definitely got lucky. And people certainly do not appreciate actual knowledge that defies their pre-existing beliefs.
It wasn’t all great.
But my particular type of weirdness, combined with a tendency to ignore or not recognise what would normally be humiliation, got me enough laughs that I could spout all sorts of facts about astronomy or whatever without being threatening to the ones that knew me best.