Every A Was an Argument

Every A was an argument. I didn't always know what I was arguing against. I just knew I couldn't stop.

The marks weren’t about learning, though I loved learning. They were not about curiosity, though I was curious about most things, voraciously and indiscriminately, in the way of children who spend a lot of time alone with their own minds. The marks were about something more transactional than that. Something I understood in my body before I could articulate it in language.

I was building a case that said: I am worth keeping. I am not a problem. I am useful and good and whatever else I am, whatever the thing is that I haven't named yet and everyone hasn't noticed yet, it is outweighed by this. By the marks. By the teacher's approval. By the specific quality of being recognised as exceptional in the only currency the environment around me had agreed to recognise.

Every A was a deposit into an account that accumulated. This account became my insurance. If the thing I was became visible, if the secret found its way into the room, the balance might be sufficient to cover it. The good outweighing the inconvenient, or the exceptional outweighing the unacceptable. I was paying for my own presence in advance and I was very diligent about the payments and nobody knew I was making them.

This is not gifted child syndrome exactly. Gifted child syndrome is about identity built on capability. What I'm describing is something more specific and more painful, which is capability used as moral credit. I really think the distinction matters a lot here. It does for me. One is a child who believes they are special because they are smart. The other is a child who believes they are acceptable because they are smart. The first is about pride. The second about survival.

I was not proud of my marks. I was relieved by them.

Somewhere around fifteen I became more visibly, legibly myself. This is the polite way of saying I became more gay, in the way that gay becomes harder to manage as the body catches up to the thing you've been managing, as the performance of not-quite-that requires more maintenance than it did when you were twelve and the question wasn't yet fully formed.

The marks were still doing their work. The account was still accumulating. But the old strategy was no longer sufficient as the only strategy, because the thing I was had become easier to read and reading it was, for some of the people around me, an invitation.

This is when I discovered that intelligence was not just something I had. It was something I could use.

The marks had been quiet. Accumulative. A case built in private, over years, in the specific silence of someone who is managing something alone. The wit was different. Immediate. It worked in the room, in the moment, in front of the people who thought my increasing visibility was an opening. I learned to say something that made the room laugh and made the specific person who had started it understand that they had miscalculated.

I got very good at this very quickly. The speed was part of it. The speed said: I was ready before you started. The speed said: I have been preparing for this longer than you know.

What I had been preparing, and what I ended up doing, was a second form of currency. The marks bought me adult approval and institutional protection. The wit bought me something the marks couldn't, which was the room's allegiance, or at least its neutrality. You could not be both the funniest person present and the easiest target. The wit triangulated me out of a position I hadn't chosen.

The first time it worked I felt something I hadn't felt before. It wasn’t safety exactly, but it was something more active than safety. Power is too large a word. Agency is closer. The sense of having been in a situation I didn't design and having changed it with something that came from me, and from the thing I was. The intelligence that had been working quietly in the background, maintaining the account, managing the case, suddenly visible and pointed and effective in real time.

I kept using it. Of course I kept using it. It worked.

I want to talk about three women and one particular kind of boy, because I think they did something specific for me and for the queer kids watching alongside me, and the thing they were doing has taken me twenty years to recognise properly.

Rory Gilmore is the gifted child as cultural promise. She reads everything. She is going somewhere significant. She is loved by her mother in the specific register of her intelligence, which is the register Lorelai Gilmore is most fluent in, and the love is real and the pride is real and it is also, if you watch carefully, a love that is most legible when Rory is performing her capability. The Gilmore house runs on wit and speed and reference density and Rory was raised inside that system and became its finest product.

The revival arrived and something broke. It was not because Rory failed, though she did. It was that the failure revealed that the show had been wrong about her the whole time. Rory's intelligence was genuine. But the show had told her, and told us watching her, that intelligence was sufficient, that the capability would translate. That the world would recognise what the school system had recognised and reward it accordingly.

The world is not the school system. The school system has a ledger and keeps it carefully and the marks go in and the approval comes out and the transaction is clean. The world has different currencies and most of them were not the ones Rory Gilmore had been accumulating.

She didn't know how to fail. That's the revival's honest revelation. The gifted child who is always ahead, always capable, always exceeding the expectation, never develops the muscle for the ordinary setback. The muscle wasn't there when she needed it. She was thirty-two years old and she had never been required to be unremarkable and she had no idea what to do in the gap between who she was supposed to become and who she had actually become.

I watched the revival and felt something complicated. Not just sympathy, but recognition. And it was the specific recognition of someone who also built their case for worthiness on a currency the adult world wasn't collecting.

Willow Rosenberg is the case that requires the most honesty from me because the identification was so complete at seventeen that the complication of it took years to work through.

Willow at sixteen is the smartest person in the room and she knows it and the show knows it and the audience knows it and the identification was immediate and total. She was gay and she was essential and she was the one who figured things out. The case she was making for her own worth was comprehensive and the show kept validating it. Of course I loved her. She was the argument I was making about myself, rendered as a television character and given mostly happy endings every episode.

Dark Willow is the show doing something genuinely honest that I wasn't ready to receive at seventeen and am better equipped to read now. Willow loses Tara and she loses herself. Grief does damage, but it doesn’t make you a monster. Becoming a monster happened because Willow was so completely constructed around what she could do that when the doing couldn't solve the problem, the self had nowhere to go.

She was worth something because of her capability, but that capability was now pointed towards destruction. The worthiness case collapsed into its own logic. If you are worth keeping because of what you can do, the moral framework around the doing is not structural. It is contingent. Remove it and the capability remains. What you do with the remaining capability is the question Dark Willow is actually asking.

I didn't want to hear that question at seventeen. I hear it now.

Veronica Mars is the essay's most honest mirror and the one I am most reluctant to look into directly, which probably means I should.

Veronica is explicitly a girl who weaponised her intelligence in response to social violence. The show does not make this subtle. She was hurt, badly, publicly, at a scale that reorganised her entire social world, and she rebuilt herself around the sharpness. The intelligence as the new wall after the old wall was demolished. The wit as the thing between her and anyone who thought her vulnerability was accessible.

She investigates. She doesn't always connect. The investigation is the intimacy she allows herself. She is the smartest person in the room and she makes sure everyone knows it and she is also, underneath the performance, someone who is frightened that the smartest person in the room is not the same as a person who deserves to be loved.

I recognised Veronica Mars not because I wanted to be her. Because I already was her, in the ways that mattered structurally. The intelligence rebuilt as protection. The wit as active defence. The room managed through sharpness so that nobody could get close enough to find out what the sharpness was protecting.

The specific pleasure I took in her quick lines and her ability to dismantle people who underestimated her was not just aesthetic pleasure. It was the pleasure of recognition. Someone had written the strategy I was running and called it a protagonist.

The gifted boy had a specific permitted expression in the late 90s and early 2000s that the gifted girl didn't, and I moved between both of them in ways that say something about what I was constructing.

The gifted boy version was permitted a grandiosity the gifted girl wasn't. He was misunderstood. He was ahead of his time. His intelligence was a burden the world wasn't equipped to receive. This type ended up on Tumblr between 2009 and 2014, writing long posts about obscure things, treating aesthetic sensitivity as moral intelligence, building a community of people who had all been the smart kid in their school and had found each other online and were now performing their intelligence for each other in a space that rewarded exactly the qualities that had made them the smart kid.

The queer gifted kid on Tumblr found community there and also found another performance structure. The reblogs as grades. The follower counts as class rankings. The sense that being right about a piece of media analysis was, somehow, morally significant. I had left one system that rewarded my particular currency and found another one immediately. The account transferred. I kept depositing.

What Tumblr also gave the queer gifted kid was queer theory. The arrival of language for things I had felt but couldn't name. Sedgwick. Butler. Foucault filtered through someone's gifset. The intellectualisation of my own experience, which was genuinely useful and also, sometimes, a way of being about my queerness rather than in it. You could write a very sophisticated analysis of queer subtext in a television programme while not yet being fully present in your own body as a queer person. The analysis as a more comfortable location than the experience.

I spent some time there. The analysis was real. So was what it was protecting against.

Here is what I was doing.

I was paying for my own presence. Every mark was a payment. Every moment of recognised capability was a payment. The payments were going into an account I had invented and was maintaining alone because the actual jury, the parents and the teachers, was not keeping the ledger I imagined. The accounting system was running in my head and the payments were being collected by nobody except me.

I understood this at some point. It didn’t happen all of a sudden, but gradually, in the specific way that something you've been doing automatically becomes visible when the conditions that required it change. When I was no longer in an environment where the marks were the primary currency. When I was around people who knew what I was and had not subtracted it from anything. When the account I'd been maintaining became obviously imaginary because there was no one collecting the debt.

The relief of that should have been total. It was complicated.

Because the habits were still running. The performance of capability. The wit as active management of the room. The intelligence as the first thing offered, the thing presented before the person, the guarantee of worth extended before the worth could be questioned.

I was still making the case. The case had become the personality.

The bullies are twenty years gone. The marks stopped mattering in the way they mattered then. The room I'm in most often now is full of people who chose to be there, who know what I am, who are not going to use it.

And the wit is still running. The sharpness is still the first response. The intelligence is still the thing I put in front of the person when a new situation requires introduction. The case is still being built, quietly, automatically, for a jury that isn't sitting.

I am still very good at this. The question I am still answering is whether I know when to stop.

The essay you are reading is itself a version of the performance. The cultural analysis as the sophisticated adult expression of getting good marks. The intelligence deployed in the direction of a complex argument rather than a classroom test, but the mechanism is the same. Look at what I can do with this. Look at how I can hold these ideas. Look at how useful I am, how precise, how capable of the thing that is being asked of me.

The difference, maybe, is that I can see it now. I can watch the mechanism running and name what it's doing, which is not the same as stopping it but is different from not knowing it's there.

Rory Gilmore didn't know. Willow didn't know until it was too late for Tara. Veronica knows and keeps doing it anyway, which is its own kind of honesty.

I know.

I am still figuring out what knowing is supposed to change.

The marks were an argument. The wit was an argument. This essay is an argument. The case has been building for thirty years and the thing it was built to protect is no longer in danger and the building continues anyway, because some habits are deeper than the conditions that created them, and some defences outlast the threats they were designed for, and some questions don't resolve so much as they become the thing you live alongside.

Who are you when you're not making the case.

I'm still finding out.