Sixth Former Maggie Ingraham '15 addressed the School Community at Church Assembly on Thursday, February 19. She spoke of finally achieving success and realizing her potential one she stopped type-casting herself as a failure.
The full transcript of Maggie's talk follows.
Growing up, it was always an unspoken notion that my mother was unstable, though I understood it to be what made her unique. There was no clear trigger with my mother. Both everything and nothing could set her off. Whether it was a shirt folded instead of rolled, or a hanger facing the wrong way, there was always a reaction. Predictability was not one of her virtues. After my parents separated, my father came to our house to pick up his toolbox. My mother had confirmed this visit beforehand, but upon my father's arrival, as no one could have anticipated, she threw a fit. My father pulled into the driveway, started towards the garage for his toolbox, and my mother called the cops, accusing my father of trespassing and stealing. I learned that my mother's emotions always seemed to be heightened, as if on some type of steroid. I would later recognize my mother's "mannerisms" as undiagnosed Bipolar Disorder.
As I said before, there was no predicting how my mother would act or react in any given situation. There was no certainty. I felt as if I were a stranger in my own home, constantly bumping into different versions of my mother lurking around the next corner. This was especially true when dealing with grades. Whenever I brought home a grade report, I couldn't anticipate what form the inevitable, exaggerated response might take. Depending on the mood I had caught my mother in, the encounter would either end with a celebratory milkshake at The Wobble Café, or being thrown into my mother's linen closet, hands and shirt bloodied, where I would be forced to remain for the night.
I was in middle school when I came to a realization: my mother had the same reaction to any grade below a C. The same. Relishing the haven those two words provided, I wasted no time and grasped desperately at the opportunity that lay in front of me. It was not easy at first, being a bad student. I had to work hard at not working hard, but eventually the C's and D's, and even F's, came naturally. Slowly I became a horrible student with a horrible work ethic. Along with this came the regular beatings. To you, on the outside, this must sound like a circle of Hell. To me, those beatings were a Godsend – because they were regular. For the first time, I could predict something. This was my first encounter with consistency.
I imprisoned myself in this paradoxical nirvana for more or less three years. The beatings and mood swings became routine occasions. In my mind the pros outweighed the cons by a long shot. Even when I transferred to the Abbey for my Fourth Form year, away from my home and my mother, nothing changed academically. At that point, I just had no motivation to try harder. No one really expected that much more out of me as student. They didn't exactly put me on a pedestal. And honestly, I didn't think very highly of myself, either. I had nothing to prove. Until one day, that changed.
Spring Term of Fifth Form year had just begun, and I was going over my Winter Term grades with Derms (teacher Ms. Corie McDermott). The end goal was to decide whether or not I still qualified for early study hall, the early study hall that I had been on for every single term up to that point. "These grades tell me you're an idiot," she lovingly stated, in the calm but authoritative voice that would make Joseph Stalin envious. "I know you're so much smarter than what this sheet of paper says. Prove me right." This stunned me at first, but it was the brutal honesty everyone in years past had denied me, thinking I was too fragile. I knew my mission: I would prove her right at any cost.
I remember the day very vividly: Mrs. McCarthy was returning Pre-calculus tests and the familiar feeling of dread arose in the pit of my stomach. All my classmates had received their tests back, and even those notorious for their high grades looked really disappointed. Expecting to see yet another F, I distracted myself by talking to friends and checking my phone. Eventually, my test was placed face down on the desk in front of me. Just like removing a Band-Aid, I thought to myself: fast hurts less than slow. I flipped the paper face-up: 95.The highest grade in the class.
In the weeks following, I was taken off early study hall. I made the Spring Term Dean's List. It was then that I realized I was capable of so much more than I was limiting myself to. I was kind of smart, which was a crazy concept to grasp at the time, having accepted the role of the dumb one, out of the four children in my family. Honestly, up until very recently, I was the dumb one. I played that part really well, simply because my longing for consistency so clouded my judgment.
Roles can seem safe, especially when life isn't safe. It's easier to play a part, even a bad or self-destructive one, rather than risk looking inside and finding out who you really are and what you can really do. But a role can quickly become a trap, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a mask we can't take off. As Kurt Vonnegut said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." By type-casting myself, I spent years acting out failure instead of success. But with the help of others, I was able to break character and try a new performance, as myself.
Thank you.