Metamorphosis

You know something’s changed about you when people you used to play with as a kid call you ma’am. You know something is changed when people older than you, or of the same age, call you ma’am just because you spend one or two hours every week teaching their child a foreign language. You know something is different when people younger than you by no more than 8 or less years call you ma’am. You know something is different when, after a lifetime spent in voluntary invisibility, you suddenly shine bright like a star on the night sky and everyone wants to see what you do next. You don’t have to be an international celebrity for that to happen to you. You just have to be a public figure in a small community.  When all these things happen, that’s when you know something is definitely wrong. Especially with the way you once imagined life. 

I never, in my wildest dreams, pictured myself as being one of those people. Never, ever. Yet it happened.

When I was little, I had my mind set on becoming an archaeologist. I have countless prehistoric shells I had extracted with much care out of some rocks we had from a nearby quarry to prove it. (It is said that the bedrock we live on today used to be the bottom of a sea once, many, many years ago, and there’s plenty of evidence towards that conclusion.) I used to spend hours with a hammer and chisel in hand, driving my mother insane with the noise and, as she put it, the futility of my efforts. In retrospect,  I regret nothing. Breaking rocks is the better choice if playing with mud or with  the neighbors' insufferable and backwards kids. (I know, that was really mean. can't help it sometimes.) 

I didn’t know, at the time, that digging up prehistoric shells had nothing to do with archaeology. I would soon learn about paleontology when I forced my mother to buy me The Atlas of the Prehistoric World by Douglas Palmer. Enter my life: dinosaurs. Book reading, documentaries, drawings, criticism of highly inaccurate dinosaur movies, you name it, followed…

Time passed, as always, and I moved on, but you know what they say about first loves. They never, truly, go away. They just change. Like everything in life.

I remember what my chemistry teacher used to say about matter never  disappearing in chemical reactions, simply transforming into something else, sometimes better, sometimes worse.  That is why I am no longer the kid dreaming about discovering the coolest dinosaur in her world-famous expeditions. That is why I am not the same girl who used to day-dream about her characters’ lives long before she started to actually put their stories on paper.

What happened to her, one might ask? People calling me ma’am happened. And not  just any people. For goodness sake, my math high school teacher, with whom I now became colleague, uses the plural you (considered a polite form in my world) sometimes with me. Considering how “good” I was at math, I owe that man a lot and I should be praising his name every day. (not that I disrespect him now. Every person older than me must be given the proper respect.) But I digress… a little.

I will never get used to people calling me ma’am. It is the strangest thing ever for me. For now, though, I must bear it. Becoming a teacher was not exactly my  idea of a future. It just happened. I was going to be the writer of novels. I can still be her, of course, provided someone considers my manuscripts worthy of publishing. I’m waiting. Patiently. It will happen.

Anyway…

I find it very strange to be called ma’am by people I like and would like to have sort of a friendship with (in the limits of my limitations. Being somewhat antisocial doesn’t make it very easy).  That is why it feels good to meet people who still call me by my first name or, in the case of people younger than me, find different ways to call me, or simply slip up and forget all conventions. 

I could say a lot about me being a teacher and the relationship I have with the students but I shall refrain because it will only make me appear mean and discriminatory (that is exactly want I am at times but one is not supposed to show those colors to the world.) Needless to say, I do not hate all the people I meet. I find some quite charming and enjoy spending time with them, if they’ll have me.

And finally, I almost reached the point of this introspection. A human being, I find, is a rather volatile creature. You can almost never see its true face because it has one for every situation and for every other human it interacts with. I am basing this theory mainly on what I know from myself but I am guessing I am not that unique on this planet and the rest of the world is a bunch of machines programmed to react in the same manner as a response to a certain situation. I don’t think it is possible. When two individuals meet and discover they like the same painting, or they hate the same kind of people, that is called compatibility. There’s always a third that hates what they like and loves what they hate.

My point is no human being is only black or only white. (No reference to skin color. That is just an excuse for some people to not like other people.)  Take a character in your favorite book. Make sure that book contains heroes and villains of sorts because otherwise the exercise is kinda pointless. Of course, another factor that might interfere is when was the book written (in the past the villain was villain, and the hero, hero, no grey areas allowed) but I believe you will be okay if the chosen volume was crafted sometime from the 19^th century onwards. So, let us begin the analysis. Is the hero that virtuous, does he or she have absolutely no dark side? Same goes for the villain. Does the villain have absolutely no good in him, no plausible justification for his actions? What about the way they behave with other characters? Heroes and villains will not get along with each other and will probably try to destroy one another every chance they get, but a villain will be gentle with the people he loves. in rare cases, they will discover they have more in common they would like to admit. We do the same things in real life. One minute you are the friendliest person in the galaxy, the next, someone you dislikes comes in  and you at least close the friendly door in favor of indifference towards  that person.  But why? What makes us like on person and behave in a certain way, and what makes us not like the other and behave in a completely different way?  why do we smile when we see someone or something we like and why do we look away when someone or something less pleasant crosses our path? These are but a few examples of how swiftly can a human change depending on the company it keeps.

I shall stop now. It can be dizzying to think about such complicated matters sometimes and I already spent too much time on it.  In the end, what I want to say is that humans are too complicated to define. They are not a single thing, they are a million things at  the same time and you must be really good to see through all those masks and find the hidden, true, self of one. Sometimes it is difficult to find our own self, let alone a stranger’s. Then, when you think you found the answer, something happens and the little girl dreaming to become an archaeologist is called ma’am by her old playmates.

Explain that if you can.