Personal Narrative: I Am Dumb

Dumb. I am dumb. These are the words I was told and that I believed for so much of my life. It started out with people joking around, calling me worse than a dumb blond; despite the fact that I am not blond. I did not always think I was dumb, I had moments here and there when I didn’t feel good enough, like every human does, but nothing that deeply affected me. It was not till middle school when I let other people get inside my head and change how I felt about myself.

I can remember freshman year being in school feeling inferior to everyone around me. So many people in my grade could so easily get straight A’s with what seemed like no effort. I had felt like I spent so much time working on schoolwork, and studying for tests to only end up with mediocre grades. Seeing my report card at the end of the year nearly killed me. I thought to myself, I worked so hard how could this happen, how can my class rank be so low. The only conclusion I could come up with was that I was not smart and that I was unintelligent.

However there was something about being called dumb from almost everyone around me that got to me. It hit me the hardest when it was no longer just friends and people my age making comments. Once family members and adults, people I looked up to starting making sly comments is when it began to penetrate my thick skin. No adult had ever bluntly called me dumb but I was bombarded with comments like “maybe you should try harder” and “school stuff probably just is not your thing.” Between jokes from piers about being dumb, people candidly telling me I was not intelligent, and subtle comments about trying harder I thought it had to be