The hardest kind of love to admit

There are days when I feel exceptionally beautiful. They don't come often, and I always feel just a tiny bit guilty for saying anything about them, for having the audacity to claim beauty.

But I also suspect that it's on those days that I come closer to seeing myself truly than at any other time.

Most other days my judgment is clouded by a lifetime of hanging back, of not wanting to be upfront about what I can do, what I know. It seemed always as if for me to step forward someone else had to step back, as if acknowledging that I have beauty, or talent, or grace, meant that someone else was going to suffer.

It's indoctrination, I know. It's not uncommon among women. It's also a crock of shit. This I know intellectually, but not with conviction.

I have this persistent belief that I can't be great and nice at the same time. And by great, I mean Great. As in, possessed of greatness. Special.

"Everybody's special, Dash." -Helen
"Which is another way of saying no one is." -Dashiell

It reminds me of The Incredibles, where the supers (as in superheroes) were forced to go underground, to hide their powers and masquerade as ordinary citizens, not just in between acts of saving the world, but all the time. Basically they were told that they had to sit on their gifts, not show who they were, because who they were made the non-supers feel uncomfortably less-than.

Have you ever watched the way kids treat the geniuses among them? It's not pretty. And I think it used to be worse.

These days there's at least some lip service to the idea that it's cool to be a geek, though I don't know how far down it trickles, chronologically. And there are still differences between chic geeks and real live nerds.

I'm one of the latter. I don't look it, but I am.

Tonight I spontaneously solved an engineering problem - quite by accident. Then I threw my arms up in the air and exclaimed, "I'm brilliant!" After which I felt abashed.

One is not supposed to exult in oneself. One is supposed, above all, to fit neatly into some acceptable pigeonhole, within which one may exhibit a high level of competence without threatening other people, because it's confined to a limited sphere.

One is not, for example, supposed to be both an artist and a writer, and also to be good at science. One should not understand astrophysics. One should certainly not be able to immediately and intuitively arrive at the solution for a complex engineering problem that's taken a team of scientists years to unravel.

Man, I am so busted.

And worse, I was proud of it. I still am proud of it. It was a moment of gleeful insight, and those give me great pleasure.

I know for a certainty that some of the people I've dated have trailed away from me because I was simply Too Much. Too big, too much energy, too passionate in all senses of the word, too fast, too funny, too intense, too serious. Always leaving them behind. Not even trying to. Trying to be kind, to bring them with me, to invite them to play.

On the way home tonight I saw all these things I wanted to show you. An art installation of colored lights that created, as a byproduct, two long beams of reflected color on the river. Like a more cheerful version of the 9/11 memorial.

A driver was kind to me. She (I like to think it was a she) waited for me to get over, when I was expecting to have to wait for her. I was surprised, and turned around while we were stopped at the light to mouth "thank you."

I'd like to do a PSA campaign telling drivers that it's good luck to be nice to cyclists, in the same way that chimney sweeps were considered good luck in Mary Poppins's London.