They Thought I Might Be Smart

an epic love letter and a long story; about camp, intellect, two long drives, and my beloved North Carolina.

A note to the reader

I’ve been working on this piece for a really long time, for me, which is about two months. When I write for this publication, it usually happens in one evening. For some reason, I gave this piece a remarkable amount of reverence, but it caused me to be incredibly hasty in finally publishing it. So I gave up on trying to make the perfect thing at about page 5, and I just let myself finish.

This is a paid article, only because I mention some buddies here who have real jobs, and I wonder if they wouldn’t want to be linked to my pages’ other works. Which is very fair, I typically swear like a sailor and am always at least a little bit making a euphemism. What I have done is created a discount for the next week, that makes this subscription just $2/month for the next year. You don’t need the link for it to work, apparently, but here is the link if it helps anyways.

https://wendymaciver.substack.com/TOESINSAND

Okay, that’s all the preamble I’ve got. Enjoy this imperfection, it is long and very personal. (Another accidental euphemism, go figure).

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This is an epic love letter and a long story; about camp, intellect, two long drives, and my beloved North Carolina.

I - PIEDMONT

Summer camp was a huge part of my life growing up. Half of the memories I have are from my tennis day camp, which everyone I knew went to, despite if they really liked tennis or not. I always only sort of liked tennis, but I greatly enjoyed making horror short films and strange vending-machine-beverage concoctions in the girls bathroom, so I happened to love camp. I could bet real, American money that half of the people reading this from North Carolina have played tennis in 100 degree weather at Five Oaks.

Another huge part of my life was never really feeling smart enough. If you’re a frequent reader of this infrequent publication, you’ll know that to be true, due to the fact that I talk about it a lot. Maybe I think acknowledging that I think I’m not smart enough makes me smarter. Either way, I’ve got to eventually find something else to talk about, but it happens to be relevant to this story.

Here’s where camp and intellect combine. In North Carolina, one of the things that would give you great intellectual status points (and essentially guarantee your admission to UNC Chapel Hill, the college where everyone seemed to want to end up in my town) was getting accepted to go to Governor’s School (West or East, but really it’s like, a whole thing).

North Carolina Governor’s School was (is; remains) a 6-week pre-college intensive, with 5 artistic disciplines and 5 academic, known well for its cult admiration amongst alumni and for being the longest running program of its kind in the country. You study your assigned discipline, as well as two other academic ‘areas’, a sociological course and a philosophical one, if I had to really reduce it to those definitions. You lived on an iconic (sometimes) college campus, you walked around like you owned the place, and you wore a corny name-tag that you posted lots and lots of Instagram pictures in. It felt like this huge win to get in; you had to be nominated, you had to apply, you had to be pre-selected, sometimes audition, then actually selected.

If you’re checking in on my personal academic status at this time, it would report back with a grade of NOT SUPER GREAT. I did really well for myself until about 15, when I couldn’t be in a classroom for more than an hour without a panic attack to follow, seemingly coming out of nowhere. And although we talk a lot less about depression as a culture these days, it was and is an incredibly real and terrifying part of my life – and when I was teenager, and it was my entire life. I was, am still sometimes, completely overtaken by depression and the resulting side effects. Which were lethargy, disinterest, and Skipping Lots of Class, apparently. (The only place I seemed to regularly show up to was the theater, which is telling, now).

I never thought I could get into Governor’s School, and neither did my peers, admittedly, but I had a really great trio of teachers who believed way too much in me. 1, Mr. McDonald, the history teacher who always smelled like coffee and I had an admitted crush on, likely due to his attentiveness and caring nature; 2, Ms. Howes, the English teacher with the fabulous classroom who was the only reason I ever as much as considered reading anything assigned to me in high school; and 3, Ms. Garcia, I’ll call her, although she was a woman of many names and many almost undefinable character traits, the theater teacher who acted as my mother, in all complicated senses of the word.

I cannot remember which one of these teachers was my nominee, which I am sorry for, but one of them was, and despite my lackluster academics, I was awarded the social and scholarly currency of going to GSW. For theater, which might explain why the lackluster academics were less of an issue. I will tell you briefly that many smarter kids than me were very upset that a seemingly lazy and poor student like me got this small win, but don’t worry, it only left a small lasting impact on how I viewed my intellect for years to come.

Here’s what I will tell you about my time at GSW as an actual student; it sort of technically sucked. I had a teacher who, although brilliant, was seemingly not a fan of my work, who thought I was too much, too loud, and far too giggly to ever do the deeply important work that Jacques Lecoq staked his life on (Jock Le Cock, funny name, by the way, how can you not giggle?) and I experienced some misconduct from a peer I thought I could really trust; which, not to shock anyone, put a damper on my summer.

But oddly, I left feeling really enlightened, despite the really stacked odds. For the first time in a while, other people my age thought I might be smart. I actually really liked everything I was learning, and there was no homework – that one-two combination made me really, really like school, for the first time in a long time. Teachers and friends alike cared about my opinion, thought I was curious, thought I had something to offer. I had never been somewhere where people cared about the dumb theater I was making. I was really used to doing shitty school plays to an unwilling matinee audience of school kids who were just waiting to see if any of the people on stage would kiss or hit each other, so that they could have something to be real-life invested in. I met some of the most influential people in my life to come, many of whom will be in this story. (One of which being my current roommate of almost four years now, my darling Kalina, another of which being my new neighbor, my darling Lissa.)

Needless to say, I left in unstoppable tears, annoying my mom, and knowing that it felt like something more than camp, even though that’s all that it was.

I - PIEDMONT

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