Why Writers Can Be Great Scientists, While Mathematicians Can Be Horrible Ones, Part 1

When I began this blog, I swore that I would lay my heart bare. LOL! I mean that, but it still sounds dumb. I decided to disclose all the important but embarrassing things about me, even if that meant causing Dr. Isis to think that I’m not that great after all. I have lots of reasons for this disclosure: I understand things better when I must to explain them to a wide audience; I don’t want anyone, even a blog reader, to admire me because they think I’m some wicked popular bad-ass with a retinue of clever, handsome suitors and a sterling academic record; I’m sick of being ashamed of myself. I also tend to hold a grudge. This last is why I’m writing about my high-school calculus teacher today.

Before I tell you about her, however, I have to give you grim background information. Mental illness and a lack of mentorship have characterized the last ten years of my intellectual development. For now, I’ll tell you about the mental illness.
Read more. . .

Until two years ago, I refused to seek treatment for what all of the physicians I’ve consulted call serious depression, and what one psychiatrist called Type 2 bipolar disorder. It’s probably largely hereditary and somewhat trauma-induced. I’ve struggled with it since age sixteen, and I was once hospitalized for it in undergrad. I have only recently agreed not to secretly quit my antidepressants again, because I have manic breakdowns and grow angrily suicidal when I do. Every time, man! No matter how long I manage to hold out before that happens. Incidentally, I have no idea how to write about my depression myself without a voice inside screaming, “You fucking loser! You fucked up!” So this paragraph stays as it is, and I hope you’ll keep it in mind if you read on.

(By the way, I was so shocked when Candid Engineer wrote about receiving treatment for anxiety. Candid Engineer writes entertainingly and masterfully, which is why I keep reading her blog. But she deeply intimidates me. Truth is stranger than the fiction of stereotypes (I’m black and Korean and I know!), so I figured that Candid was this unshakably confident blonde with the looks of a varsity cheerleader at an all-white prep school and the brain of Richard Feynman, who never bored men by being anything but tomboyish and sexyfun and who never cried in public. Certainly, she would never understand “mental illness”, let alone have it. She’d probably sneer at the very idea. “There’s no such thing as depression. There’re no excuses or made-up diseases. There’re just losers and winners. Liberals are ruining this country!” I’m telling you, my jaw hit my MacBook keyboard when I read that post.)

(Yeah. I know that’s some scary crazy projection, by the way. I do that. I’m way better about not doing it now than I was when I was young, but I still do it sometimes. Again, I have to warn you that you shouldn’t read this blog if weird dorky insecure people who reveal too much about themselves make you uncomfortable. But I digress.)

My high-school calculus teacher rescued me when I returned to Los Angeles from Berkeley. I had been truly brilliant and I was supposed to have made something of myself. Instead, I wasted my scholarships and my parents’ money on an English degree I didn’t really want, and spent my time as the hanger-on of a bunch of rich white drama kids whom I never could please. I’d baffled my professors and grown bitter, unfocused and alone. My little sister no longer saw me as a god, and I’d broken my mother’s heart. Worse, the things God denied to me in high school—the boyfriend, the intellectual adventure, the popularity, the self-actualization—and that I’d expected to be rewarded with in college—because that’s what college was, right? A reward for being good—had not come to pass. As bereft as I had ever been, I’d lost the only thing that had kept my chin up: proof that I was gifted and had no ordinary future before me. I was nobody, and I wanted to die. This is not an exaggeration; this was what I felt and how I thought. I warned you that I once believed in magic.

I hid in my parents’ house. One day, my mother, with whom I had an almost classic Asian-immigrant-mom-and-Asian-American-daughter relationship, looked at me with what I interpreted as loathing. “You’ve ruined your life,” she announced.

I didn’t expect to care. To my surprise, though, I still had one grain of sand from Fantasia. I wanted to make something of myself, and I believed, deep, deep down, that I still could. I was twenty-three. I wasn’t dead. What if my mother no longer wanted me to succeed? What would happen to me if I stayed? Would she stop me?

My eyes widened and I backed out of the room. My poor mother caught my hand.

“I say stupid thing,” she pleaded. “I just want to talk to you.”

As evidenced by the reasoning I’ve just divulged, I was in no state to be reasonable. Or fair. Or even communicative. “NO!” I screamed. “NO!”

I pried her fingers from my wrist and swatted my mother’s arms. My mother slapped me, hard. It was my fault, so I began to cry. I can’t hit my mother, I thought.

It was the only clear thought I had. So I spit in her face.

It was only much later that I found out that this was worse, and that I’d’ve been immediately disowned for this, were I in Korea. Now my father arrived, stricken, and tried to interfere, but I ran out of my parents’ house. My parents lived within a gated community that was succumbing to the gang wildness outside. “I was supposed to be a doctor or a lawyer and save them from this,” I thought. “I was supposed to be the accomplished honorary white person, a glorious defiance of the stupid, fat, ugly and lazy stereotype, and instead I’m going to have a tedious, ignominious, working-class life like thousands of blacks and Latinos everywhere. I’ve had every opportunity to succeed, I’ve had every advantage, and I’ve let everybody down.”

It was at this point that my calculus teacher rescued me. She drove all the way to the projects where I stood, picked me up, and took me back to her house in the Beach Cities, where she and her husband offered to let me live in their guest room. I eventually took a corporate job nearby and stayed for about a year and a half, after which I left for my archaeology master’s degree program.