mary-masked

The Best Part of the Nerdlesque Festival (for me, anyway)

Published: May 1st 2017, 9:31:05 pm

This is the only photo I could find of me and Nasty together. We are not selfie people.

The best moment of the weekend, for me, was Nasty introducing my act. She is someone I have looked up to from the moment I started burlesque. She is the first performer I ever saw and she is the reason I fell utterly in love with the art form. 

This was not the first time she's introduced me, but this time she made up a tag line for me. She called me "The Venn Diagram of Burlesque" because I was equal parts sexy, smart, and nerdy. 

It's hard to explain just how much that means to me but the short version is Nasty Canasta called me smart. Intellectually, I know that I'm smart but I spent most of my formative years thinking I was stupid. Being smart but having an un-diagnosed learning disability means having a lot of teachers who think you're just not trying. And no matter what I said or did, no one believed that I was trying as hard as I could. I knew that I wasn't lazy so I figured that I must be stupid. Things that were easy for other people were impossibly hard for me, so it seemed like the only logical explanation. Obviously, the actual explanation was ADHD but by the time I found out I'd already spent half my life thinking I was stupid so...it's a hard belief to shake.

There's also that awful binary forced on women where "have" to be either smart or sexy. This played out a lot with my best friend when I was in my teens and early 20s. She was "the smart one" and I was "the sexy one" despite the fact that we were both smart and sexy and being pushed into those roles was incredibly damaging to both of us and to our friendship.

So knowing I'm smart and believing it are two different things. But someone that I have the utmost respect for said that I was as smart as I was sexy and there was no caveat for my jerkbrain to hook into. Jerkbrain will find any excuse to not believe people when they say nice things about me but... Nasty knows what she's talking about. And there was no reason for her to say that other than it was true. 

It was one of the most touching and validating experiences of my life so I had to write about it here.