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Math Brain
Math Brain
Sarah, grade 11
I want a math brain.
I want an affinity for numbers. I want a talent for calculations. I want a perfect steady hand for sketching curves. I want a brain with an innate aptitude for digits, and symbols, and signs. A brain with a built in calculator. A brain that graphs its ideas on cartesian planes.
I really want a math brain. I’m tired of my writing brain. A writing brain is like a cheap party trick; people see it and smile and then they move on. I have a brain that is always assembling sentences and stacking together literary devices like a toddler playing with LEGO. It isn’t so much that I don’t appreciate the wonders of language, because in many ways I do. It’s just I rather be the rich sophistication of someone with an intrinsic ability to do math.
I don’t quite know exactly where it went wrong. Probably sometime when I was young. I remember that I had never been particularly invested in math the way some children were. While other kids slid around the beads on the abacus, I slid together nonsensical rhymes, purely because I liked the sounds. It was all so enticing, and, like any kid, I was easily tempted. Sometimes I wish someone had put a stop to that habit, because now I can’t get rid of it. There are still some days when the points of the curve I’m trying to sketch shift into beautiful, iridescent words, like pearls waiting to be strung onto a necklace, and the numbers and variables slip behind red velvet curtains. All the math-y stuff has disappeared and I’m aching to play with these shiny new words. Those days, I have trouble getting my work done. Those days, I’m a little girl again.
I acknowledge that writing is great. I love it--truly I do. It’s vibrant and wild and intense and fun. But it’s also not the same. A writing brain is not a math brain. No one ever looks at a woman who writes beautiful poems and says, “Gee, you’re so brilliant and intelligent, it’s astounding.” In fact, no one ever looks at a woman who writes beautiful poems at all.
A woman who writes beautiful poems plays into the narrative. She is love-y and dove-y and sugary sweet, and she writes saccharine odes to the delicate woman poet she imagines herself to be. She’s a perfect caricature of the male gaze, and so any intelligence is overlooked. A woman who wields her poems as weapons will never be perceived as a threat.
And, as superficial as it is, I want to be seen as intelligent. And I want my intelligence to be obvious, and a little bit threatening. I want to use numbers as bullets and wield calculations like swords. I want to use a graphing calculator as an axe with which I shatter glass walls and ceilings and floors. I want to understand math so well that people seek me out just to discuss their answers with me. But I can’t do those things with my current brain. I can’t do those things with a mind that betrays me by shifting the
x-axis into a horizon line that is just waiting to be described.
I don’t want to see the x-axis as an infinite horizon line that glows orange like honeysuckle under a puckered sun. I don’t want to see the function as a sloping, emotionally-charged mountain range that hums deep resonant tunes. I want an x-axis. I want a function. I don’t want it romantic; I want it plain, and fresh. I want a shiny bright aptitude for numbers that people think is unique. I want the geometric gaze of a person who seeks out problems and challenges in the same way I seek out new literary techniques.
I want a math brain, and I’ve tried hard to get one. I study, and I do the homework too, but I’m in a constant state of waiting for the work to pay off. Some days, I sit by the window and wait to see if the postman is delivering my wonderful new math brain. I’m 16 years into waiting. I think my package has been delayed.
Frankly, I’m getting tired of the delay. I’m getting tired of being frustrated by math. Everytime I start a new question, my mind reverts back to the little girl who would spend her nights crying over math at the dinner table. If I went back in time, I wonder if something could have changed this. Maybe if I had spent less time writing love letters to ladybugs and more time practicing my multiplication tables. Maybe if I had spent less time playing silly games with rhymes and more time rehearsing my long division. Or maybe, just maybe, if I really tried, I could change it now. If I shut down all the flowery descriptions of beautiful places, all the invention and reinvention of great loves I haven’t experienced, all the sappy sweet poems I write about the people I value, all the angry stories I write when I’m frustrated by math. Maybe if I shut it all down, and focused on calculations instead, I’d have my math brain. Maybe then I’d have that mathematical mind I envy. But I’m constantly betrayed by the curly-headed 5-year-old girl who wants to play with words.
Sometimes it’s beautiful to live in a world where everything appears as vibrant words and as colourful scenes. Sometimes it makes my eyes turn crystalline and my blood turn glittery. It can be a wonderful, evolving, astounding thing. But, sometimes it can be tiring. Sometimes it isn’t quite worth it. Sometimes I’d rather have a math brain because I think the sunset would be just as beautiful either way.
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Spring 2024
LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We wish to acknowledge this land on which Branksome operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and go to school on this land.*
*The Land Acknowledgement may evolve as we honour our commitment to Truth and Reconciliation in partnership with Indigenous communities.
*The Land Acknowledgement may evolve as we honour our commitment to Truth and Reconciliation in partnership with Indigenous communities.
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