“Christine Kuo, you are very smart, but you are very lazy!”
I laughed along with the class that day. Later, I retold the event with a sort of pride about how I had “bested” the requirements of the exam by exploiting some technical loophole: one that allowed me to complete a task legitimately, but far more easily than planned.
I recounted how I had been caught eventually, of course, but that the professor had been good-natured enough to recognize the cleverness in my actions, and grant me the clemency of not docking my points- with the caveat that I would not be allowed to do it again.
“You are very smart, but you are very lazy!”
It had been a compliment then. I wore it eagerly.
But what she did not see was the desperation behind that act of cleverness: that it was panic that led to a drastic feat of self-preservation.
She did not see that all that week before, I had willed myself daily to study, but time had dripped through the sieve of my mind until I woke up the morning of, drenched in the remorse of things I should have done.
She did not see the way my chest constricted upon viewing exam questions on a topic we had practiced all quarter, basics that “anyone should know by now,” but that suddenly appeared terrifyingly alien when I held it in my hands.
She did not see the relief with which I grasped a singular lifeline: one possible solution to rescue myself from drowning in another failure. Not the right way to do it — not ideal, not even technically acceptable… but not ‘wrong,’ either. Good enough. I would have to settle for just good enough.
It was not laziness, but survival.
And the pride, in retrospect, was not in the fact that I was smart or clever. The pride was not in the points I received or in the approving chuckles of my peers.
The pride was in the fact that I had gambled on the relationship with my professor, with whom I had spent so many months building up my reserves of good will–
So that in a time like this, when in my despair I risked everything…
She smiled at me, and only called me “lazy.”