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Wait, work with me on this one.
Gender dysphoria--your body is the wrong gender. Species dysphoria--your body is the wrong species. Profession dysphoria--your body is wired for the wrong profession.
See, I’m a writer. That’s a fundamental, basic fact of my existence I can do no more to change than I could to change my sexuality or skin colour. But like a man who’ll try on his girlfriend’s underwear while she’s at work and insists on being a ‘she’ when he’s online, I’m not sure that’s who I’m meant to be.
I think… I think I’m actually an engineer.
It feels kind of good to say it at last, but also very scary.
I’m no good with engineering-type things, though. All those equations about pressure and torque and voltage make my head go squishy. It’s like being a surgeon but being perplexed by the offal. I want to be good at them, I want to understand and be fascinated by all those numbers and Greek letters, but they just don’t fit into my brain. There’s no holes for them to go into.
I love listening to engineers talk, though. I love the discussions they have about, say, whether a USB cable plugged into a laptop electrocute a toddler. I love those bits in Freefall where Ambrose explains why the ship isn’t working and in xkcd where the punchline is a string of computer code. I love the way engineers take a problem, break it down into parts and argue about how to solve each part while entirely losing track of the bigger picture.
I want to be able to take a bunch of shafts, gears and equations and make a windmill out of them. I want to be able to boost the power on my TV remote control so it becomes a deadly weapon. I want to turn my work chair into an orbital observation platform using only items I can find around the office.
Well, I want to be able to spend my time scribbling on Post-It notes, working out just how impossible those things are and how I can make them possible. I have a yearning.
But I’m a writer. My equations are grammar and my gears are adverbs. I can pull apart a paragraph and make it five times more efficient, but re-wiring a plug is a foreign land full of language sounds I can’t make. The only poetry in motion I’m likely to produce is when a screwed up scrap of paper that used to be a first draft sails through the air and into the bin.
Sigh. I’m a fox engineer in a human writer’s body. Maybe I should form my own support group…
Gender dysphoria--your body is the wrong gender. Species dysphoria--your body is the wrong species. Profession dysphoria--your body is wired for the wrong profession.
See, I’m a writer. That’s a fundamental, basic fact of my existence I can do no more to change than I could to change my sexuality or skin colour. But like a man who’ll try on his girlfriend’s underwear while she’s at work and insists on being a ‘she’ when he’s online, I’m not sure that’s who I’m meant to be.
I think… I think I’m actually an engineer.
It feels kind of good to say it at last, but also very scary.
I’m no good with engineering-type things, though. All those equations about pressure and torque and voltage make my head go squishy. It’s like being a surgeon but being perplexed by the offal. I want to be good at them, I want to understand and be fascinated by all those numbers and Greek letters, but they just don’t fit into my brain. There’s no holes for them to go into.
I love listening to engineers talk, though. I love the discussions they have about, say, whether a USB cable plugged into a laptop electrocute a toddler. I love those bits in Freefall where Ambrose explains why the ship isn’t working and in xkcd where the punchline is a string of computer code. I love the way engineers take a problem, break it down into parts and argue about how to solve each part while entirely losing track of the bigger picture.
I want to be able to take a bunch of shafts, gears and equations and make a windmill out of them. I want to be able to boost the power on my TV remote control so it becomes a deadly weapon. I want to turn my work chair into an orbital observation platform using only items I can find around the office.
Well, I want to be able to spend my time scribbling on Post-It notes, working out just how impossible those things are and how I can make them possible. I have a yearning.
But I’m a writer. My equations are grammar and my gears are adverbs. I can pull apart a paragraph and make it five times more efficient, but re-wiring a plug is a foreign land full of language sounds I can’t make. The only poetry in motion I’m likely to produce is when a screwed up scrap of paper that used to be a first draft sails through the air and into the bin.
Sigh. I’m a fox engineer in a human writer’s body. Maybe I should form my own support group…
6 comments:
And there you have exactly how I feel towards writing.
Then there's me. Fully capable of the engineering if I could bother to apply myself. I refuse to be a number crunching stati- I just prefer the wildlife, ok?
Oh, and mousified ;)
Actually, I ought to add that I'd be seriously mediocre at being an engineer or scientist, too. Just like everything else...
Sounds like you should be a product manager?
Me? Oh, no... I just want to go walking. Have bag-of-tricks, will walk for money ;)
Yeah... maybe it's just over-exposure to Dilbert, but anything involving the title 'manager' sounds like you'd need to surrender your soul first...
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