If Only They Knew the Real Me
By Shirley-Ann Augustin-Behravesh
Art by Turner G. Davis
We had very few playgrounds on the island of St. Lucia. Our playgrounds were our yards, the church yard, the street and whatever clearing was available to run in. My favorite pastime was climbing trees. I would spend hours playing on and around the trees. I played with rocks and sticks, old containers, pipes, paper, young fruit—you name it. I once made a doll with a piece of garden hose as its body, a strand of cotton yarn for its hair, and added in some facial detail using a marker. It was such a hit that I had to make one for my two cousins as well.
One summer when I was about eight, my cousin Shauna who was the same age stayed with us. After watching gymnastics in the Olympic games, we found our uneven bars on a plum tree, and a balance beam on an avocado tree. That summer my father gave us two plywood pieces and we made a bench of it on a mango tree. I can still see, feel, smell and hear that moment—the serenity and sufficiency of sitting up on that tree, ripe mango in hand, watching over the valley.
“I thought of lives other than my own…I thought about my dreams for the future.”
I spent a good deal of time on my own, be it in a tree or elsewhere. Such a gift of time and space gave me an opportunity to think about many things. I thought on the sky and the stars. I thought of religion and God. I thought on the world as we know it, and the possibility that our truths might be untrue. I thought a lot about the sea, and what lay beneath it, what lay beyond it. I thought of lives other than my own. What it would be like to live in another. I thought of my experiences and what they taught me. I thought of my parents, siblings and classmates—and the many humiliating moments when I did something “dorky” or “stupid.” I thought about my dreams for the future. I thought about what it could be like if someone knew the real me.
There are very few moments in my life that I can recall as if it were yesterday. One of those is a day when I visited the career counselor’s office, somewhere around the equivalent of eighth grade. It was an exciting point in my life; I had to choose my track, carve myself a path, define who and what I wanted to be.
No one had ever talked to me about life after secondary school before, but I’d been a good student, and I was eager to hear of all the exciting options in store for me. I’d always done what they’d asked: focused on school, got excellent grades and kept out of trouble.
My meeting with the counselor was after lunch. I walked into her small, well-lit, slightly messy office. There were papers scattered all over the desk. I wanted to fix them into neatly stacked piles, but I sat down instead. She flipped through some sheets of paper and then looked up at me.
“So what do you plan to do after secondary school—I guess you’re going to A-level?” she asked, referring to our equivalent of AP classes.
“Yes,” I answered sheepishly.
The counselor was a loud and cantankerous person, but she was not unattractive. In fact, when she was trying to be nice, she actually looked kind. She was probably about 35 at the time and had long curly black hair that she usually tied up in a low bun. She had perfect skin, like honeyed milk. Her broad smile made her entire face light up, and you could tell when she smiled that it was from deep down.
But right then, there were no smiles. She looked tired and had a look of exasperation on her face.
“What is your favorite subject?” she asked.
“Math.”
“So how do you plan to use math when you go to work after A-levels?” She looked slightly annoyed.
“I was thinking,” I paused, “that if I could get a scholarship, if I do well enough, then maybe I can do math at university?”
This was an entirely new thought. I don’t think I’d even said the idea out loud before. I’d heard some students in class discussing the universities their parents said they would go to after secondary school, and I’d been so intrigued at the prospect that I’d done some research. I’d found that the St. Lucia government gave scholarships every year to the students who topped the high school exit exam.
An amused grin appeared on my counselor’s face. She said that I probably wouldn’t get the scholarship because other kids in other schools were a lot smarter than me. The only other students going to university, she said, were those with money or some ties to the US.
“Take the business track,” she advised. “That will give you a good chance of getting a great secretarial job once you graduate.”
When I tell that story today, people assume it was some sort of blow to my self-esteem; they assume that I spent the day crying over how demeaning that counselor was to me, about my lonely dreams. But I was used to it by then. It only grounded me a little more. I’d never been good enough for most things, and by that point, I’d gotten used to hearing advice like that.
My family called me the ugly one. I was darker, had a broader nose, a large forehead, and it didn’t help that my two adult front teeth grew out too large for my head. My mom said it to my face several times: “How is it that my child is so ugly?” She never hid it that she had wanted a boy, and instead my ugly face showed up.
“People assume that I spent the day crying over how demeaning that counselor was to me, about my lonely dreams. But I was used to it by then.”
And then there was my pipe-dream of being a singer. From a young age, I was part of the church choir. It happened by default since my dad played the church organ and my mom was in the choir. But it was great for me because I loved singing. I’m not saying I was great at it, but I could hold a tune better than most. My dream was to sing a solo, and I remember being so excited that one day I would be selected. With a 10-person choir, my chances were quite high. But it never happened. Each time it came up, everyone agreed that I was not loud enough.
Not loud enough for a small solo in the choir, not charismatic enough for the talent show, not native sounding enough to do a reading in church, not wealthy enough for certain friends, and not pretty enough to be favored by my own family. Being told I wasn’t good enough to be a mathematician or a scientist only settled those feelings of ambition that every now and again flared up. So when that counselor told me to forget the scholarship, I wasn’t upset. I took her advice.
Most of my school friends had gone off to university, and I got the great secretarial job. I worked in a computer sales and repair shop. My job was to answer the phones, assist customers and keep files organized. But even my boss soon thought it was a waste of my time. He added extra duties, showing me how to keep the accounts, do basic computer repairs, take charge of purchasing. A few weeks later, he let me teach some of the night-time computer classes, and had me train with the computer technicians.
One day he brought up university and my plans for the future. I hadn’t thought much of it considering the impossibility of it all. I told him that I really liked working with computers but also enjoyed doing the accounting. He said that the company was lucky to have me, but he knew that I needed more. He printed out an application to our regional university for computer science and accounting, and told me it was my assigned work to complete it.
“Don’t worry about the ‘how’ yet,” he said.
I completed the forms, if only because it was fun to imagine that it could be real. I mailed the application in, and never mentioned it to my parents.
When the acceptance came, there was shock. Didn’t they realize it was just a farce? That surprise was then followed by an acceptance that even after getting in, I knew I couldn’t go. It was just like my counselor had tried to tell me before: I had no scholarships and my parents did not have the collateral needed for a student loan.
“’How many times in our lives do we doubt ourselves?’” I asked the audience. “’How many times do we feel like a fraud?”
One day not long after that, my great uncle came to visit. This was another moment I remember well. He was probably 85 at the time. He was and remains the most pleasant and wisest man I’ve ever met. He was never without a smile, not just on his lips, but in his partially blind eyes. The wrinkles on his face were mostly etched around his mouth, as if he had spent his whole life smiling. When he spoke, his words were carefully chosen, and gave insights that no one else in the room could conjure up. He was always so happy to see me.
He asked how school was going. I told him that I’d graduated A-levels with good grades. He asked what my plan was, and I said that I’d found a job. He waited for a moment, and then said “and….?”
“And…uh….” I fished for something to say.
“And I applied and got into university,” I finally replied. “But I can’t go because I can’t get a loan for it.”
Our conversation was in Patois, but I clearly remember how my great uncle responded. He said that accepting defeat was for old people like himself, who had no more energy to fight, and that I, in my youth, should spend my energy fighting, finding ways to achieve my dreams, and never accepting defeat.
My uncle had owned some small parcel of land around the town that he’d never developed. “Use my property as equity for a student loan,” he said.
And just like that, I was university-bound.
Three years later, I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in management and finance, in the top four percent of my graduating class. And the following year, I set off to grad school with a fully funded scholarship to the University of Cambridge. I graduated in the top ten percent of my class, and take pride in overcoming feelings of alienation among a predominately white Cambridge. Three years ago, I graduated with my PhD, with the outstanding graduate award for my department.
I’ve never been brave enough to tell my story. I never thought it would be interesting or inspirational in the least. But on convocation day, when I graduated with my PhD, I told my story in front of hundreds of my peers, their families and my professors.
“I don’t belong here” was how I started my speech. “I was never destined for college; and I never dared to even dream of it.”
I could make out some faces, those in the front row, eyes fixated on me. Looking at them, I had flashbacks of me pushing through despite halting obstacles: Starting term assignments from scratch when my laptop got stolen; working through days when I had no means to buy food or even get to class without bus fare; trying to make it through class when I was in debilitating pains during my first trimester of pregnancy; suffering silently through my sister’s sudden and brutal death in the last few weeks of my final semester.
“How many times in our lives do we doubt ourselves?” I asked the audience. “How many times do we feel like a fraud?”
Nodding faces and smiles stared back at me.
“There’s this uneasy feeling that lies within a soul that feels undeserving, and very much a fraud. All these years, slipping by unnoticed. No one ever realizing that I was in the wrong place—or at least they never confronted me about it. And now, I stand here before you, today receiving a terminal degree—a Doctor of Philosophy.”
Applause, screams, more applause. Their applause shocked me. And then, the tears came. Buckets of them.
Had I really done it? Was I really deserving of these accolades? I knew that I had worked hard to accomplish all that I had achieved. But something in me only fully grasped that I deserved it when I heard the words aloud from my own mouth and watched the audience applaud.
When I close my eyes now, I can still feel, smell, touch that moment. Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through my veins; maybe it was the excitement in the air; maybe it was the realization that I was deserving. That I was good enough. And perhaps, just perhaps, I might have been good enough all along.
Shirley-Ann Augustin-Behravesh is a senior sustainability scientist and lecturer in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University.