I know me. I’m intelligent. All my life my family have told me how intelligent I am and my mother has acted as if my only focus in life was what I was studying. I remember when I was 18 and just off my ‘P’ plates and I hit that doctor’s car in Dover Heights coming down the steep road near the high school. The car mechanic told my mother to tell me to stop thinking about boys when I’m driving.

“No,” my mother said. “Michelle wouldn’t have been thinking about boys. Her studies maybe, but not boys.” The car mechanic looked at my mother in disbelief.

Actually I was thinking about a boy I had just met, which is probably normal for a girl at that age, no matter how intelligent. But I was still intelligent and had a good sense of how computers work, even though there wasn’t much of that going on back then. I still knew myself and what I could do.

I studied archaeology at university. I did it to annoy my mother who wanted me to be physicist. I found out later that studying Arts, which included archaeology, was what a girl was expected to do. Apparently it was the best way to find a doctor husband, or a lawyer, which I wasn’t looking for but everyone assumed I was. Perhaps I should have studied medicine and today, everyone would assume I was a GP because that’s what female doctors do.

What I think of myself, and what people see when they look at me, is never the same. Even after more women became doctors, or lawyers, I always felt like people saw a clerk or a secretary when they looked at me. I’m blonde and I’m short and blonde jokes didn’t help but everyone thought I was humourless when I complained about them.

When I was in my twenties, being blonde was equated with being pretty but brainless. Even if you were neither. I remember I worked for a while in a hotel where I wore a black uniform. My hair is thin and curls often fell, where they showed up against the black, around my tits. I had a boss who liked to pick them off, he used to brush my hands away when I tried to prevent him.

“No, I like doing this,” he said and he was my boss. Fortunately, they eventually passed a law against men like him but not before he’d manhandled me. I got sick of having to prove myself and went back to university. I decided to study Communication which at the time was so popular it was extremely difficult to be accepted. I sailed through but I still had to prove my intelligence to everyone I met.

My sister started telling everyone I was a failure who hadn’t fulfilled her early promise. My sister had, all she ever wanted to do was get married and have children, and by the time she was in her mid-twenties, she had done that. But I hadn’t fulfilled my early promise and my sister made sure all the family saw that.

I decided to study computers. I knew I was good at that. I also got fat just so people didn’t think that looks alone got me ahead. Not that I’m particularly good-looking, just blonde. I graduated from computing with Distinction but when I went for a job, no employer was willing to take a chance. Everyone knows that women can’t do technical stuff. I had to make a living so I ended up writing and teaching.

“See,” my sister said, “she really can’t. Maybe she’s autistic and can’t cope with the real world.”