I grew up with the uncomfortable feeling that people had already decided who I was before I’d had much chance to show them.
Some of my teachers openly called me stupid. It’s a weird thing to tell a child, particularly when your job is supposed to involve helping them learn.
As I got older, the assumptions didn’t disappear. They simply changed their clothes.
I was blonde, skinny and female. Three apparently compelling reasons, in some people’s minds, to assume there wasn’t much going on in my brain.
I’ve had people apologise to me after a conversation, genuinely surprised to discover that I had something intelligent to say.
It’s difficult to know quite how to respond when someone congratulates you for having a brain.
For years, I felt I had to prove myself. And I wonder how many of us are still doing exactly that.
Perhaps you were the difficult child. The quiet one. The dramatic one. The pretty one. The one who was never quite good enough. Perhaps someone handed you a description of yourself so early that you never thought to question whether it was true.
I eventually became a child therapist. The irony of that isn’t entirely lost on me.
But A Pretty Thought wasn’t created to settle an old score.
It grew from a fascination with everything we fail to see when we think we already understand someone. The assumptions we make, the stories we inherit, the identities we construct and the contradictions that make us human.
The name is a little playful, a little ironic, and rather personal.
For a long time, I felt I was being looked at before I was being listened to.
I thought it was time to give the thoughts a place of their own.