“Where am I?” This is my rallying cry as I grow into the third age. It is not about being physically lost. It is more about needing an assessment of progress on thinking journeys. I take my thinking for a walk most days, living alone allowing me to do that without derogatory comments coming my way.
Right from primary school at age 5, I was ‘dreamer’, ‘head in the clouds’, ‘thick’, ‘stupid’, ‘slow’, ‘not with it’, ‘not the full shilling’, ‘on another planet’ or that truly wonderful Scottish insult of ‘glaikit’ (pronounced as ‘glay-kit’).
Needless to say, school was not the best experience in life for me. Once labelled, you stay labelled throughout the entirety of your schooling. And so, I was thought of as ‘behind’ everyone else throughout my education, and I largely lived-up to the general expectation, definitely not excelling, but also doing well-enough to enter higher education, if wanted. And some began to wonder about their initial assessments.
From school until near retirement, I have continued to be viewed as the ‘dreamer’ or the one with his ‘head in the clouds’, despite travelling through higher education at both graduate and post-graduate level, but no-one calls me ‘glaikit’ anymore — except me.
I choose to follow in the footsteps of people of colour who have reclaimed that most awful of insults known as the ’N’ word, or some in the LGBTQ community reclaiming ‘Queer’, and wearing that label with pride, despite the violence inflicted upon many under the banner of ‘Queer-Bashing’ not so very long ago in the UK.
Unlike those communities, I don’t claim ‘glaikit’ as a label that I wish to publicly adopt, and I would not expect anyone else to fire that word at me nowadays. But I do want to adopt it internally. It is part of my history and part of my cultural origins.
Identity, though, is not about the reclamation of a single word. It is about the recognition of that word as a symbol of how life has been lived to date. This one is important to me, as others are in other spheres of my life, but this is the only one I wish to reclaim.
It is about a change in social norms, and a recognition of multiple intelligences and mindfulness. In that scenario, words like ‘head in the clouds’ or ‘dreamer’ or ‘slow’ become recognised as having some positive value, and not regarded as something that can appropriately be hurled at anyone, as it really is insulting, and with no recognition of the value of contemplation, taking time to consider and embracing the slow life in general.
Insults are never appropriate, whatever they are, when they are used by one person against another, but there is a reasonable use with this particular word, I have found, when employed as part of my own internal self-deprecation whenever I find myself saying: “Where am I?”
Fraser
November 2023