Sarah-Katherine has been wracking her brain to put together material for the book she's writing. Now, the first fruits of her efforts have appeared. Brilliantly articulated and touching. I want to read the book when it comes out.

What if you're smart? I mean, really smart. What if you're the kind of smart that got in trouble in school a lot, because you just couldn't sit still and listen to lies and half-truths and bullshit from disaffected public servants who cared nothing for actual education? What if you used to cut school to go read at the public library? What if you had questions -- so many questions? And nobody had the time to answer your questions? What if your questions were actually annoying to the people who were being paid to answer them, at least officially?

...

We did what we had to do for an insane amount of money, then we crept back into each other’s company and cried, or raged, or laughed. It was necessary. And for the first time in my life, I was surrounded by women like me -- smart women. Women so smart they were actually functionally nuts. Women who understood every single literary reference I made. Women who were so smart, they made me feel dumb. Women who had been on their own since they were fourteen; women who had burned everything they’d owned on the crucibles of autonomy and self-determination; women who realized it was far less humiliating to fake-finger their own pussies so some fat, ugly white man could jerk off to them, than it would be to punch in to his clock and take direction from him for eight hours a day, forty hours a week. Especially when we all knew he'd be jerking off to us anyway.