Profile

Hey there! I’m Meghan. Thanks for dropping by.

When writing a personal profile, it’s always hard to find the right overlap between things that I think make me interesting, things that other people think make me interesting, and things that are appropriate to the venue at hand. Hopefully a lot of what I write here will occupy the space at the center of that particular venn diagram.

I’m a 33-year-old full-time college student. This is my second, tremendously more successful, attempt to earn a degree. Understanding why I’m in school and learning about things that are deeply personally meaningful to me makes a huge difference. I’m expecting to graduate in a year and a half with an anthropology degree and a history minor.

I worked in IT for most of a decade prior to that. Once, I thought I’d be entirely content with a job where I could be in my little cave and never have to deal with other people. I quickly learned that working in tech support is not like that at all. I learned more slowly that such a life was actually not at all what I wanted. Being laid off in a merger was the culmination of a transformative process wherein I realized that in this world that is materially ephemeral, people are a lot more important to me than computer hardware. I also came to believe that a tremendous number of problems in the world arise from people who don’t try to understand the way others see the world. Anthropology seems like the right path to try to gain and share that kind of understanding. Maybe I’ve become an idealist in my thirties.

School has been another transformative process that’s given me new mental frameworks to view a lot of life and culture through. Gender, for instance. Ever since I began to consciously consider the matter, I’ve never felt entirely at home in the category of male. But I’m not female either. For a long time, I’ve identified as genderqueer, a term that to me meant a space between male and female. But some of what I’ve read this semester has made me increasingly aware of the nature of gender as a social construction, and I’m identifying less with the concept of gender even as a spectrum between two points. Instead, I’d prefer to divorce gender entirely from biological sex and stop privileging the two arbitrary points of ‘male’ and ‘female’. I’m beginning to try the descriptor ‘agender’ on for size. My public presentation is generally masculine, but I do wish for more freedom to deviate from that presentation without major culture clashes.

I’m polyamorous, and I have two wonderful partners. I’ve joked that my life has been sort of like being in four relationships at once; my classes, my primary partner Danaeris, my secondary partner Lisa, and the jobs that I have at school, mostly in that order. It can be hard for me to find a lot of free time. (I hope this summer will be a little easier on the calendar though; I mean, look, I’m finally writing a profile!) I’d like to get out to more social events and meet more folks!

One last thing it’s important to know about me is that I am faceblind. In short, I have a neurological impairment when it comes to recognizing people by face. It’s not just being ‘bad with names’. I could spend hours with someone today, and then see them tomorrow and have no idea who they are. This was a major part of my being deeply, deeply shy up until just a few years ago. I’m handling the effects that my neurology has on my interaction with people a lot better than I once did, but it does have very real effects on life. I love talking more about face-blindness (or anything else I wrote here) in more depth with people who are interested, but the important thing to know for people who are meeting me is that I likely won’t know who you are by sight for a very long time. It’s not personal; I’m equally bad with everybody!

So thanks for all the time spend reading that. A lot of folks create profiles that are rather shorter and more to a point. I suppose mine is a bit outside the norm. I've always thought that I'm a bit outside the norm myself, so maybe that's ok.

If you’d like to get in touch, I’d welcome a note!

---Meghan, May 2013