I didn’t mean to become this person… I didn’t really think it would work. I had no idea what I was getting into when a year ago I sat by the stream of my childhood and made a promise to myself. I couldn’t have imagined that on the eve of this anniversary I would be lying here, looking like this, feeling like this… and have lived this year more and in more ways than I had even imagined …
I was hurtling myself towards an abyss and a world of unknown… but I was hurtling all the same. I had no tangible goals… but there was certainly a direction and for the first time in my life I felt a certainty and a calmness that I had never known. It was the utter risk of it all that gave me that faith (if you will)that I had to go out, abandon all the shoulds and the ought -to’s.
It was something that had been building… depending on how you count it, for years…
But there was something about that summer…there existed something that had pushed me further than I had been pushed before which, I think must have brought me to that point.
This is a tale of fear, loss, risk, growth, love, more loss, disappointment and renewal.
The title is more of a recommendation of self than it is a reproach… so take it to heart.
There is no beginning that is really the beginning. These things start. Do these things start at birth? Shortly after? Before birth are these things we inherit or are they part of our nature… and for some reason we are born with our own set is nearly impossible set of idiosyncrasies… and suffer as a result… I don’t know the answer to these questions, nor are their answers nearly relevant.
What is relevant is that I was broken. I had been a teacher for several years giving my all, literally my heart, soul, money, time and sleep rather lack of sleep. I had a unquenchable passion. I was driven to be a good teacher. I was young and new at my job. I had to prove myself. But even more so, my students deserved better. They deserved the world and for the most part they had been deprived the essentials. As is common among poorer urban youth, their education involved much of what they shouldn’t know… and not nearly enough of what they should know. And as a history teacher, you might imagine that I would include the constitution, bill of rights and various revolutions around the world against oppression as “what they ought to know.” But I am not your average passionate teacher. Above all, above even my subject of history, I believe that my students ought to know how precious they are, how capable they are, how powerful they are… and that they have the ability to change the world. And I would like to apologize for the use of so many and so obvious the clichés, however there are moments when they are unavoidable, often moments of sincerity.
The disenfranchised poor, minorities, immigrants and the young suffer the greatest damage.
Needless to say at this point, I worked hard. I was passionately committed to my work and my students for reasons sited above and more. But I slowly also realized that there was something else. It wasn’t just the passion that regularly kept me at school past 9pm. It was really that I was hiding with equal dedication and effort from something that I didn’t even know existed… but I was hiding all the same. Hiding with so much force that I wouldn’t be able to recognize it for several years…
I had worked with this schools pioneering class and had promised to be there until those students graduated, where so many others had left them. I had made a promise that I intended to keep to each of those kids, those remarkable people. I was not going to abandon them. I had been there working hard for three years… and with four days left in the year, we were all told that the school was closing and that the following year each of the students would have to find a new school to attend for their senior year. This also meant that I was without a job and slim chances of finding another for the coming fall. but that was a secondary matter to devastation I felt for my students.
It wasn’t until later after the school had closed, the students had left, the boxes were packed and the walls were bare that it sunk in… that I no longer had work. There was something terrifying yet relaxing about that…
But not the way you think.
I had wanted a break. Who wouldn’t love a year off? It seems to be any ones dream. But shortly it was all that time that started to scare me…
There was something that needed to change. I wasn’t even sure.
I needed a change. My life… wasn’t really a life up to that moment. It had been a vigorous comma. I was living a vacant life.
I was merely the operator of my life… I hadn’t actually participated in it… since… well maybe the last real thing I can remember doing was in the eight grade when I told my best friend that I had a crush on her boyfriend, my other best friend. Everything after that was a version of me doing what I was supposed to… or running and hiding from life.. Hiding from anything that might ever hurt me. But it was a very still silent and slow kind of running… the kind of running no one would notice… not even me…
It is almost like the next thing I remember in my life was fifteen years later when my best friend at the time, a colleague at school and an awesome chemistry teacher, asked me a question that shook me. It shook me so much that it took me a long time to even process it… We were out or a drink at a sort of swanky bar that her boyfriend managed; she is the ex-model, red-haired, bomb-shell-type and men are always all over her, either in reality or psychically. This made it interesting to be the woman next to her. But she is also smart and sharp and more than anything direct, which is how we came to be friends. But one instant she turned to me and said “Do you know why you are such a Bitch?” or something to that effect.
I hadn’t realized…
Well to preface this by saying I had just deterred another one of her suitors in a flip and equally direct way. So the comment was relatively appropriate.
All the same it struck home… and I think that must have been the intention… cause somehow it didn’t quiet seem like an attack, as it might have seemed… she genuinely wanted to know… and I dint have an answer for her… I hadn’t even quite realized that I was a bitch… but the truth was out…
There are, primarily, two women responsible for my transformation and neither of them managed to produce immediate results. They both planted seeds and the results have sprouted this year.
There are many other people who have contributed… several men, romantic interests and my father… who has been a touch stone among other things.
Through these relationships I have been reborn. Certainly revised.
If not so much of a cliché
(This story although over a year old is still un finished as is the journey, the transformation and the posting)
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