More from the misfit section....

 Being a misfit and a poet is lonely. It's the kind of lonely that leaves you alone in a crowd of people. I carry this with me at all times, and sometimes it is not too heavy of a burden and sometimes, it is truly too much to bear. Remember that kid in school that was just sort of odd and nobody wanted him/her on the team or in their group? Yeah, that is me. And thank God for adulthood where it is okay to find your own brand of misfits and you can all oddly not fit in together. But to think that childhood did not leave scars on a deeply feeling person is a lie. To say surface level crap like... "that is all behind you now, you are no longer being bullied or are a misfit," or "But aren't you glad since it shaped who you are today?" Let me tell you, I am grateful for today, and that it is not like childhood. But I have never once been glad that I was bullied by classmates or teachers. I'm not glad I was targeted as an "at-risk" kid so the infamous "they" could poke and prod my brain for reasons to list in their research. I don't have some secret gratitude for people who laughed at me and made fun of me and then scratched their pretty little heads when I broke bad. Ironically enough, with all my disdain for education today and the hugely broken down corporation that it is, one of my favorite ever quotes comes from education or education gurus. And I can't give the proper credit as I don't remember exactly where it came from. But it didn't originate with me. Here it is: "You cannot punish the trauma out of someone." Which is literally what both education and rules of society in America try to do. 

As one who was formally a moderate to heavy drinker, and a more than just occasional recreational drug user, I am supposed to let all this shit go today. I am not supposed to stir the pot anymore. But it is what I do. I am good at it. And I have a few different views on this. One, it is a release. In the cycle of abuse it is the part where the victim invokes violence because it takes away the unpredictability of it and it give the victim some amount of control. Maybe not to what is going to happen to them, but of when. And waiting for the other shoe to drop is horrible and time consuming and eats up any available brain space. People wonder why you don't get things done, but your body, heart and mind were waiting. And that waiting is paralyzing, and Petty didn't lie, "the waiting is the hardest part...."

Shit-stirring.... it isn't just for breakfast anymore. Someone's got to do it. You know, when the water gets stagnant, it becomes a breeding ground for things like mosquitos. And, as you all surely know by now, "Well behaved women rarely make history" (penned originally by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, often credited to Marilyn Monroe and Eleanor Roosevelt). So someone has to stir the pot. Someone has to be the supporter of Black Lives Matter and PRIDE, and women's rights when everyone around them is shouting things like "it's not that you are expressing yourself, but the WAY you are going about it!" Which is usually a non-violent, non-criminal way, by the way. Shit stirrers of world unite. 

Stirring the shit pot does a few things though that I don't like. The pot boils over onto non-shit substance and taints everything around it with the smell and taste of shit. It splatters. Onto people and entities and entire lives of those who did not make the shit or stir the shit. And it burns and stings and stinks in the process. It can ruin relationships and it is a major form of self-sabotage. 

Self-sabotage. Something else I'm truly adept at. And let's face it, the more precarious my mental health is, the more likely I am to believe that every thought I have is worth sharing and shouting and splattering in every direction. And when this happens I am most likely to believe that my thoughts and my mind have never been clearer. But the truth is, we generally hurt the ones we love the most. Why? Because it is safe. or safer. Because, in general, they are going to love us anyway. And sometimes those are the people we are trying to reach in a roundabout kind of way. Does this person care about me enough to reach out even though I just shit on them? In spite of, or because of. So why bleed on those who didn't cut me? Why let the shit explode on the just and unjust? Well, for one, it just splatters when it it is stirred often enough and the heat is turned up high enough. But also because it is not safe for that shit to splatter out into the unknown. 

Knowing I'm creating career sabotage and injuring relationships? Not enough to stop me. Because that self-sabotage groove is deep. And stirring up shit that is better left alone, just another strength I possess and service I offer. So there you go. 

Found the pic here

March is Slice of Life month...

All month?! All month. The challenge is to write a slice about your day, every day, during the month of March and share it on the blog developed by Two Writing Sisters. I have not been successful in the past. I've been incredibly hit and miss. And for several years now I haven't even tried to participate. But the timing is changing and my life seems to be in a space where I am ready to accept and rise to the challenge. 

I've been encompassed by my past life, teaching, of late. I was not invited back to a teaching position last year. And that in and of itself is a whole gamut of emotion. Up and down and angry and twisty and knotted and sad and indignant and blaming and then self-blaming and hopeless and then back to angry. and let's just go around another time. Ugh... 

Last year, I took on a whole lot of new. A new grade, in a new district, including a move to a new community, and more. I moved from 1st grade to 5th grade. And I was lost. Lost, lost, lost. But to compound things, I was teaching the smallest class I had ever had (11 at it's largest), with 2 of those students having parents on the school board and a 3rd student having a parent that was besties with the family of the president of the school board. There was no room for error. I made an exorbitant amount of errors.

I could have developed a love for 5th grade and even a niche for it. It could have been my jam. But not with the amount of time I had and the margin for error that was afforded to me. Zero. That was the margin. 

Not by my administration. My principal/superintendent afforded me a margin. An amazingly wide margin, knowing what I was up against with the parents and students. She was amazing and she did everything she possibly could have done in order to help me. She guided, she encouraged, she empathized, she ran interference, she found me some capable assistance, she counseled. So what was my deal? That is the question I still ask myself almost daily. 

Why, with that amount of kind, accepting support, could I not succeed? Was it pure laziness? Self-loathing? ineptitude? Was I just too overwhelmed? Too tired? Too scattered? Was I simply in over my head? 

Why?

Seriously though.

My inner chatter goes through this on the regular. And I vacillate. One day it's all about the indignant, self-righteousness, and the voices in my head blame those sons-a-bitches who had the audacity to treat me with less than fair and reasonable expectations. One day, or maybe the same day that starts out angry, self-righteous, and indignant, the overwhelming take away is my own failures. And self-ridicule. What is the hell ever made me think that I could teach? And teach 5th grade?! I am a Kinder teacher at heart and an okay first grade teacher. I can stretch those little minds and make them readers and make them love me and do literally anything I ask of them, which makes them try. try. Try. TRY. 

I went into this gig thinking I could make 5th graders try. (insert insane laughter here). I do not have that much power. I cannot influence them in the same way I can Firsties. And I cannot influence them when they are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE INFLUENCED according to parental dictates and judgements. 

On the good days, I still strongly believe I was on a right and good path with some things. Writing. My students had to journal every day. Every morning, whether we met in person or in a Zoom meeting, there was a journal prompt waiting for them in google classroom. Every morning. And a rubric to measure their writing quality that laid out clear expectations. Which is something parents seemed to want. But apparently their children were not to journal because the parents thought it was dumb." I had no way of showing them what all their children were learning when they follow the prompts. So some students did the minimum and got the marks to match. Which furthered the divide. Some of them didn't do the journaling at all. In spite of parent contacts and detention. So you can lead a young writer to the blank page/screen, but you cannot make said writer pound it out on the keyboard. 

Okay, that is only one tiny slice of that slice of my life. It's like if I took this piece of my teaching life, this one small year and split it into a million other pieces and then chose one of those pieces and slivered it down even farther. I know. So that means that this is not a clear and complete view of this part of my life. Maybe not even a complete slice. But it has drained me and saddened me and overwhelmed me in just this short glimpse. So that's all folks. Tomorrow being a new day, I may or may not give you another slice of this same cake. Only tomorrow will tell. 

If you want to read everyone else's slice, visit here: https://twowritingteachers.org/2022/03/02/day-2-sol22/

Fake it til you make it?

 I was taught something totally different than what people seem to interpret "fake it til you make it" to mean these days. As a newly sober/clean addict, I was told that sometimes you have to fake it til you make it. This was not intended to be in the spirit of F.E.A.R. (f*#k everything and run), but in the spirit of overcoming in the sense that I didn't have a clue as to how to live differently than I had before. It is a nice sentiment to say, overcome your F.E.A.R.  by facing everything and recovering. But I didn't have a clue as to how to live in recovery mode, facing life as it came to me. So through mimicking the actions of others who were successfully living a life I desperately wanted, I might be able to learn. But it will not be my first instinct or a natural response. Possibly not ever. But for sure as a "newbie" to recovery or in regard to any new challenge. In order to build muscle memory, I have to do the action. I have to fake it, when I don't really have confidence that my life will work out if I take this action, and take the action anyway. Because. Well, because I have done such a fine and upstanding job of making my life work out the way I have wanted it to by doing the same dysfunctional things over and over. In order to build new habits, instincts, and neuropathways in my brain, I have to repeat actions that are not instinctual to me at this time. I have to "fake it." This is often messy, embarrassing and occasionally humiliating. It is full of the Face Everything and Recover kind of fear. The John Wayne kind, being courageous enough to saddle up in the midst of my unknowing, the middle of being scared shitless. And not waiting until I feel brave or empowered of equipped. Just do it. 

This is different, however, than damn-the-torpedos-throw-all-caution-to-the-wind-and-act-with-reckless-abandon. This is doing the thing I know to be right, even though I don't actually know how. This is asking for help, accepting advice, and uncomfortably doing things in a way that I have not done them before. This is step work and taking my own inventory and realizing just how many times and how many ways I have NOT accomplished whatever it is that I have to become willing to face and act upon in the face of my fear. 

All of this "jargon" is stuff I learned in recovery. Some of it spoken with the intellect I hear all over the workplace today. And the talk of trauma and re-wiring our brain and all those education buzz words. Well, I have heard it before it became popular. Some of it spoken through the wisdom of others who told me, "you can act your way into a new way of thinking, but you cannot think your way into a new way of acting." Change requires action. And if I don't have the strength, knowledge or ability to successfully maneuver this path, I will have to borrow this from others who have gone before, who are willing to share their experience, strength and hope with me. I have to trust them and then saddle up and do this action that I don't understand or even believe in (yet), and be willing to do it over and over until I've built a new muscle memory and carved new grooves in my brain, lighting up new dendrites and growing new habits and instincts. But until I have uncomfortably faked it over and over, I cannot face it instinctually and be in a new path. 

Fake it til you make it is not bullshit advice. It is deep, it is real, it requires an action, even though I don't like the action, or feel comfortable with it. Until I know better, I cannot do better. In order to do better, I have to do the thing that is not natural to me. 

Today's rant is brought to you by this photo that facebook "suggested" to me. This photo has some amount of validity. But don't you think that "face it til you make it" requires you to fake it? It requires acting like you know something when you don't and just doing it until you do know it. In my not-so-humble opinion...