This little blog may be my outlet for a while, as a writer, anyway. School is now in full swing, as I’ve just completed week 3 as an art teacher at a local high school, and… I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck? Had the shit beat out of me? Both? Things took an upswing toward the end of this week, but I don’t want to get too optimistic, as optimism that I’ve got anything figured out as a teacher has historically been an overnight mail request for trouble, the universe swinging some sort of mallet down into my backside as a reminder: you’ve not yet figured anything out, girl! Be realistic!I Why some people can make optimism work for them, I don’t know, but it’s never really been my friend. So I try to point myself toward a kind of quiet, cautious belief that while the road is long and twisted and full of unknowns, I will arrive, eventually, most likely in one piece. Where? I don’t know, but I sure hope it’s someplace more peaceful than this one.
But I’ve lost my point. I came here to say: I’m struggling, as a writer. I left teaching in 2017 and I didn’t think I’d ever come back, not full-time anyway, because I could not seem to balance teaching art with my need to create it (there were other reasons, to be clear, but they’re not relevant here). When I left, I imagined myself finding some other kind of job that would allow me more mental and emotional freedom so I could actively pursue my creative interests and pay my bills, and perhaps teach an occasional workshop or two on evenings or weekends. But my plan did not come to fruition. It turns out I don’t have a strong drive toward any career except either writing (whatever I want, not what someone else wants) full time (but I need to eat! and I don’t have rich parents!), or something in the human services, which by nature, are emotionally, mentally, and often even physically demanding jobs. So it seems I am trapped. My mind and heart are torn between two seemingly opposing desires, at least for me.
The kind of writing I like to do best requires I travel somewhat far off in my mind, detach myself from the demands of everyday life, the drudgery of reality. But teaching is so fantastically concrete, utterly grounding, it pulls you into the here-and-now lest your classroom be taken over by a herd of teenagers. There is no time for dreaming, no space for the mind to wander. This might be possible were I able to shut OFF my teaching brain when I get home after work, but this is something I’ve often failed to do in my past, or felt I was simply not capable of. It feels like the distance between the kind of thinking my job asks of me and the kind of thinking my writing requires is too vast to travel in the span of an hour or two (if that) during my evenings after work. I get home and slide into cozy sweatpants and flannel and read the news or a book or watch TV or a movie on the couch. I don’t feel capable of much else. I’ve been cooking in massive batches on the weekends so I can just pull something out of the freezer when I get home after work.
How do other people do it? I don’t know. Perhaps they have more self-discipline than I do. Perhaps they teach at less challenging schools (but then, they have the challenge of those parents), or perhaps they excel at time-management or have some special ability to shut off one part of their brain and turn on another. I am not, by nature, one of these people, I do not innately harbor any of these skills. But, if I am to live a happy and fulfilling and well-fed life, I must learn how to be.
I must also remember that this is likely the worse part of a long road and as I keep at it, and the road smoothes out (or I simply get better at handling the bumps), it may well get easier and easier to carve out time and space for my own creativity, beyond this little blog (we’ll see if I can even manage posting more than 4 times a year here!) No, I didn’t manage to balance teaching art and making it before, but I also didn’t have an MFA under my belt, which for me was primarily training for writing in the real world. In completing this training, I also wrote some essays that mean a lot to me, some of which still need work, and which I’d like to try publishing once I properly polish them. I didn’t have these works to tend to before, nor did I have any confidence in myself as a writer. Writing still feels like a frivolous pipe dream some of the time, but I know that voice doesn’t matter much anymore. That it makes me feel happy and alive to do it is reason enough to continue, to figure out how to prioritize writing outside of a demanding job.
Because it is a job I love, teaching. I love the endless puzzle of it, how things change everyday and I must pivot and figure out how to get my students to learn things that feel impossible to them. I like the challenge, and it’s never boring. I love how happy my students look when they’ve done something they didn’t believe they could, and I love when a kid shows me their work and they’re so proud of it. So yes, I suppose, once the challenges at work are little less frequent and urgent, I can assign myself a personal challenge: to figure out once and for all how to balance teaching art and making art. Because really, my life (should I want it to be one I’m proud of, in the end) depends on it.
Pictured at the top is a beloved star of mine, Cygnus. The swan. Actually, Cygnus is two stars, a binary system. The stars whirling around each other, their velocity and gravity working at the same time to both hold them together and pull them apart.
<3
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