I had all these grand ideas about my life when I returned from my final (and graduating!) MFA residency this past August. Newly minted with my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I was flooded with a sense of urgency and focus—I was to at last dedicate myself to writing, and only writing! Oh, yes, I’d make it spiritual, my writing life! My writing practice! Sacred and pure! I won’t lie, lots of blog post ideas drifted through my mind, all the summations and proclamations I wanted to make about how after 39 years of floating around between too many passions and hobbies, at last my attention alighted on just one. And I felt good about this decision, certain. I bought a slew of tiny notebooks to carry with me everywhere to jot down ideas and inspirations. My desire to get back into painting vanished, everything felt calm and clear, focused, at long last. I journaled every morning á la Julia Cameron, my heart feeling settled at last: this is it! Writing! Yes! Nothing else to distract me now!
But then BAM! SMACK! Fist-fulls of reality in my face. A first dose: I am sitting in my classroom in late August, hauling hundreds of dusty old binders out the room in big garbage bags, scrubbing layers of scum off the tables, wondering how the fuck I’m gonna teach while an industrial ventilation system grinds away overhead. Then my attention wanders, and I wander after it: digging cans of food that expired in 2015 out of desk drawers, then tooth paste and brushes, coated with a film of dust, then a pile of crumpled face masks. Then I’m in the back of the room, trying to pick and peel at the oil-based printmaking ink students poured down the drain that eventually hardened into (and completely covered the drain) plastic. No water will be getting down this drain, so I keep picking in a panic. Suddenly I stop, look around me, and see 15 jobs half-started and unfinished, the classroom in seeming worse disarray than before. Evidence of my persistently and sometimes aggressively wandering mind, attention, focus, whatever you want to call it. I can never decide: What now? What first? What next? It’s thirteen things, all at once, while I spin like a crazy top between them. My sister tells me she thinks I have ADHD, and perhaps I do, but that doesn’t change another important, no, essential, fact.
This: Re-entering the art classroom full time, of course, has also meant getting my hands dirty. Not with sink slime or dustballs or mold, but with, you know, art supplies! Colored pencils, cake temperas, black markers—it’s a pretty meager stash at present, but the point is, I’ve been thinking in pictures again, big wide-open ideas, moving my hand across paper not to make a word but a shape. I realized how much I missed drawing and painting, or doodling little cartoons, or looking at something deeply in order to figure out how to recreate it two dimensions. My brief experience of calm and sharp focus loosened, its hard edges gone to haze, a wide and uncontrolled scope, reeling through space.
So, my plan to immediately prioritize my writing life backfired, as things I declare or make proclamations about often do, and I’ve since had to adjust course. I’m also really glad I didn’t any of those blog posts I’d been spinning in my supposedly-certain-mind. I mean, sure, I could have prioritized my writing, but at the expense of a few things: Firstly, at the expense of thinking about and creating visual art again. And certainly at the expense of my career (which I need for health insurance, food, mortgage, and yes, the sense of purpose and joy it gives me). If I’d refused to stay late after school to go home and write, my lessons would have been disorganized and lower quality, my room would still be a pigpen, I’d never have gotten caught up on the all the paperwork bullshit, and my stress would be through the roof. The to-do list is endless, basically, but if I’d prioritized writing from the start of the school year, I’d still be drowning in teaching, planning, calling parents, grading, creating and submitting supply orders (this takes HOURS), bothering HR to fix my pay rate (also hours, and still not fixed), or any number of things that arise on a typical day at school. During September, I was drowning. But I set my writing life aside, and I’m treading water, now, not desperately, but contentedly. Sometimes I even float on my back.
And yes, yes, I still plan to prioritize my writing life—but not only my writing life, rather my creative life. The truth is, no matter how many times I try to convince myself I’m some other kind of person, I’m me. I own a book called “How to be Everything” and that title still basically sums me up. I AM a writer, and a teacher, and most importantly, an artist. It is essential to my being to create. I create with words most frequently, but also with pictures. I’d forgotten this. I also love to read, run and work out, do yoga, hike, bike, cook and bake, blog, work on my website, learn about things like owls or mushrooms or the Revolutionary War or the first stars that formed in our infant universe. I wish I could be that ardently focused human, a laser beam pointedly shined on my greatest passion. I’m sured I’be be a lot farther ahead in life—as a writer, or an artist, or a teacher. Or whatever else.
But I am not that person. I never have been (ice skating! horses! Helen Keller! astronomy! candle-making! and other various hard-core obsessions of my youth), and I probably never will be. Why waste any more time trying to be somebody else? Squelching my impulses, or funneling my desires into somebody else’s “superior” approach… these things don’t work. Trying to force-change my nature gobbles up even more time than having too many interests already does.
The man who was repairing my noisy ventilation system so I didn’t have to shout over it anymore? That guy who turned if off so it would be quieter in my room while he waited for the part to arrive? He promised he’d be back soon to fix the fan. But after weeks of mounting teenager smells and old wood smells and stuffiness and students whining about it all, I inquired at the custodial office. It turns out this man (who promised that he wouldn’t forget about me, he actually used those words) hurt his leg in some hunting accident, and would perhaps be out on leave for the rest of the year. Ok well what the hell to do in the mean time? I panicked, briefly. Then I asked the custodian to come to my room to turn the noisy system back on, but I watched him do it. So now I can get up on a stool to reach into the ceiling and turn if off before my classes, and then back on again after the kids have gone.
It isn’t a perfect solution, but it works well enough. I turn it on for heat and off so I can teach in a normal voice. On, off, on, off. A simple switch, a little stool, a little making-it-work so I can get what I need without waiting six months for someone to come in and fix the fan belt. This is a skill I’d do well to practice and apply in other areas of my life. There is a way, there must be. On, off, on, off. Writing, teaching, art, writing, teaching, art. If I cannot find a way, then I’ll have to make one. A little stool, a little switch.
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