Staring at the Foreground

I stare toward the horizon a lot lately. 

I just keep staring at it, expecting it to change. The road looks straight and clear in front of me, but I keep thinking that it’s going to turn, to drop off, to lead to somewhere different. 

Am I really going to keep traveling this same path? High school was four years. College was four years. I’ve taught four years. When is graduation? When does the path change again? 

I stare toward the horizon a lot lately. Well, actually, I stare at my computer screen a lot lately. 

I have a secret Pinterest board where I pin articles about teachers who’ve quit teaching and moved on to new careers. I have a folder of bookmarks on my web browser titled “Dream Jobs,” but I don’t think there’s a link to a single truly dream job on it. I’d have to know what my dream job is for that to be possible. 

I’m signed up for email alerts of teaching and tutoring jobs in my area. I signed up one day when I was fed up with teaching, yet even then I couldn’t think of any other categories of jobs to consider than those. I check them every day out of habit now, and I’ve almost sent in my resume for a few. 

I’ve considered getting my Master’s in library science. I always wanted to be a librarian. My elementary school librarian wore sequined tops and animal print and made them look awesome. She smelled of perfume and used her long manicured nails that I admired so much to turn the pages of children’s books that she read from the side, holding them turned for us to see the pictures. I could see myself in sequins and glasses, with my hair piled on top of my head like hers, cataloging and organizing and helping kids pick out books. I can almost smell the books… being a librarian would be amazing. 

I say I wish I could quit teaching. I threaten that I’m going to. Every year, I say it’s my last year, but I think of ideas for next year in the shower, continue to buy books for my classroom, and write notes to myself to remind me how I can teach what I’m currently teaching better next time. I wonder what I would do with all the canvases I’ve painted for my room if I quit, try to imagine not having school to think about all the time and can’t think of what would take its place.  

The truth is my dream job is teaching. I can’t think of anything else to add to my job alert profile because what am I made for but teaching? What else have I ever wanted to do?

I wanted to be a waitress.
I wanted to be a writer. 
I wanted to be a librarian.
I wanted to be a linguist.
I wanted to be a teacher.

That is the exhaustive list of every career aspiration I can remember having in my childhood and adolescence. 

I don’t know if I can add wanting to work at LOFT or Starbucks or being SuperNanny to that list or not. Do those whims I’ve had since adulthood count?

The thing is, I think I’m a teacher. 

I keep staring into the horizon, trying to find an alternate route, something that will fill my heart without the sacrifice, something that will make me feel constantly validated, something that would let me sit with my books and my papers and my journals all the time, something I could do in an 8-hour day without any night and weekend work and see lives change for the better every single day right before my eyes. 

I think I’ll be staring into the horizon for a long time if I’m looking for all that. 

Maybe it’s time to start looking around me instead of ahead of me:
     my scrapbook of notes from kiddos
     my bright-colored classroom, my oasis and theirs
     a girl wearing her glasses because if I can, she can too
     a stack of essays, far from perfect, but better than last year’s stack
     facebook messages from former students, asking for advice
     kids who come back to visit from high school
         and notice what I’ve changed, remember where they sat in the room,
         ask if we still read what we read together their year, 
          say they miss 7th grade the most
     the kid I don’t even have in class who hugs me in the hall
     the 8th grader who brought me a card the first weeks of school
“Thank you so much for everything you taught me last year. 
            We’re already using it this year.”
     the 8th grader who brought me candy for Christmas
 (I can’t believe she thought of me all this time later.)
      nervous pre-teens in prom dresses and ties at a formal dance
      pages of notebooks marked “Please read, Mrs. Coleman!” 
      and written as letters just to me "Mrs. Coleman, what do you think?"

I am a constant back and forth when it comes to this place in my life. I’ve felt good like this about teaching before, and it always seems to fade. Somehow, though, this time, I think I’m going to keep it. I’m going to get tired again, frustrated again, all those negative school feelings again, but I think this new current of gratitude for the amazing privilege of being a teacher, of assuredness that this is who I am, is going to stay, even when it’s beneath the surface, reminding me of who I am and how and why…

I think it’s going to last. At least until something new really does appear on the horizon, all on its own without trying to force it. 

I just have to get my eyes off the horizon, quit staring into the distance, and look around. 

Blogging... or lack thereof

Blogging... it's a funny thing how it's different from real writing. 

Added later: real writing? What do I mean by that? I want to edit it because it doesn't seem accurate, but I want to leave it because I'm struck by the fact that that's what I wrote originally. Real writing. Hmm..

Anyway... 

Blogging... it's a funny thing how it's different from real writing. 

Even though there are only 3.5 people, maybe, who read each thing I post on here, there's something different about blogging.

When I look today and see that my last post is from June 7– Hey, I was still 25 then!– I at first feel ashamed, as if I have been abandoning my first love of writing completely. Thankfully, I know that my Day One journal app and my good, old-fashioned paper journals, which I love for their realness and paperness and ink-and-graphite-smoothness, do hold writing since June 7, not as much as needed or wanted, but enough to keep me going. 

I have been writing, but I haven't been blogging, which leads me to this reflection, which no one cares about but that I'm going to post anyway, about how blogging is different.

Writing that is blogged is somehow more final. There could be an audience. I mean, it probably wouldn't happen, especially with this one, but something conceivably could get shared on the internet and become a sensation. I mean it could. So I have to be careful and make sure it's something I wouldn't mind attaching my name to. 

But, in reality, the actual reason it's more final, in my real world of maybe 3.5 readers,  is there will almost definitely be at least a small audience, a few faithful friends who follow the blog and will read out of obligation or curiosity or maybe even excitement since its been over half a year since I last posted– how did I let that happen?!– when they get they email announcing I have written.  (And I really am grateful for my friends who care what I write! I'm not disparaging the 3.5 of you– a group of actually more than 3 or 4 people who won't actually all read at any given time, which is why I've made the average smaller... You are few in number but great in love and importance.) 

But anyway.

Blogged writing is more final. It won't just live in Day One for me alone or stay scrawled in my notebook where only I will revisit it. Someone, at least one other person, will read it, maybe even comment or refer to it later. 

Someone could actually call me out– Hey, remember, you said you were going to love your job this year, remember? (Btw, I actually told someone on Christmas Eve– one of my incredible teachers past, one of the first who inspired me to write and to teach, perfectly enough– that I love teaching. I said it all genuinely and naturally without thinking about it. It shocked me as it came out. It was kind of astounding. I'm still reeling at it now as I relive it. I don't know the last time I said that without planning it or forcing it. It was either a crazy slip or a crazy epiphany.)

Someone could actually talk to me about how ridiculous my number of posts about or referring to John Mayer lyrics is getting and how I need to get it together. 

Someone could see the depths of what I'm wrestling and know that John Mayer's lyric is still true in me– So what? So I've got a smile on? Well, it's hiding the quiet superstitions in my mind. Don't believe me, don't believe me, when I say I've got it down. (Good luck, imaginary person who would tell me to quit quoting John Mayer. Not gonna happen.)

Actually, that has happened. Well, not stopping the JM obsession  or someone telling me to but someone seeing the depths of my wrestling. One of my high school friend's father, a dear friend in his own right, a pillar of our hometown, told me that he reads my blog from time to time. He told me, looking me straight in the eyes, Your struggles are quite– what was the word?– compelling?  

There's something about knowing that the struggles have been aired, that anyone can read them, that someone may feel them along with me or that, even if they're completely foreign to the reader who's never felt anything like them, they've been written and they've been read. 

And they're out there for anyone to see. 

Someone could disagree with what I think are spiritual break-throughs and call me out as a heretic. I don't know who would be so bold in my group of sweet-natured friends. But someone could. 

Or someone could say, Wow, how did you put to words exactly how I feel? Like I want to say to JM and to Sara Groves and to random bloggers and singers out there who've done that for me. 

Someone, a favorite author of mine, could make a comment on a post and start a chain of events that would lead to Jason and me meeting new friends in Nashville and having a new favorite blog to read and maybe even more in the future... Actually, that already happened, and the story isn't finished yet...

Maybe even someone, not John Mayer himself perhaps, but maybe someone close to him in charge of his PR doing Google searches of his name, or maybe a friend, will discover this blog and say, "John, we've found someone you need as a friend, someone who gets you."

Which reminds me– I should write about Dolly Parton more so that could happen with her too. 

Alright, now I've gone and gotten weird.

And I've pretty much forgotten what I'm even writing about at this point. 

So it's time to stop. I just want to say that there's something different about blogging, knowing that the words are going out to the world. Even if no one reads them. The words are out there, gone, and mine. 

It makes me feel like a writer. A real writer. 

So I need to blog more.

Because I am a writer.