Too Many Notes

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  • Hmm . . .where in the world did I put that net?

    When I was a mere sprout of an adult, I graduated college and had no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t have an internship lined up and had nowhere to go, so I just went home and started looking for jobs. In those pre-internet days, finding a job in your field was not as simple as checking your notifications from LinkedIn. In fact, I barely even remember what it was like. Did I search in the classifieds? Send cold call letters of interest? Dang, we didn’t even have EMAIL! Who even remembers how we used to make connections back then. 

    What I do remember is that terrible feeling of uncertainty with the unknown, which for me always pushes me to take risks just to feel like I’m doing something. At that age, I craved forward motion. Nothing was worse to me than standing still. I landed a small, (very) low-paying career job in my home state, but it didn’t feel right. It wasn’t scratching my itch to make something of myself. I stayed for a while, then just packed up my car, grabbed my orange tabby cat, and moved to Chicago, where a lot of my friends from college had landed. I didn’t have a job, but I knew there would be opportunities there. 

    A few years later, I was visiting my grandparents back in Mississippi. They were from the Greatest Generation and had met during World War II. He navigated bombers, and she worked in a shipyard in Florida that built warships. She told me as we made almond shortbread together that she really admired my courage to just up and move because I wasn’t happy with my circumstances. She said this was not something most people do because they fear the unknown. (Back in her day, I believe they called it having “pluck.”) It was one of those sweet bonding moments when I felt she saw herself in me. I remember telling her that I have always been excited about change. What I fear is stagnation.

    I made a few more moves after that. After working in journalism–mostly newspapers–I became concerned that this career was not compatible with my life goals as I got older. I wanted to be financially stable and hoped to have a family someday. I loved the creativity of the job and the thrill of winning press association awards. I was good at it. However, I saw how hard it was for anyone with kids (especially women) to put in the late hours needed to get a paper out the door. I also saw how strapped the industry was and how it was nearly impossible to take a vacation because there was no one to fill in if you were gone. Even though journalism was exciting and fun, I really couldn’t see a path forward to my personal and financial goals.

    So I jumped. I packed up the cat again (such a good boy!) and headed to grad school. Two years later, I had my masters in curriculum and instruction. 

    I found that being a teacher filled in a lot of holes for me. It’s hard to stagnate when everything starts anew in September. There is never a lack of challenge in the classroom. I also found that I liked being around teenagers and their energy. I also loved the personal connection I was able to build with my students and the deep feeling of satisfaction I got when I saw them improve and grow. I still used my journalism skills: I analyzed and edited every single day. I taught these skills to kids and started up student newspapers and tv shows. Now, it was them winning the awards, which felt just as great as when I won them. Yes, holding an issue of a magazine I helped create when it’s fresh off the press gives a little thrill, but it pales in comparison to watching a human being I’ve personally helped mold walk across a graduation stage. 

    In my (so far) 22 years of teaching, I found something new to be pleased with aside from the thrill of forward motion. I discovered the deep satisfaction of having roots and bonds. I bought a house and made a pact with myself not to change jobs or move for as many years as I could stand it. And guess what: staying put did more to help me reach my goals than chasing them did. I got married. I had a daughter. I settled in for a while. However, change sometimes comes for you whether you want it to or not.

    Enter the economic crash of 2010 and the new push to standardize everything in education. Enter slashed budgets, increased class sizes, and micromanagement. Exit everything I loved about my job. Exit me from public schools. 

    Eleven years had passed before I jumped without a net again. I spent six months working as a long-term substitute while I searched for a job in a smaller, private school. I wanted a place where I could have autonomy again, where I could connect with my students the way I used to, instead of spending hours every week writing ridiculously detailed lesson plans. The next year I started teaching at my current, cozy little school, where there is really no end to how much impact I can have with these kids. I teach some of them four years in a row! I’ve been here 11 years now, and this place feels as comfy to me as my favorite slippers. The only limit to what I can do in the classroom here is my imagination.

    Anyone who has lived through the last two years on Planet Earth knows which major career upheaval came next. My school made it through the pandemic successfully; yet, I feel the creeping fingers of change coming for me again. It’s a constant stirring. This time, I’m not as confident to make that leap; however, the ground is shifting under my feet, so I need to act. Viruses. Political upheaval. Climate change. Inflation. The possibility of war. Amidst all these, I will need to send a kid off to college and plan for retirement. It’s time to kick myself out of my own cozy career nest and make my way up the financial ladder. 

    So here I am again, looking for a new career direction. I miss writing, and I now have 22 years of editing essays and herding cats under my belt. I think I have a boatload of skills to offer any company who will let me get a foot in the door. I’m going big here, searching for my new home in a successful corporation that will have what I need, like a competitive salary and benefits (crazy talk, I know!). There’s a huge shift in the world of work right now. Workers are more empowered and salaries are up. The more people change jobs, the more openings there are, which makes it the perfect time to make that leap. 

    I was once in a salary negotiation with a boss at a time when the company was undergoing some turbulence and turnover. He wanted to keep me on staff to stanch the bleeding. I remember saying to him that change is scary to some but looks to me like an opportunity for growth in a company, to look within and stave off stagnation. I remember the look on his face of tremendous relief that I saw things the way he did. I got the raise. 

    Now, I’m the one who needs to stave off stagnation, and I’m pretty excited about it, honestly. This time, however, I’m not going to jump without a net. I hope my grandmother would still be proud. 

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  • Of Fairness and French Fries

    It’s one of those cliches we all hear when we are kids: “Life’s not fair.” As a child, I fully admit that I did not grasp why adults said this. There were PLENTY of unfair things happening to me that needed to be addressed! Then, as a teacher of teenagers for over 20 years, I have found myself dealing with an entitled kid every now and then. The ones who especially grate on me are the ones who are not happy with a B, and feel I should give them extra work, take the test again, or change my grading methods so they can have an A. In these situations, this kid doesn’t actually think they deserve the B; they don’t actually feel they have more to learn.  They want an A because they identify themselves as an “A student,” and the B makes them feel bad about themselves. Instead of looking within for how they could have done better, they always place the onus of change onto an external factor. In this case, I–the teacher–was that external factor. See, it’s MY fault the kid didn’t get an A. It’s not FAIR that this one situation didn’t go their way. As an adult, I often struggle to explain to these “A student” types that it’s not reasonable to expect life to always go as you expect and that there is really no such thing as “fair.” 

    My child once told me when she was in kindergarten and I was complaining about something, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit, Mommy.” I looked at her and made a Marge Simpson noise in the back of my throat. It’s not the most attractive quality of mine, but I will admit that I was one of those A student kids who got personally offended when things didn’t go my way.  That feeling of entitlement doesn’t just apply to grades. It spreads out over everything in life. When I have worked hard to accomplish something, and I don’t get the result I want, my inner child stomps her foot and balls up her fists in anger: “NOT FAIR!” I could go into a lot of areas of my life where I see this, but today I want to talk specifically about my body and how damned unfair it is that I have the one I have. 

    First of all, I didn’t ASK to be born into this damn thing. How is it that I am still putting up with crap construction that is not even something I designed or chose? Maybe if I had bought it on sale, all these imperfections would be more tolerable. But no; these genes are all sad hand-me-downs, carelessly and RANDOMLY left to me by my parents and ancestors. It’s like when someone dies, leaving a house full of decades of accumulated stuff for their relatives to sort through. So rude. So thoughtless. 

    I hear “positivity people” say all the time that our bodies are gifts from God, that they are blessings: we are lucky to be alive. We should honor our body and thank it for carrying our souls around like a fragile Faberge egg wrapped in cotton fluff. Well, I say that if God loved me he would have given me a butt. I mean did God truly intend for me to sit through hours of teacher staff meetings on little blue hard-plastic disks they consider seats on cafeteria tables with absolutely no cushioning? If God loved me, he would have given me more melanin, so I would not have to waste my time and money on daily applications of sunscreen so I don’t get cancer. If God loved me, my nails would be strong and not peel off every time I open a can of LaCroix. And if God loved me, he certainly wouldn’t have given me stretchy tendons and a spine that is complete trash. I won’t even talk about God’s insult where migraines are concerned. And speaking of butts, did God think it was funny to take what should have been my butt and put on my abdomen?! I see him up there in the clouds just pointing and laughing at me when I’m in the dressing room trying on jeans. I mean, it can’t just be a random act of creation. It seems, somehow, cruelly intentional.

    I mean, I suppose I could be appreciative of my naturally curly hair and my well-formed ankles. I guess it wasn’t bad not having acne growing up. Oh, and making it to age 53 without any cavities wasn’t the worst thing. And I did inherit a sharp sense of humor and the ability to craft words and do deep analysis. I guess maybe my good hand-eye coordination has been of some use. I dunno. 

    Now let’s get to my real beef with God, the real reason I’m talking right now. Where the Creator has stiffed me the worst is in the department of food. I was given a discerning palate and the skills to cook. I live in an era of plenty, where I can get almost any ingredient or sample the cuisines of the entire globe. I have the privilege to afford almost any morsel my heart desires, and I really enjoy eating. It makes me happy.  However, eating those tasty things can pretty much kill me. 

    I was gifted by my ancestors a condition called PCOS, which made me fat as soon as I hit puberty. This is related to being female, which is a WHOLE ‘NOTHER LEVEL of insult from You Know Who. I’ve been on a diet since I was 11 years old.  I’ve had insulin resistance most of my life, which has reached a tipping point where I am on the verge of becoming diabetic. To put it simply, I’ve used up almost all my natural insulin. Diet and exercise are like putting a finger in a dam: It works to slow weight gain but there’s really nothing that can put an end to the problem of my body composition and metabolism. My entire life, I have had one refrain in my head and heart about this condition: “It’s not fair.” 

    Despite knowing in my head that no one really deserves anything they are born with, that kid in me still gets overwhelmed at times with sadness and feelings of injustice when faced with facts: that I have to deny myself things I want and can have just because I was born with this particular body. 

    Two years ago, I was feeling really uncomfortable in my body. Everything hurt and I could barely walk to my car without getting out of breath. I read that this new pandemic, which was still overseas, seemed to be targeting people who were older, especially ones who were diabetic and obese. Something in me clicked, and I finally turned toward the one diet I had always avoided: low carb. There was no reason for avoiding it other than it would be so damn hard to not eat all my favorite things again: popcorn, biscuits, sushi, etc. And you know what? It worked. Over the course of a year, I lost 50 pounds and my overall health improved in more ways to mention. Finally!

    Did I mention earlier that life isn’t fair? Because it isn’t. After a year of steady progress, it all ground to a halt. I stayed on my diet, and I went to the gym. I researched how to break a stall. I experimented and tweaked my eating plan. I started intermittent fasting and joined some reddit groups. I worked HARD, DAMNIT! The other day, I looked at my weight loss chart on my phone, and I saw that I weigh exactly what I did a year ago. All that work. No pounds lost. The only thing I have to show for 12 months of effort was a big fat nothing. 

    Then the truly awful truth hit me. I am going to have to work that hard from now on just to NOT GAIN. Tears came to my eyes as I realized I may never reach my goal, no matter how hard I work. The sadness settled in the following weeks as I nibbled on a french fry here and a pizza crust there. The little entitled girl in me keeps saying, “What difference does it make if you’re just going to be fat forever anyway? It’s not fair that you can’t have donuts with your family on Saturday mornings.”

    This insult was then followed up (naturally) by injury. I got a herniated disc (Thanks again for the garbage skeleton, Ancestors!) and have had limited mobility the last few weeks. ANY weight I put on my shoulder causes pain, whether it be a purse or a backpack. It occurred to me pretty quickly that would count for body weight as well. If I want to not become an invalid, I have got to keep the weight off. So I am back to that old diet motivator: fear. Tried and true. The A student in me is putting the onus of change for my health onto an external factor, just like my students do with me. 

    Wouldn’t it be great if we could travel in time and speak to our future wiser selves? (There’s no reason to speak to your past self. You wouldn’t listen.) Or maybe peek in on those ancestors and see what motivated them to keep going in times when things didn’t seem fair. I’m sure any of my bloodline who lived through America’s founding and wars could give me an earful about what’s fair. I am 100% positive my grandmother Jill would echo kindergarten Chandler about getting what you get and not throwing a fit. She truly loathed entitled people, but she made an exception for her first grandchild. 

    No. It’s not my ancestors’ responsibility to tell me how to live. I know this, of course. And it’s not God’s job to give me everything I want in life. But if I could make one request, ask for one thing of God, it would be this: I would ask for inner peace, contentment. I know life can’t be free from struggle and disappointment because then it would be boring.  However, I sure wish I could handle it better. 

  • Butterfly -> Caterpillar

    I saw a meme the other day that said: “The Empath: I used to think I was introverted because I really liked being alone, but it turns out that I just like being at peace, and I am very extroverted around people who bring me peace.”

    To be honest, I don’t usually resonate with memes. They don’t speak to me and my unique (unusual?)  perspective on the world. Most memes are . . .well . . .  let’s just say it: basic. They are for the average person that doesn’t really know how to put their feelings into words. As any teacher of mine can attest, this has never been my problem.

    This one struck me, however, because it revealed something to me about myself that I had not understood. In my youth, I always considered myself an extrovert. I liked to socialize and I like to talk, share and discuss. I was the type of person to gesture wildly at a nightclub and accidentally hit someone in the face who was trying to scoot by me to get to the bar. 

    When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, I craved more socialization, more friends, more deep conversations with like minds. As my friends and I began seriously pursuing careers, we scattered to the winds and didn’t see each other much. At this point in life, there were only phones and snail-mail. The internet was here, but not many people were on it. Smartphones and texting were right around the corner, but my friends and I couldn’t yet keep up with each other on Instagram and chat on WhatsApp.

    After grad school, I moved to Memphis and taught school in the suburbs. I didn’t know anyone here. Y’all, it is HARD to make friends as an adult in a new city. I tried going out by myself, striking up conversations with people, asking co-workers to hang with me outside of work, inviting people over to my place for dinner. I was a “try hard,” and it was kind of embarrassing.  At some point, I just kind of gave up trying to make friends IRL.

    Then came the internet. I jumped in with both feet. I was what is called an “early adopter.” I reached out and tried making friends in chat rooms. (I type quickly, so having online conversations is easy for me.) I had a blog that chronicled my weight-loss journey that had real followers. Some people I met were awesome. Some were creeps. Very few were open to meeting someone they met on the internet in person. People tend to want to keep their internet friendships ON the internet. 

    Running parallel to this evolution of online communication was the devolution of my personality. I slowly shifted away from being an extrovert to being more of an introvert. I didn’t really talk in staff meetings as much. I stopped trying to socialize with any coworkers. I did get married, but he was even more of an introvert than I am, which meant we spent time together, but not with other couples unless I went to a huge effort to wrangle an invitation to something. 

    Keep in mind that I was working as a high school teacher, so my days were anything but quiet. I was surrounded by noise and fast-paced chaos all day. I TALKED all day. So, when I wasn’t at school, I sought out silence and stillness. 

    Then, I became a mom, and my desire to connect with other moms drove me to try reaching out again, with limited success. I made some mom acquaintances, but not many mom friends. There were people I would see at birthday parties and school events, but they wouldn’t invite us over for a beer or anything. Add to that the new chaos of having a baby, then a toddler, then a teen. Kids all day at work and a kid at home as well. That’s a lot of—to put it simply–stimulus. I started to seek out solitude more and more. I resigned myself to the truth that maybe I am not meant to have real friends, the kind you talk to all the time about your tiny troubles, the kind you go on a joint vacation with.   

    And guess what came next: Trump. And Twitter. Now, even in my bedroom with a calming candle burning, I could be losing my damn mind, adrenaline surging as I stared at the small screen, watching our entire democratic system slip away, one lie at a time. Dear reader, I’m sure you know what came next to push me right over the introversion edge. That’s right, it was COVID. I became so topped up with anxiety that I welcomed the shutdown. I didn’t want to be around any people if I didn’t have to. 

    With all the fear, grief, and loss of the last two years, it has rarely even crossed my mind to make an effort to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone. Zooming for anything but work seemed like a chore. I started looking inward for my entertainment, starting a new fitness journey and joining Reddit and  Instagram communities around health, skincare, and makeup. Simple things. Easy things. Things I can control. 

    When I saw that meme, I realized that I had undergone a reverse metamorphosis. The butterfly had built herself a cocoon and was now a cyber caterpillar, nestled inside her virtual world of interests and relationships. And I did it in the name of self-care. I did it to have a modicum of peace, an escape from my own anxieties. 

    Upon reflection, I realized I also did this as a kid when I was moving around all through elementary school. But at that age, I escaped with books. As a teen and young adult, I felt no need to escape from real life. I was extroverted because I was at peace with the world. I was happy to be moving through life and expected only good things to come.

    I wonder now, as I watch a video of a Ukrainian family lying lifeless in the street, having been struck by a rocket blast as they fled their home, if I will ever feel peace again. Is the world we live in past all peace? As an “empath,” will I ever be free from worrying about my child, my family, my country, or my planet again? Will I ever again be a part of a group of people that allow me enough peace that I will gesture wildly and smack the drink out of someone’s hand? I don’t know that I will. 

    What I do know is that I don’t want to be quiet anymore. I don’t have to be at a cocktail party to express myself, and expressing myself anonymously on social media just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. So welcome to my blog, Too Many Notes. 

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