The problem is that almost all of it is beautiful: the brightening sky on the seventeen-minute drive between my daughter’s 7 am middle school drop-off and arriving at the college campus to teach writing to 22 joint-enrolled high school girls, who themselves are surely beautiful, if I am daring or unwise enough to look at them. The problem is seeing. Others try to notice beauty more often; I am slammed with the stuff—whatever the molecular composition that occurs in a different sunrise every morning and the backlit eyes of a student waxing on about her love for Manga, which is obviously beautiful to her, even if that isn’t the word she chooses. (Cool, she says, It’s so cool.)
This kind of seeing is too god-like. I’m a mere mortal here, but some fairy, maybe a malevolent one now that I think about it, touched my eyelids as I entered the world, and by 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I am done for. Because beauty is information. I am constantly taking it in. It is ones and zeros with layer upon layer of meaning on a cosmic scale and my brain can only compute so much. It’s worse with people. Give me constellations; give me birds. At least with them, there’s no backtalk. I can look and receive, and look away, and look back, and I’m still okay on a cellular level. But look a fellow human in the eye? Their soul laid bare like that? What else am I going to think about for the next stretch of hours?
I have an explanation: this is why autistics don’t do eye contact. Not because it doesn’t matter to us, but because it matters too much. Give me light, give me flame. Give me green green growing things and the creatures that live among them and the rascally cat on my lap. Give me books and ideas and landscapes and an interior imagination. It will fill me to the brim. But save me from humans. They are too lovely, every one of them. A burden too big to bear.
I’m trying to talk about the limitations inherent in ADHD, in autism, which is not news. The difficulty is that the limitations are not the ones I expect. Teaching. I do it for a year, a semester, then a break. I tell my counselor, I might not go back. It takes too much out of me. And that’s true, but I go back again. I am back this spring semester for English Composition with two very different groups of college people. One of them is easy to keep boundaried—that sea of teenage girls, bussed in from the county high schools so they can get ahead on some college credits before graduation. I provide instruction, give some writing exercises. I take attendance quietly, slowly learning their names. Allow their personalities to meld together down the rows of desks. I am a good enough teacher in this way. They will learn if they show up. They keep showing up. They do the work. I do mine.
It’s the other class. It’s the nontraditional students, every time. The ones who didn’t make the grade for Freshman Comp, the ones who need extra support, the ones whose insights when I read “Fireflies” by Aimee Nezhukamatathil leave the high schoolers in the dust. On the way home, I collect my groceries and fill the gas tank, and I can’t stop teasing through answers to the Why of how these handful of individuals in this earned grades so low they ended up here, having to be taught grammar-school punctuation and basic sentence structure, when clearly their lives have been rich enough to make them able to notice connections between imagery and theme in an essay that is not easy to follow, even though they had to find work-arounds for the words “imagery” and “theme” because they hadn’t been taught them, at least not well or for a long time.
How brilliant they are. How they shine like the sun. How they stick with me even as I arrive home and put food away and heat some lunch, and now, with time to sit over a book or an essay draft, I am so tired. I see how it seems good, the way I see the students. The way I care for them. But I tell you, it is too much, and lord, I do what I can to put boundaries in place. I see how I’m a better teacher when I part ways with my students at the end of fifty minutes, but sometimes I have seen too much in that brief time and my mind my mind my own beautiful mind cannot always let go.
I don’t know what this means for down the road. I won’t make it long in the classroom if I’m not able to tend my poet self. But also, I’m a damn good teacher. And I like teaching. This is ADHD. This is autism. This is a self that undoes the best parts of the self. This is a sorrow and also one of the wonders of God’s own creation. This is two things that can’t be true at the same time being true at the same time. This is me in the wide world.
How did I get here, anyway? How I love not seeking the answer to that question. How I love that there are many ways to answer it:
I told my family We have to decide if we’re going to move house or if we’re going to stay, and they chose moving—but that’s not the Here we’re talking about.
I majored in one thing (English Education) and not another (Social Work, say, or Comparative Literature).
I met a guy and married him. Or, I took a long time to meet someone, and the poet within grew strong in the meantime.
I had children. The children were neurodivergent. They got diagnosed. I understood myself in a new way.
I went for an interview to organize a high school book club and came out with a job offer to teach tenth grade. I tried. I both hated and loved it.
I tried again and fell apart.
Refract. I tried a new way: middle school creative writing, college composition.
I thought, Why am I trying at all? There was no clear answer. I took a break.
I went back. Annie Dillard is right: every year is a god. Every semester its own story.
What am I pretending not to know? That either way, whatever I decide at the end of this or any semester, it’ll be alright. That where I am is always more okay than I think it is. That it’s almost never clear, the way to go. That that’s the wrong kind of seeing, anyway. That I always do a good enough job, or better. That even that doesn’t matter as much as I think it does. That I would never trade my poet self, not for all the peaceful brain space in the world.
Thank you to Sarah Teresa Cook’s January Resiliency Circle, in which I wrote most of this essay. Find her writing and offerings at For the Birds.
I really, really love this--and I totally get it. I can recall the faces still, 20 years later, of my most treasured nontraditional students in English 101 and 200. How I loved them! And woke up in the middle of the night thinking of their stories. If your knack for seeing beauty is a flaw in our too fast, too surface-y world, I don't know, I say let your flaw flag fly. Lucky students, lucky schools to have you in them. Sharing--hope that's okay!
"That I would never trade my poet self, not for all the peaceful brain space in the world."
So much of this essay was so helpful to me. Thank you.