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!
Thank you for sharing, Rebecca! Glad you understand, too, and not surprised. :) What's hard about it is the way it drains me. The way I can't really be a writer on a teaching day. The way I need a nap afterward before picking my kids up from school. It feels like it takes too much--and yet it also feels like I was made for it.
I'm sorry if I minimized the strain--and drain--of teaching. Why are the most fulfilling things also the most tiring? Anyhoo, I hear your struggle and a lot of love in your post! (I was just thinking to my editor self: ooo, I'd love to see an essay about all this, but that's just one more thing on the to-do!!)
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!
Thank you for sharing, Rebecca! Glad you understand, too, and not surprised. :) What's hard about it is the way it drains me. The way I can't really be a writer on a teaching day. The way I need a nap afterward before picking my kids up from school. It feels like it takes too much--and yet it also feels like I was made for it.
I looove "let your flaw flag fly" :) :)
I'm sorry if I minimized the strain--and drain--of teaching. Why are the most fulfilling things also the most tiring? Anyhoo, I hear your struggle and a lot of love in your post! (I was just thinking to my editor self: ooo, I'd love to see an essay about all this, but that's just one more thing on the to-do!!)
"Not because it doesn’t matter to us, but because it matters too much." Yes.
I know you know, Carri.
Halleluja! Also, there is a wider lens one can utilize to indeed contain all the beauty. It’s nonduality. You’d love it.
Ooh investigating now...
"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.
Oh Megan, I am so glad.