I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the Secret lately about the things I really want: my clear skin, my perfect mate, my perfect weight. I just keep feeling so tired. That’s the only word for it. When I think of what I truly desire, everything just gets fuzzy in my head. And it takes focus to really visualize and feel the feelings of having it now.
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Now I feel like I’m in this narrow, dark tunnel and every day that’s coming is precisely like the one that came before. I can’t picture so easily meeting the One without feeling those old feelings of pressure and what will we say and will I respond correctly so he doesn’t walk out of my life because he doesn’t think I’m interested. I try to remind myself that if it’s the One, it will feel natural and all those concerns will be moot, but then the fuzziness comes back at that moment. I feel like the same old Nicole, as if I’ve lost all the changes I earned so well. And that spirals into feelings anxious over those feelings, and the tiredness makes it impossible to counteract them with strong good feelings. I need help, but will it come? Am I holding a match to the manuscript of my future over which I’ve labored so long? Oh, please, don’t let it all go to waste simply because I am tired. Even young men grow weary and cannot go on. Even young women lose their strength. And what is to happen to them when they do?
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It just feels like there is nothing new on the horizon and everything I’ve created in my head is just a mirage, an effect of the heat that charged my brain for a while, a fever dream. I just can’t seem to open my eyes, or close them, rather, and see the possibilities.
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My father brought up my soon-to-expire teaching license, of all times right before I was to embark on my Thanksgiving Day cook-fest, which I had anticipated for 11 months. See the balloon? Now see the pin. Voila! Instant letdown. I promised to check into it when school started up again and said no more about it, but inside my brain was roiling, trying to see my way through this disturbing new thought forced into my head. It suddenly made me feel so foolish and naïve to think I could manifest a husband who would marry me by autumn of next year and be well-off enough and secure enough to support me as soon as we marry, so that this year would be the last year I would EVER have to enter Newsome Park’s doors, or those of any school. Listening to my dad talk about “just being smart” and “the job market now” and “people are losing their jobs all over the place” made me feel like not only would I have to finish out the year at Newsome Park but would have to bleed another year out of me. How trapped and disheartened that made me feel. I had sworn I wouldn’t invest one iota of my energy into a future in education, even a fall-back future.
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And today I went back to work, positive, managing even up until the parking lot and walk into school to live in the present, wasting no energy on dread. And the day went fine, I suppose, but I still ended the day bowed down. I investigated the relicensure scenario and I can take creative writing courses, which would help my writing and be paid for by NNPS. But all day I just couldn’t stop thinking, “I hate this fucking job,” over and over. Not even angrily. Just a fact that won’t be denied.
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99.5% of the time, I’m reconciled to the fact that I am here the rest of this year. But there are those 0.5% days when I allow myself to become aware of how I live day to day, borrowing neither trouble nor time from tomorrow or next week or next month. And I think, “How long can I go on, living day to day? How can I do that for another seven months?” And when I confided in Dad tonight as I cooked, his responses were, in this order, “A lot of people don’t even have jobs right now” and “You’ll find the strength” as he ate his huge helping of Thanksgiving leftovers. And I very nearly cried right there over the pasta. Because I didn’t want to have to find the strength, not for another two years. I can’t even fathom another two years when I don’t even allow myself to think of next month.
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When I confided to Mom my feelings, she actually listened to my hate for my job. She heard me when I said I don’t want to work with children at all, in any capacity, ever. She listened when I said that if I didn’t get out soon, I worried what it would do to my desire for my own children. Her ears were open when I said I didn’t want to hear another child say, “Ms. Parks.” I loathe this job. And even if I had to stay in education, God almighty forbid it, it would have to be out of the classroom and far away from children. And I said how faraway all my dreams seemed, like every day is just like the one before, and that it was like a wake-up call when that concern over relicensure came up: How could I actually get what I want? How could I marry my perfect mate by the time my paycheck runs out and actually get to quit this utterly despised profession? How silly and naïve was I to lose myself in such castles in the air.
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And Mom replied quite firmly I must not allow myself to be dragged off-course. That she and Dad were just being parents and thinking safe and sensible, but if that truly conflicts with what I want, then to focus instead on what I want, since no one knows my desires like me. She said if I truly hated teaching so passionately, then I shouldn’t bother renewing my license, even though Dad would disagree.
I objected that it wasn’t that I thought they were trying to drag me off-course, but rather than I was disheartened by the very real possibility that their suggestions is the universe showing me I need to prepare for the unexpected, and that it was tough not knowing if this is the case or not. Mom said it’s not my job to know how or why, just to stay focused on what I want. I conceded that it had occurred to me that maybe the whole conversation came up because this is a way to hone my craft with creative writing classes, which I wouldn’t do on my own coin but which would be paid for by the school district. That maybe relicensure was merely the vehicle. And how delightfully, wickedly ironic that my loathed reality should pay for my way out of it.
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Ever since I started writing a reinvention of the Rumplestiltskin fairy tale, I have wondered if there is a job out there I would want. If maybe I can write or get published by autumn so I can still quit teaching. I’ve considered that if it hadn’t been for going back this fall, I wouldn’t have rediscovered fairy tales for the sake of my poor, literature-deprived students, and I would never have gotten this idea for a book. And I’ve also considered that if this year hadn’t been so horrible from the start and if it hadn’t have driven the hatred for my profession so deep in me, I wouldn’t have such a motivation to write even when I don’t feel like it. If writing got me out of teaching, I have endless motivation to keep at it – anything to stay away from the pit of education.
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I don’t know. I did feel better after talking to Mom, although I still feel so worrisomely fuzzy with my focus on my future. I’m going over there tomorrow to hammer out some classes to take next spring.
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And somehow I will make it through the next seven months, though God please not another ten after that. After my shower tonight, I was gripped suddenly and unexpectedly with a shaking emotion as I felt what I would feel if I was told I didn’t have to go back tomorrow, or the next day, next week, or ever. I could feel the tears pushing at my throat, and I realized that if I heard the key turn in the lock of my prison door to let me out, I would not laugh or jump or squeal or dance. I would simply weep. I would weep for the freedom I had dreamed of so often and for so long, at the feel of it finally solid and crystalline in my parched hands.
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