New Paths

 

You'll look up and down streets.  Look 'em over with care.  About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."  With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any you want to go down.  In that case, of course, you'll head straight out of town.

- Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You'll Go!

For the first time in twenty six years, I am not prepping for a new school year.  My former colleagues are.  My youngest sister is.  But... not me.  I resigned from teaching last year.  It wasn't an easy choice, but I've come to terms with it as best I can.  

I took some time to rest and heal... it's not easy to just leave a job, particularly one that consumes so much of your time and spirit the way teaching does.  When I'd found some inner peace and balance, it was time to think about next steps.  Over the summer, I decided to seek employment in a new district.  But no district so far has wanted a teacher with twenty six year of experience... new college grads are so much less expensive, it seems.

Now I'm not so sure what road I want to go down.  Like the character in Oh, The Places You'll Go!, I can see plenty of streets that make me say, "I don't choose to go there."  Retail?  Not a chance.  Temp work in an office?  No, thank you.  Substitute teaching pays less than minimum wage, when you break it down, and even long term subbing, a more stable income, is not really an option I want to pursue.  The remaining choice, it seems, is to head "straight out of town."  

I don't feel that this means physically relocating... that wouldn't be right for either me or my family.  It's more metaphor.  I need to break out of what I've BEEN doing and seek a path I haven't tried before.

But what that is, at the moment, I just don't know.

Out of the Cold

I'm a firm believer in the power of a kind word.  Words, after all, are in my bloodstream, in my soul.  It's how I hope, one day, to make a living.  Still, this classic Peanuts strip kind of hits me where I live.  I can definitely relate to Snoopy, fellow writer that he is.

Shivering in the cold, Snoopy needs something... warmth, shelter.  One could, of course, wonder why he's sitting out there in the snow to begin with - he has a dog house - but for whatever reason, he is not availing himself of it.  Schroeder and Charlie Brown, seeing this, feel moved to offer comfort and warmth of a spiritual nature.  In their warm clothing, hats and mittens and jackets insulating them from the bite of the wind and snow, they speak their hearts - then go, leaving Snoopy to, essentially, wonder, "WTF?"

Snoopy doesn't need to be told, "Be of good cheer."  He needs a JACKET.  He needs to be brought inside.  He needs to find physical warmth, not spiritual consolation.  It would be easy to point fingers at the humans in the equation and say, "You should be taking care of him!  You see he's cold - do something, don't just SAY something!"

But that's not the way this works, this being out in the cold.

Really, what Snoopy needs is to get his furry butt off the ground and into some place more congenial for sitting.  As do we all.

It's easy and tempting to daydream about being published.  To envision the agent or the editor who will sweep in, like some knight out of a fairy tale, and scoop up our words, bestowing the boon of publication on us.  We may imagine ourselves as that fairy tale protagonist, a Goose Girl or Cinderella, a Little Match Girl, toiling away at work we'd rather not be doing - teaching, office managing, waiting tables - and waiting for someone to see past the dusty reality to find our true writer selves within.  We, like Snoopy, are sitting out in the cold, gazing wistfully at the published authors and rows of chosen manuscripts transformed into books, waiting for someone to invite us in to the warmth and shelter of our dreams.

But that's not the way this works.

Like Snoopy, we need to get off our furry butts and get moving, if writing is our heart's work.  We know all too well that it's not just a matter of writing and waiting.  There is work there, market research and searching and questing for the editor or agent who has space in their roster for us.  It may be more work than we feel we can handle  -most of us are, after all, already working one or more full time jobs to support our lives and families- but what's the alternative?  To sit, like Snoopy, out in the cold?

To wait for someone to come and tell us, "Be of good cheer" or "You're an awesome writer - just keep at it"?

No.  If we're going to get published, we have to do the hard work of it ourselves.  We need to get ourselves into that warm, sheltered place - even if we need to build it ourselves.  But don't fret too much.  Once we're moving, working, writing our hearts out, there will be people who see that and offer their words of support and encouragement.  And those words will actually mean something, paired with our own efforts.

Be of good cheer.  It's hard, but we can do it.  

Be of good cheer.





Stress, Stress, Stress...

I've been stressed at work lately... so stressed that it's awfully hard to detach from the work and live outside in the world.  And stress, as so many of us knows, has no regard for boundaries to begin with.  I truly envy those people who are able to find solace in a hobby or passion that shuts out the stress; it isn't that way for me.  The more I try to find relief, the more persistent the stress seems to become.

I force myself to make time for things that the gurus and TV doctors and real world doctors swear will help.  The trouble is, I really don't want to do any of them.  I joined a gym and exercise, which I hate doing.  I get regular mechanical chair massages at the same gym, my reward for going through the motions and making my body move.  I sketch or color, sometimes, though I've discovered that those "relaxing" coloring pattern books actually stress me out to no end; I fret over staying inside all the lines and getting every detailed hole filled in, and my fingers wind up cramped and my shoulders wind into knots. I go to bed earlier... and earlier... to the point that my ten year old son now to bed after me most nights.  But getting enough sleep is supposed to help, yes?  I pet my cats, which is supposed to lower my blood pressure, but that just reminds me that I don't, sadly, take my dogs out as much as they'd like - which is to say at all, cold-averse weather wimp that I am.

And I try to make time to write.  Ah, time to write.  THAT should be a stress reliever.  That, at least, is one thing I've always been good at - escaping into my own dream worlds, visiting with my imaginary people.

But not now.  Now, the words desert me when it's Time to Write, leaving me staring at the page or screen with a direct line to Writer's Block Superstore on speed dial.  Guilt comes calling - I should be writing; I made this time for writing, and I should be using it - then anxiety - why can't I write?  Will I ever be able to write the way I used to?  To find relief in writing?  WHY CAN'T I WRITE?  Finally shame joins the party, sadistically gleeful - I'm just not disciplined enough to write through this, and other writers are, and that's why THEY get published and I don't.  

It's enough to make a girl wish she didn't have time to write to begin with.

Strange Way to Make a Living...

Writing is a strange way to make a living, and I had sold many books by the time I was forty but was not making enough money to live on.  I worked construction, ran heavy equipment, tracked satellites, taught - did many things to support life - and by the time I was forty I was working very hard and had become almost completely broke, living with my wife and son in a small cabin in northern Minnesota with no plumbing, no electricity, and no real prospects.      
                                                                            - Gary Paulsen, Woodsong

I read that quotation aloud to my sixth grade students the other day, when one of them asked me if I would quit teaching once I got rich and famous as a writer, and I laughed.  They were astounded that Gary Paulsen - himself probably one of the most famous writers they know at their young age - would write such a thing.  They seemed equally perplexed that a teacher who is a published writer had such a pessimistic view of her chances of becoming wealthy doing what she loves.  Many of my students come from families who pull, if not six figure incomes, at least in the high fives.  They cannot conceive - though this is partially an aspect of simply being twelve - of not actually achieving one's dream career, however lofty it is.  They've been raised to believe that as long as they dream it, they can do it.

I wish I still held that lie as convicted truth.

I am a writer who teaches.  I love being with my students, but as each successive year wears on, I hate with greater passion what teaching has become.  I don't like to talk about it.  I don't have the statistics readily available in my head, can't counter the arguments of the other side, don't really have a better solution.  But where I once felt that teaching was my Calling, one that could live happily beside my heart's dream of writing, I now see it as the lesser of evils.  I can teach, or I can work at Wal Mart or some dead-spirit business office job, or I can force my family to do without health insurance and the income my teaching provides.  I can't support my family on my writing.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever.

Writing IS a strange way to make a living.  You either carve time out for it, or you feel yourself begin to wither a bit inside.  You know that you MUST do other things, as Gary Paulsen writes, "to support life" - but you know, unless you're a rare creature indeed, that these "other things" are not what you REALLY want to do, and every moment you're attending to the needs of what brings in the money is one less minute that you're writing.

Then, too, is the issue that writing is not something that one can schedule.  If you're in a creative mood and in the middle of something else, you either drop that "something else" and scribble like mad for a bit - or you lose that spark, which will never again burn as brightly or as clearly as when the Idea first struck you.  I've taken to spending a good chunk of my teaching "downtime" - meaning, my lunch - writing.  I no longer visit with my peers, and sometimes, when they come visit me, I find myself vaguely irritated - something I instantly quash, as having peers who care and want to spend time with me is as necessary as writing is to keeping my sanity.  But I need that time to write, because otherwise, I'm wandering through the day half a person, my creative spark snuffed.

I hate that I can't make a living by writing.  I dream, even now, of being "discovered" - some editor of a publishing house, some agent, maybe just some writer at a comics publisher, will see a fragment of my work and will Know.  It's replaced my dream of being carried off by a white knight or a black-clad ninja, romantically whisked away from the mundane and onorous into a world of magic and Happily Ever Afters.  But it's not going to happen... not without a ton of work on my part.  Luckily for me, it's work I'm happy to do.

And while I work at being a writer... I really am grateful that I have paying work to support myself and my family.  I may hate teaching as a profession most days... but I truly enjoy being a teacher.  A teacher who writes... and a writer who teaches.