Obsession

I have found myself getting distracted, pulled away from my effectiveness as a teacher.  

Somewhere between teaching in Baltimore and getting ready to leave to find a teaching job in MN, I have come to care a great deal about what my coworkers and bosses think of me.  For three years I taught untainted.  I just operated on the principle that my energy was best spent trying to make the complicated landscape of an often troubled classroom fit together.  I just tried to paint the picture of a healthy learning environment, shifting landmarks and roads and cliffs, until the entire view made sense and was amazing.  

When work is over and my mind wanders back to it I realize that I'm no longer envisioning lessons, execution, squeezing joy into objectives.  Nope.  I think about stupid stuff that actually riles me up.  Like how I haven't been asked to help out on Saturday tutoring sessions when there's a clear need for extra people.  Who cares?  Why do I care?  It's stupid.  Why the fuck should I care if I get asked to help to do something when I really need that Saturday to myself.  There are other things my mind wanders to, like what does a certain administrator really think of me?

In fact, the only reason that last question has plagued me is because I'm now middle-management at my school.  Albeit, I'm barely middle-management, but I am the team leader for my department.  I run our department meetings, manage our grade submissions, serve as the first person they go to with general issues, and am responsible for recruiting a new set of students inside and outside our building for five different career pathways.  I get to sit in meetings with department heads, and I hear the way they talk about their teachers.  Since I'm not a seasoned professional yet, I can't help but to wonder what has been said about me.  

Mostly, I want to know because if I'm a shitty teacher, I need to know this.  I need to know what to do to be better, meet my kids' needs.  It's not even about shitty.  It's about excellent, one of the best.  That's what I want.  I don't want to be a rock, solid, dependable teacher.  I want to be the kind of teacher that inspires independence and freedom in her students.  I know that's not me yet, and I just want to know how to get there.  

I leech.  Off.  Every.  Single.  Word.  What are these other amazing teachers doing? I listen to this hoping that I will see myself in their descriptions, but I usually don't.  I just see me, my personality, my own drive, my own perplexity over how to make what I teach, an ambiguous curriculum, relevant and interesting to a group of students filled with just enough who don't want to go into journalism or media or graphic design anything to throw me off my game on some days.

This all brings me back to the main point, that these tendencies to indirectly learn from people, are for naught.   I think I need to get back inside my own head, my own classroom. and manage my department in the strictest of senses.  When my mind wanders on to these words, distractions, dramatic musings, I need to stop myself and contemplate some aspect of my teaching instead.  

This energy needs to be harnessed, focused, because this world of drama is exhausting and it leads nowhere.

  

What happens next

For years, I have gone through bouts of panic, fierce and sickening panic about death.  Last night was no different.  Friday and Saturday nights were silly, full of friends, and joyful banter.  In fact, the entire week was extremely enjoyable.  I even fit in some jogging that I've been missing as of lately.  So there was no melancholy state of mind as I went to bed - no possible warning sign, but then as I laid there a string of thoughts exploded creating a very physical and panicky reaction.

And this happens.

I sat there remembering and agonizing over the fact that I will die one day, maybe soon, maybe not.  Probably sooner than I want if I don't shape my physical well-being into something better than it has become in the past three years, mostly the last.  For a moment I felt a sense of relief, like I could add days to my life if I did X, Y, and Z.  The next cogitation that when I do die, it's just all over.  In the ground, the world keeps going, a diminutive part of it mourning for an even tinier amount of time.  I just don't exist.  

Thoughts about what I want my life to be are stronger every day, the fear of what I don't want it to be sometimes more robust, but I'm haunted by the vision that one moment I will be going along in my life and the next moment will suddenly be blank, nonexistent.  

For me, there really just isn't any notion of after life.  There is nothing.  I don't understand how this doesn't haunt more people?  Instead of it motivating me to live life to its fullest, like it used to, it paralyzes me and reinforces nonaction.

It doesn't help that I'm sitting here in Baltimore, counting down the days until I move back to Minnesota.  I don't necessarily know that Minnesota will be this great and right thing, because there is no job there (yet), my own place (yet), but there is a community of people that I assume will make existence richer.  What I don't get is how did I get so far from the words I once wrote a professor in undergrad that proudly stated: the best thing man can do is learn how to be alone and not lonely?  There is no guarantee that the community I think is in Minnesota will come into fruition with my life.  

 

If it does, than will I only be biding my time, letting my deeper, darker fears go unnoticed because I'm allowing myself to fill my mind with different thoughts instead of working this all out?  Is that just what life is, distraction?  Being more alone here this year has opened the door to lots of thoughts that I didn't have time to think about.  In one sense, I'm happy for that discomfort.  The parts of life that I do find joyful feel like a cover-up, because I'm acutely aware of the end.

I want to find some kind of genuine relief for this fear, to be content with the obvious.  But I don't want to find God.