Who is left for me to be?

 I am sitting at a teacher's desk in a classroom that isn't mine. This isn't where I thought I'd be by now. This isn't what I thought my life would be. When I started substituting again, I thought it was temporary. A way to get my foot back in the door. A way to do the work, to be in the building, without all the weight that comes with being the teacher in charge, but to be here with kids and to be seen doing what I do best. 

I though that doing this would eventually lead back to me being a teacher. I thought I always was a teacher. 

I am sitting at a desk in a tech ed room, in a district where I've subbed for 7 years, where kids in grades 7-12 know my name. In a district where I've 3 times interviewed for a permanent contract teaching job and all three times been dismissed out of hand without even getting a second interview. It hurts. All the time. But it isn't the one that hurts the most.

Two days ago, I went back to the school where I spent 2 of the past 5 years as a long term sub, as the English teacher of record to 100 kids a year. I went back for the first time since I interviewed there for a permanent job that I thought was maybe mine for the taking. It was the first time back in a school that I thought would maybe be my forever school.

I sat at a teacher desk there, at the desk I sat at for a full year two years ago, and all day it was all I could do not to cry.

THAT interview? Was a room full of people I already knew. Three teachers I'd worked with, one had been my mentor teacher. A principal I'd reported to. They smiled and laughed at my jokes and nodded at my answers. 

And then they didn't pick me.

I thought I was already a teacher there. I thought I already was part of that department. I thought they liked me. I thought I belonged. 

So when I didn't get that job, it felt different. It didn't feel like oh maybe they just didn't give me a chance. Maybe they have me pegged as a sub and are having a hard time seeing me as an English teacher. Maybe they already knew someone and had them in mind for the job. 

It felt like a verdict. . It felt like people I knew, who knew how I teach, deciding that I wasn't good enough. It felt like confirmation that I'm never going to be a teacher again.

Two days ago I was back in that building for the first time since that interview. Other teachers said hi to me in the hallway and I looked at the ground. I had to blink a few times and pretend I had a runny nose when I grabbed a tissue.

I've always thought I would be a teacher again. I've always thought that I was still a teacher, just waiting for the right time to get a job again. Just waiting for the right job. 

I don't think that anymore.

So if I'm not a teacher, who is left for me to be?

One day

 One day you will wake up and you will be in your forties. Your children will be teenagers. Your days of publishing a blog every day during naptime, of playgrounds and storytimes and PBS kids providing your only opportunities to breathe will be a decade in the past.

You will look at your life and you will say okay, world, I'm ready to come back. I'm ready to go back to being the person I was before I was ever just somebody's mom. I'm ready to return in full force to being a person myself because these small humans who I have been consumed by for so long are people themselves. 

And maybe the world will say no. 

Maybe you will find that after 15 years of being a parent, you can't just pick up the life you had before as if nothing has changed. Things have changed. And the things you've done because you thought they made you a good mom, the part time work you've done because you thought you were "keeping your hand in it," the things you created out of nothing and the things you have adapted to meet the needs of other people? These things will all seem small and indistinguishable. 

You will realize that you cannot simply resume a life that you left. You will realize that the person you were lo so many years ago doesn't exist anymore and that you can't bring her back to life just be wanting to.

And you will grieve.

You will be angry and then sad and then angry again, all in the course of an hour. And you will feel like you don't have a right to have any of these feelings because of course you chose this life, you opted out instead of leaning in, you wanted to be with your babies and you were, and that should be enough.

It won't be enough. 

And you will want to write about it. You will want to scream from the rooftops about how life isn't fair and also you will wonder if you did the whole thing wrong in the first place, and fair doesn't come into the matter. You will want to process on paper the way you did when your kids were watching Curious George just so you could have a minute with your thoughts, only now your kids are at rehearsal or at work and your thoughts are too much to be alone with sometimes. 

You will think that you are too small, too insignificant, to have anything to say anymore. You will not want to put yourself out there because you've been rejected so many times, and so your writing, your words, your feelings, they'll fester.

You'll think you're not enough. 

You'll think this world, this life, is not enough.

Maybe it won't be.

And one day you'll pick up a pen and you'll write "I have nothing to say I have nothing to say I have nothing to say" in your journal for three straight pages. And then the next day you'll do it again while you wait for your no longer a baby girl to finish band practice.

And then one day you'll have something to say. And it will feel small and insignificant and you'll be afraid of being rejected. And you'll say it anyway.

And then maybe one day you'll realize that if you can't step back into that life you had in your twenties (TWENTIES) then maybe you'll just have to find a new one.

Invisible

 Last week, I went on an overnight trip with my daughter and 14 other teens from her school. They were participating in a high level academic competition, and I knew all of them, from 6th through 12th grade, at least a little bit from subbing. Another parent chaperone and I slept in the dorm, walked them to meals, recorded their performances. coordinated with their teacher coach and their parents at home. 

I am 45 years old. A dorm bed and shower are not my first choice. 

But these kids were delightful, and they did really well at their competition, and I was - AM - so proud of all of them.

So when we got back, and the school posted pictures of them, I was happy. I AM happy.

But.

I looked at those pictures and all I could think was that the other parent chaperone and I weren't in them. I hadn't asked to be, I hadn't thought I should be at the time. But here, now, looking back, I was looking at a picture of these kids and suddenly felt like I was never part of their experience at all.

I felt invisible.

I'm tired of being invisible. 

As a mom, as a substitute teacher, as a theater booster and band patron, I show up and I do the work and at the end of the day I disappear. That's the point, I guess. The point is that it isn't about me.

But can't something be about me?

I have been known to disappear  from group chats, from social  media, from my blog (ahem, ahem) and wait for someone to notice I'm gone. I know that's stupid. I know it's crappy and immature and that really everyone else is too busy and too caught up in their own complicated lives to spend time looking for me if I'm hiding.

But sometimes I just wish that someone missed me when I was gone. 

I wish that I was visible enough for someone to notice when I wasn't there.

Is that terrible? I hope not. 

Don't say anything

 I had an interview last week. "Don't say anything" I said to my husband and children as I told them quietly about it. They were excited and I bit my tongue. That was what I didn't want.

I had an interview and I thought I did fine. I was completely myself, I told the truth. I thought I was a good teacher. I thought I was a likeable person. I left the interview thinking, I know how this is going to go and I don't want to hope.

I didn't hope. I didn't count on it. I tried not to tell too many people I'd even been to it. 

And today I realized that they've been doing second round interviews this week and I definitely didn't get one.

I tried to not get excited, to not hope, to not put my faith in something that might not happen and you know what? It still hurt when it didn't happen. 

This sucks.

I want to stop trying, to stop putting myself out there, to give up. To stop believing that anything in my life will ever be different. I'll just do this forever or I'll go get a job at a Target. I don't even know what the point is anymore.

It suck and it hurts and I have to wipe my eyes and go about my day and just be good at what I'm doing now and who I am. 

Don't say anything. I know. I know. 

For the Fire

 My best most creative times came when I committed to writing every day. My darkest times happened when I committed to writing every day and didn't follow through. The shame, the fear of disappointing people, the labeling myself as a failure. They hit hard. 

The truth is I don't think that now I'm writing for the same reasons as I did when I was 29. I don't have a community that I'm writing for, I'm not up for any prizes. There aren't bloghops or comment trains. There's just me and the blank page and the sense of putting something out into the world and then no longer having any control over what happens to it. 

Natalie Goldberg talked about doing spontaneous writing at a church fair, about giving away pages she had written and never seeing them again. Keats allegedly wrote a sonnet every day and threw it in the fire.

I want to learn to let go. I want to learn to be less precious about my writing so that I can write. The good thing about not having any readers is that there's no one to disappoint. So hello world, I'm here to say that for the good of the craft, I'm going to write a blog post every day for the fire. That is, to throw into the fire. Except you're the fire. 

Right?

Right.

The Good

 I'm reading Just One Thing by Rick Hanson, in which he suggests practices to do regularly to develop what he calls a "Buddha Brain." One of them is noticing the good. So here is some good from my day. 

1. The girls who came to my substitute study hall made me laugh for 20 minutes and genuinely seemed to enjoy my company. 
2. My daughter's friend, who is a CODA, taught me the ASL sign for water today.
3. A girl in the class I'm subbing for right now just found her friend's toiletry bag in the bathroom and returned it to her. 
4. This is the third day in a row that I've written, even though I didn't always feel like it. 
   
5. I cross linked a bunch of products in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, which feels like a positive and complete accomplishment. 
6. My friend's child just made a capella choir for next year.
7. My youngest is going to the state competition for Future Problem Solving in a week.
8. A former colleague wrote on my Facebook wall that she was watching Matilda and told her spouse "That's all well and good but once upon a time I taught with the real life Miss Honey."

That's all I've got for now but I'll keep looking. What good have you noticed lately?

Soft

 Today is a quieter day. I am here at work, in a classroom full of high schoolers taking public speaking who are, as a matter of fact, silent. 

There is space for my brain to work and today it does not seem quite so much like it's out to get me. I've read an entire book of Billy Collins poems and the fact that beauty and poetry exist in the world is maybe in and of itself enough. 

I wish I had, as Virginia Woolf once so eloquently said, a room of y own. Sitting in other people's classrooms, watching other people's students, as I have done for 7 years now lends itself to a certain public kind of thinking. I would like to make something. I would like to be someone who creates, who inspires. My brain is soft and polite and it's hard for me to say no and so I am instead someone who can be trusted to say yes when the freshman asks to go to the vending machine. 

It's not the kind of beloved I wanted to be. 

But today in this space with these children, my brain feels soft around the edges and that is not the worst thing. There is beauty in my head and there is beauty around me and right now no one is trying to take it away. I know that later there will be dishes and there will be laundry, I know that there are bills to pay, I know I know I know. 

But right now there is quiet and there is recognition and there is no one asking me to be anyone in particular and maybe just maybe this softness is a thing I could learn to love again.

Because a vision softly creeping

Friends. It is 2026. I am 44 years old. 

It has been a long time. 

Five minutes ago I was lying on my bed, with my thirteen (THIRTEEN) year old baby girl nuzzling against my shoulder watching game shows on my bedroom TV because I forgot to sign into an streaming services. I had a notebook open next to me as well as a book of writing exercises that I kept opening and closing. Nothing felt right. Nothing spoke to me or inspired me. 

I was certain that I was out of words. That there was nothing left in me that had any meaning. 

My girls are big now, teens, with their own lives and worlds. My little one told her therapist the other day "Sometimes I like my friends more than i like my parents. Sorry mom." And I said, no, baby, you're thirteen. You're supposed to. That's the way it's supposed to be. 

I'm 44. I don't know how that's supposed to be. 

I'm a teacher, and I've always been a teacher, through all those years when I was "just a mom." But here I am now with two girls who don't need me all the time, who are busy with their own worlds, and I always thought that when I was ready I would step back into the classroom without skipping a beat. 

It's been years that I've been trying. 

I apply for contract jobs and they hire 22 year olds. 

I'm feeling like the world doesn't have much use left for me. 

So I'm lying on my bed, snuggling my teenage baby girl, and searching my library webpage for books on writer's block, for books on how to get unstuck, for books on how to find my words when I don't believe I have any anymore.

The only way out is through, friends. The only way to write is to write. 

I'd forgotten. 

So hello, old friends. I missed you. I know I'm probably speaking and writing into a void right now, I know there's probably no one listening anymore, but I'm not certain that that matters. 

I don't know where next is. I don't know who there is left for me to be. But I think this is the only place I'll start to find it. 

Maslow before Bloom

One  of my favorite things to say when I'm teaching is "You have to do the Maslow stuff before you do the Bloom's stuff."

In case you didn't study psychology or ed psych, Maslow was a researcher who created a pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. Essentially, you have to meet your needs for survival, safety, and belonging before you can meet your needs for growth and self actualization. 

Bloom was an educational theorist, who developed a taxonomy of educational objectives. Knowledge came before understanding  came before synthesis and evaluation.

So when I say you have to do the Maslow stuff before you do the Bloom's stuff, I'm saying that you have to make sure kids' basic needs - physical, emotional, and psychological - are being met before you  can expect them to meet higher order learning objectives. 

I kind of forgot that the same thing applies to me. 

I have been trying to figure out what to do with my life. I have been DESPAIRING of the fact that I can't find higher meaning and purpose in my life. And every day I've been writing the worst crap in the world in my journal about how I feel afraid and angry and alone, repeat, repeat, repeat.

I'm never going to reach self actualization without dealing with that stuff first

I don't know what that means yet, but I know that keeping it in mind and allowing and accepting it is the only place to begin.

I have to meet my Maslow needs first. And that's okay.

Despair

 Last week, I was sitting in the teacher's lounge at a middle school where I was substituting. The teachers sitting around me started talking about how the teachers at the high school were going to turn over in the next one to three years because so many teachers were going to retire. My ears perked up because I am still hoping to get a teaching job. Then I started to realize that the people they were talking about were all only about five years older than I am. 

I wonder if it's time to give up. 

I am 44 years old. I'm too old to start over. I am too old to try to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. 

Do I regret the years I spent as a full time mom? ... Nooo? I mean, I don't think so. 

Do I resent the fact that spending those years with my kids somehow took me off the track to ever do anything else with my life ever again? Yeeeees. 

How many times when my kids were little did I tell myself that I couldn't do everything at the same time but life is long? How many times did I convince myself that it was all going to be okay, that I was going to have time to find myself again, that when my kids weren't little anymore there would be plenty of time to do all the other things I wanted to do again? 

And now I'm 44 and it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel like there's any time left to do things. I know there's a lot of life left, but it really doesn't feel like life thinks there's enough of me left. 

There's no happy ending today. There's no moral. There's no twist. Today there's just despair. 

Resilience

 When I was in my 20s, I used to say that I was very lucky. I was very lucky that every time I had really needed a job, one had appeared. 

I moved to Indiana after my first full year of professional teaching, and I signed up to sub in 3 different districts. By October, after subbing a few times at the city schools and exactly one time at the county high school, I was offered a long term sub job by the county that I hadn't even applied for. When it ended, I went back to subbing. Again, I subbed a few times at the city schools and exactly one time at the county middle school, and I got a call that very afternoon asking me if I would take another long term job. That job turned into a second job that took me through the end of the year. 

The next year, we moved to Texas, with very little warning. I sent letters to all the public and private schools in town and before the summer had ended or I had even set foot in the state of Texas, the Catholic school principal called me and said I was just what he needed. I worked there for three years. 

When my husband graduated and we moved to Pennsylvania, I worked as an SAT teacher and master tutor, teaching several classes a week, while I waited for my PA certification to go through. As soon as it did, I signed up to sub in several districts. Before I had even subbed a day, I got called for a long term job that lasted through the end of the year. 

This summer I had three interviews. One in my home district, where I have subbed for 6 years. One for the middle school in the district where I have long term subbed at the high school for the last two years. And one at an underprivileged school that struggles to keep certified teachers. No one hired me. 

I feel broken. I know I need to bounce, to keep applying, to take the rejection with a grain of salt. But in the back of my head, in the bottom of my soul I just keep asking, why does no one want me anymore?

The last job I interviewed for, the one which on the surface seemed like the least strong match, was the one that probably stung the most. When I saw the job posted a week before school started, when I got the invitation to interview, I thought, this is it. This is the job that's going to come through, that's going to change my life, that's going to be there right when I need it like all those other jobs have been. I told people about it. I almost bought books for the classroom library before even going to the interview.

When they picked another candidate, I was disappointed. Really though, I was deeply, deeply ashamed. Ashamed for thinking that I could get it. Ashamed for telling people about the interview and then having to tell them I didn't get it. Ashamed for believing that anyone would want me. 

The very first teaching job I ever applied for, the one that I don't talk about, was at the school where I student taught, subbing for my cooperating teacher. It seemed like a sure thing. I would be teaching content I knew to kids I knew and loved. But they gave it to someone else. The superintendent had promised the next job to someone and besides, he said. I looked sloppy. My clothes were wrinkled. My hair was messy. 

I went home and cried.

That winter break, before returning to my last semester of grad school, I sat on my parents' couch and read Writing Down the Bones cover to cover. I wrote for hours. In the evenings I went to the townie bar with friends, one of whom is now my husband, and shared pitchers of beer. I started to feel like a person again. I remembered who I was. 

And at the end of that break, the same school called me for a different long term sub job, which went to the end of the year and which turned into my first full time contract job the next year. 

I checked out Writing Down the Bones from the library a few weeks ago. My notebook is open. I'm afraid of the vulnerability to hope that something will come up , that something will change, but I'm beginning from the only place I know. Hopefully I'll find myself there again. 

Drowning

 I am sitting in a classroom with one student who is quietly working on her AP French work. This isn't my classroom, isn't my student, isn't my chair. I am substituting again, after two years of working long term and teaching again. I am alone with my thoughts because there is really nothing for me to do. 

And I'm drowning.

I have had a chest cold for about a week and I'm not sure at what point I need to go to the doctor, but I took my littlest twice for the same thing last month and they didn't do anything either time, so I'm hesitant. When I take a deep breath in, it catches in my throat for a second. When I exhale hard, it quickly becomes a juicy cough, which at least feels a little bit satisfying. 

Both my kids are in therapy now, one of them with two different therapists, and we go to family therapy every twoish weeks. Both kids are in a play that rehearses every night for the next two weeks, and the little one also just got into another play and the big one is auditioning for one today. Big sister is also in marching band, so I'm ferrying to those practices and going to football games every Friday.

My income as a substitute teacher is half what it was last year on a temporary contract. 

I am drowning.

I applied for at least 10 jobs this summer. I interviewed for three of them. I didn't get any of them. 

There's a second student now, which is nice for the first one at least. And here comes a good cough. There's a squeak at the end of that inhale now. 

Breathing is important, I tell myself. And I've been looking for some breathing room. Some time to read, to write, to think. 

So why am I drowning?

Writing

 I am sitting in a public library 40 minutes from my house while my oldest daughter runs a Dungeons and Dragons for beginners program downstairs. She is really quite amazing at this and runs it at two different libraries now. I'm proud of her. I'm happy for her.

And I'm sitting here for 3 hours waiting for her.

Before I left my house this morning, I packed a bag with my laptop and charger, my journal, a book I was in the middle of. Then I left that bag sitting on my living room floor.

I was going to go for a walk and listen to my audiobook but I lost my earbuds a week ago.

I'm a mess.

So, I logged on to one of the public computers and signed in to this here old blog, and I'm writing. I'm writing. I know how to do this. I remember. 

There's something about writing that brings me back to myself, if only for just a few minutes. 

I still don't have a job for next year. I still haven't figured out how to make my teachers pay teachers store into a real business that replaces even some of my income. I still haven't read the 36 books I was trying to read for summer reading this summer. I still haven't become a steady working freelance writer, had an article published in any famous magazines, been randomly offered a book deal by a benevolent stranger who stumbled upon my blog.

I still don't know what I'm even looking for. 

But always, every time, it starts with this. It starts with writing. It starts with being raw and real and genuine and just putting all the words on the page and trusting that somehow, somewhere, I will find my way home. 

Hello world. Hello words. I'm here. For a few minutes, I'm home. 

Failure

This morning I got the official email from a school district saying "thanks for applying but we've decided to move forward with another candidate." Yesterday I realized that the backup "safety" job I'd applied for, a long term sub position with a district I've worked with for the past two years, had been posted for over a month and I hadnt even gotten an interview.

Last week, one of my Facebook friends had a post about the Atlantic responding to a pitch she'd sent them and another post about having two more articles boosted on the Medium. She joked about her husband telling her "people are supposed to struggle." 

I'm happy for her. I am. ... I am? 

I am. But.

Right now I feel like a big old failure. 

I feel like no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I work, I'm not getting anywhere. 

And also I know that I'm not trying as hard as I could be because deep down inside I still believe that trying and wanting is shameful. 

Deep down inside I'm still the gifted seventeen year old straight A student who sat down on the curb and cried the day she got three thin envelopes in the mail. 

Deep down inside, I just want to feel validated and wanted and loved. Deep down inside, I'm tired of being nobody, I'm tired of not existing and having anything that's mine, that makes me me. Deep down inside I always assumed that after staying home and raising kids for ten years, I could jump right back into being me, right back into things being easy and not having to try too hard.

Deep down inside, I have been ignoring for a long time all the things that I just never did because I was afraid they would be hard.

I don't wanna put myself out there. I don't wanna be vulnerable. I don't wanna get rejected. I don't wanna fail.

But I don't wanna be invisible forever either.

The work

 

“Should I stab my own eye out with a knitting needle instead of writing?” says the 14 year old sitting so close to me on the couch, I am reminded of the time when she lived inside my uterus.

I mean, I understand the question.

She reads this over my shoulder as I type it and murmurs. “Mmm hmm. There’s two. Now we can share” as she hands me my own knitting needle.

She’s writing a novel. She’s 2% into it and so far the characters have laughed 18 times and haven’t made it past breakfast. It’s the end of the world.

As she decides that maybe - MAYBE - someone will come to the door before they even have a chance to START eating breakfast and she’s back off and running, I stare at the google doc on my screen and think about how I too would like to write a novel. Or a memoir. Or a single blog post really. But it’s hard and it’s scary, and the knitting needle is looking surprisingly tempting right now.




All day I’ve felt on edge, tired and wired, certain that I want to be doing SOMETHING but that I have no idea what that is, that I am somehow falling behind, that I will never accomplish anything in my life. And the more I think about that, the more I freeze, the more I sink, the less motivated I feel to even do a single thing.

I want to write a book. I want to write articles and get them published somewhere. I want to find my voice again. I want to create things that people find meaningful. I created this human who has informed me that there’s no doorbell because OBVIOUSLY these are medieval teenage friends having breakfast together, so clearly I can create ANYTHING.

I just have to put the knitting needle down and get back to work.

Well, hello Summer. Hello self - what? Yes, there's yogurt in the fridge. Yes it's. Oh never mind I'll be right there.

 My summer vacation (and the end of my temporary teaching job) started on Friday. Today is Tuesday. 

I laid out a plan for myself in my notebook yesterday. 

1. Start the day writing.

2. End the day reading.

3. Clean something every day.

4. Make something every day.

5. Do something you've been avoiding every day. 

6. Do something fun every day. 

This is the summer that I'm going to find myself, find my voice again, figure out my life purpose, recover from burnout, get enough rest, heal some of my autoimmune diseases, improve my mental health, and remember how to have fun.

In the past two days I've gone to 3 therapy appointments total for my two kids, visited two different public libraries, driven at least one kid to theater rehearsal every day and both to piano lessons once, folded four baskets of laundry, and run the dishwasher at least 527 times. 

I feel like something is going to have to give. I don't want it to be me this time. 

Starting over. Again.

 Today is my first day of summer vacation. Yesterday was my last day of school in a permanent sub position, at a school I've been at for two years that will not have a position available for me next year. Yesterday was also big girl's last day of middle school. Yesterday I got confirmation that I did not get a full time contract teaching job I was hoping to get.

I have a lot of feelings.

I left school yesterday shortly after the kids left. I had comp time to use up and I was finished with my grades and my (her) classroom. I tried to duck out without seeing anyone, but I didn't quite succeed so i got a few hugs and teared up a little. There were a lot of people I didn't see though. People who have kindly accepted me as part of their community, treated me like a real member of their department, made me feel like I really belonged there.

I guess I never really did belong there though. I was always just filling someone else's place.

There's a long term middle school job available in the same district next year, and the department chair is making phone calls for me. There are people hoping for me to get it. But really I have no idea if I'll get it because for the first time in my life, at 44, I'm getting rejected a lot.

And I hope I get it because it's a good district, because it's a job, but also I'm dreading getting it. I'm dreading going into a new building with people I don't know, with kids I don't know, with a curriculum I don't know, and starting over. It sucks. I'm much too old to still be doing this every year. I'm too old to keep starting over.

I thought when I stayed home with my babies that teaching was  a thing I could always just walk back into when they were old enough. I thought I would still be able to do it, still be able to get hired and be treasured. I'm not.

It's my first day of summer and all I want to do is curl up in a ball and cry for at least two weeks. But I have to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get ready to start over. Again.

My place

I am 44 years old. My baby girl is 14, and her 8th grade recognition ceremony is in an hour. Little sister is 12. It's been a long road. 

When I had babies, I opened a blogpost and started writing because I just didn't know what else to do. I poured out my soul onto the screen. I reached out into the world and the world reached back and for that I will always be grateful.

And then one day I stopped. Blogging wasn't a thing anymore, there wasn't a community, and I didn't think I had anything left to say. Except I did. Of course I knew I did. I just didn't want to say it. 

Almost two years ago, I saw a long term substitute teaching job posted at a place where I worked 14 years ago and almost on a whim I applied. And I got it. And the past two years I've spent in a classroom again with 15 year olds who aren't mine. And it felt like coming home.

But here I am now, finishing another long term sub job, applying to more jobs, and I don't know where I belong. No one wants to hire me for a permanent job. I'm never going to find anything. Why would anyone want to hire a 44 year old mom with a 14 year resume gap? There are 30 year olds with more years of classroom experience than I have. It's frustrating. It's lonely. It's exhausting. I'm tired of getting rejected. I'm tired of trying.

But I keep looking, keep going out there because some day I'm going to find my place.

Who am I

My therapist thinks I should start writing again. She thinks that I know deep down that I'm a talented writer and that I shouldn't pin my opinion of my own writing on accolades and rewards and sponsorships and book deals. She thinks I have something to say that's worth saying, that people will want to hear.

Errm. Hi.

My 13 year old (YES SHE IS) thinks we should all wear pins with our pronouns and with other distinguishing features about us. She thinks this would make life so much easier for all of us. My pin would say:

She/her
CisHet
Ally
Liberal
Mom
Teacher

I'm not sure what else it would say. My therapist asked me today what feelings I had about myself and not about the things that surround me. She asked me what my goals were for myself to make myself happy. Am I supposed to have those?

I feel tired. I feel discouraged. I feel overwhelmed and bored at the same time. I feel like these are a lot of the same things I felt when I had babies even though now I have a tween and a teen. 

Is it me? Is it them? Is it the world?

My therapist seems to think there's still a me in here somewhere, separate from everything I do. A being not a doing. A self. She wants to know who that is.

So do I, friends. So do I.

Self care

 I went for a walk today. 

Every session, my therapist asks me, "Did you get to any self care since I last saw you?"

"Wellll."

Yesterday I went to my endocrinologist. I have Graves Disease, have I mentioned that? It means that I have an autoimmune condition that makes my thyroid VERY CONFUSED and so it spits out too much thyroid hormones all the time unless I take medication. If I'm high, it can make me jittery and anxious and can also give me a lot of extra energy and productivity. And make me lose weight.

"Your thyroid is a little high."

WHAT THE HECK BODY? WHERE HAVE MY BENEFITS BEEN? I've spent the past month barely able to get off the couch.

Thanks for nothing, thyroid.

Anyway.

I went to my endocrinologist yesterday and he said my thyroid was high, and he increased my medication but he also asked my how my stress was.

Hahahahaha.

So today seemed like a good day to Do The Self Care.

I went on my group chat of local mom friends and said "Does anyone want to go for a walk to ignore our meaningless lives for a while. I mean, my life is meaningless. I'm not saying your lives are meaningless. I'm just. I'm gonna go."

And I laced up my shoes and went for a walk with my own self, Glennon in my ears, the (okay I didn't know it would be THIS strong) wind in my hair.

45 minutes later I thought to myself, Self, that was a good walk. I walked a lot of the demons out and I feel better and now I sure am spent.

I was about a mile away from home.

20 minutes after that, I stumbled through my front door, plugged in my now dead phone, and rooted around my room until I finally found a marble notebook because if we're doing this, we're doing it.  Coffee in hand I plopped on the couch, flipped the notebook to the front cover,

And it had biggest girl's name on the front. Son of a.

Back up to my room I practically crawled, dug around some more, and found another notebook. I grabbed it and the pen next to it and sat down on my bed, my hand moving across the page in a was it somehow apparently did still know how to do.

And then I went downstairs to get another pen because the one I'd been trying to use was completely dead .

How's self care going for you, friend?