Substitute

 I am sitting in someone else's chair, at someone else's desk, in someone else's classroom. In 4 minutes, her 3rd graders will come back from gym and I will teach them compound sentences with her slides and her lesson plans. 

In front of me on my desk - her desk - is my green travel mug of coffee from this morning. In the bottom of this cup, there are only a few drips of cold, stale coffee I made at home 7 hours ago. Still, in these last 4 minutes of my prep - HER prep - I repeatedly raise this cup to my lips, letting the bitter drops fall into my mouth. 

And in these last few minutes, I scribble in my notebook. I scribble about how my 12 year old daughter is writing 50,000 words this month and I can't. I write about diagramming sentences. And as I grasp at the last few bitter drops of creativity  still in my brain, I realize that none of that can substitute for making something that's mine.

More

 Both of my kids are in school. In school in person. Not here with me. Not doing reflex math in my lap. Away.

I have time to myself. Time to do whatever it is I want to do with my life. I just don't know what the heck that is.

I know it's not laundry. I know it's not decluttering. I know it's not watching Schitts Creek for 6 hours a day.

I don't know what it is that I want.  All I know is that I want more.

Back to school

It has been the case for many years now that back to school brings with it for me a kind of grief.

It seems like it should be too long by now for me to be grieving, too long for me to be sad and to be missing that completely different life I stepped away from 12 years ago when I left the classroom. 12 years ago when, for the first time since I was old enough to remember, I didn't go back to school.

And the grief passes and is replaced by other things, by busyness, by self doubt about the choices I've made, by longing for something that feels far out there, by guilt for thinking of these years with my children as wasted. I had a plan, you see, to get back. To start by subbing and to work my way back to being a full time teacher, to ease into it. And then a year into that plan the world shut down and I got stuck.

And now I'm afraid that I've missed my chance. That it's too late. That there is no way back anymore. That I'm too old to be figuring this out, that I've wasted, lost, too much time.

I'm not the same person I was 12 years ago and it's not the same job it was 12 years ago, and I can't step back into it like nothing happened.  And I don't want to start over and figure out who I am and what I want to be. I don't want to be someone else.

But I don't want to be no one anymore.

I can't today

The news is heavy today. I see it. I hear it. I know.

But I can't today.

I know that there is action to take, good work to do, right words to say, and I see the people I love deep in it.

But I can't today.

I want to be the kind of person who sees a need and leaps into action, who fights the good fight, who makes all the right kinds of trouble at all the right moments. Who goes after the guns, who protects trans kids and reproductive rights, who saves Ukraine and stops climate change. I want to be that kind of person and I love and admire those people and I know I KNOW there are right things to do.

But I can't today.

Today is heavy, and I have a brain and a body that crack when it's heavy, that need quiet to process and feel, that buckle under the pressures of tragedy and conflict and the unbelievable enormity of the world's grief. Tomorrow I will write my congressmen. I will do whatever it is I can think to do, whatever the people who are braver and smarter and stronger than I tell me to do. And you won't necessarily see it on my social media echo chamber. But I will be doing what I can in my own way. Tomorrow.

But I can't today 

Lost

 I am sitting on my bed in the middle of the morning. My kids are at school. My feet are cold. Outside my window, the sky is gray and misty and I have to turn on a few more lights to be able to see in my room.

In my head, it's gray too.

I am feeling lost in my life lately. I am fairly certain that I want to create, that I want to make something that's mine, that's special, that I can put out into the world. I am fairly certain that it's not optional, that not creating anything is eating away at my insides. Festering. 

But I'm still just sitting here, lost.

A few years ago, when both my kids started school, I went into a place when it was time for me to go out into the world. When I was ready to try things. When there was time and space to be not just mom. And I started, tentatively. I substitute taught. I wrote, some. I ran. I tried a variety of things, and I was just starting to maybe find my way.

And then the pandemic hit, and my kids were home with me all the time again, and there was no space in my head or in my life for everything, and I went into stasis. Survival. Get through the day mode. And that was okay.

But now I'm back to this place with the space, with the wide open world in front of me, and I don't know what to do. I'm paralyzed. I'm stuck. I'm hiding in closets or under the covers to keep from being alone and lost in the world. 

I know that I need to do something, make something, but I don't know where to begin. 

Who do I want to be

I sat in the armchair in my therapist's office, my hands in my lap. She read from the open binder in front of her on the table. 

"So. The next target on your map for this brown  is trouble setting up your teachers pay teachers store. Do you want to work through that one today?"

"Ha. Umm..yeah. We can work on that. That's ... Kind of an ongoing thing?"

"Oh? So" she glances down again, "you'd say that's a present target?"

"Yeah. Yeah I'd say."

Chasing gold stars. Beating failure to the punch. I think those are the only two modalities I've ever had. If I'm not going to be immediately successful, if I'm not going to be praised and appreciated and adored, I don't want to do it. If I'm not sure I'm going to be successful, I don't want to try. If I don't try, I don't fail.

Or I fail every time.

I've been trying.

I took classes. I learned power point. I learned Canva. I practiced. I revised. And I'm not succeeding. 

No gold stars.

 And I haven't quit yet.

Except for all the times I've quit.

But I've started again. I've tried. Trying is hard. Trying is scary. 

So now I'm sitting in this arm chair and tears are running down my face. The floodgates have opened and honestly everyone in the room is surprised that this is the thing that did it.

"I just ... Wanted to feel successful. Wanted to be good at something. I think I had unreasonable expectations for what this was going to do for me."

"I'm sure," she said, "that you've been successful at a lot of things if you think about it. I mean, look at your girls! You're raising these wonderful girls."

I pause, longer than I mean to. "But. They aren't me. And the older they get, the more obvious that becomes. They are their own people. Their accomplishments are theirs. And that's good, that's right. But I want something that's mine. And I know I .... Have. I have done things that I'm proud of. But. They're in the past. What now? What do I do now?"

"Well. Why don't we talk about that next time? Why don't you try some things, some hobbies, try to come up with some things you can feel successful at?"

Sure. By next week, why don't I try to come up with some things I can feel successful at. That's not what I've been trying to do for my entire adult life or anything. I'll just ... Get right on that.

So, dear reader, do you know? Who do I want to be when I grow up? 

Sad

 She sat in the chair across from me, looking down at her binder of notes open in her lap. "Can you rate your depression over the past week on a scale from 1-10?"

"3?"

She wrote it down before looking up at me.  "What ... What do you think is keeping your depression going? Because it seems like every week you have some. You're on medication for it, right?"

"...Yeah."

"Then why do you think it's never at a zero?"

I paused for a long time. We'd spent the previous half hour talking about my week, about how it had been hard. About my anxious 11 year old screaming every morning before school. About my perfectionist 9 year old crying for an hour instead of writing one page of a draft. About me trying a project that I thought would make me happy and realizing it wasn't what I hoped it would be. Why wasn't my depression at a zero?

"I think.... I think I'm just at a stage in my life that is full of a lot of drudgery and a lot of emotional labor, and not a lot of intellectual or creative stimulation. And I think that's really hard. And sometimes I get big ideas, like my blog or my teachers pay teachers stuff, that I think are going to just FIX IT. And then they don't. And it's disappointing. And if I wait until I WANT to do things like write, I'll be waiting forever. So I end up not doing the things that would make me happier."

"Oh. Okay." She flipped back through the binder. "You said before it's the weather. Do you think the weather contributes?"

Pause. "Yeah. Definitely the weather."

And. It was true. It was all true. It's the weather. It's the laundry. It's boredom. It's disappointment. It's emotional exhaustion from carrying the feelings of small people. It IS. 

BUT.

What I really wanted to say was, A zero?? What's a zero? What would it feel like to be at a zero on the depression scale. Would I even want that? Do I know anyone at a zero? Would I want to??

This morning, after fighting with my kids to get up and get dressed and get in the car, after sitting in two drop off lines, I switched on the We Can Do Hard things podcast. As one does.

And the episode was "Susan Cain on sadness as a superpower."

And I exhaled from somewhere deep in my body where I hadn't known I was holding my breath.

Susan Cain has a book out today called Bittersweet. A book about the beauty of melancholy. About being what Glennon Doyle calls midnight blue, about seeing what G calls brutiful.

And I thought, yes. Yes. This is who I am. I'm sad because I'm paying attention. I'm sad because it's brutiful. I'm sad and I'm okay with that. I'm sad and I can use that.

I'm not glorifying depression. When I'm at a 6 or 7, I need help. Real help. But I'm never going to be a 0 because that's just not who I am. I'm sad. And I'm grateful.