“The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance itself. Like music also, it’s fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata to reach the final cord and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.” - Alan Watts
Oops, I guess the last time I wrote here was the end of June. I’m not really sure how that happened, except that I kept not sitting down to write. And even today, I barely made it here, telling myself I’d write when an idea came tugging, which is hasn’t, or when my list of menial to-dos is complete, which it never is.
I have a note in my phone titled “writing ideas” that I add to daily. Usually at stop lights or dripping wet right after a shower. They pop into my head as fully formed quips, bumper sticker ideas, and when it’s time to write the stories and extrapolations dance toward them, like moths fluttering around a light. But lately…not so much. Lately, I’ve been doing everything except this. But guess, what my fingers are tapping away right here right now, so we are on our way.
I do have some bigger topics I want to tackle, but I’m not quit ready to go there today, as the experiences surrounding them are still too close to my heart and I’m really out of practice here. Maybe a little life update will do. Keep it light, just move the stagnant energy.
I got a job. I’m teaching a course called Learning Frameworks at a local community college. It’s about how learning happens: the psychology of learning, the neuroscience of learning, and pedagogy - how teachers facilitate learning through instructional practices.
I’m excited and nervous and tentative and it feels like a step backwards and a step forwards simultaneously. My “writing ideas” note reads “what happens when you stop operating out of a wound?” What happens when your passions change?” I’ve written about my 12 year career in education. I documented in real time my abrupt departure from all of it and the shock of becoming suddenly ambivalent about something that I’d considered my purpose for so long. I used to LOVE being an educator. I used to care so deeply, with my whole heart and soul and personhood about making change in the education system. I started a nonprofit for that reason. I told my story ad nauseam: I was a student who hated school, I was a student who felt stupid in school, I was a student who couldn't access her creative and intellectual gifts in school. I was someone who had to recover her self worth because what she had to offer didn’t match up with what was valued in school. And I am someone who became of teacher because of these wounds.
And now, I am not that person. Now, the aperture has widened, my experience as a student is distant, a blip of time on my lengthening lifespan. The larger systems and sociopolitical contexts have come into view. I don’t feel dumb or inadequate or care at all that I sucked at school. I still care about people with my whole heart, and kids especially, who are people in their purest form, and in general I believe in humanizing our institutions of which school is a major one, but something has shifted and my access point to caring is steadier, and less fiery, and not so individualistic, or white savior-y, or grand, or I am the change. And when your identity is not wrapped up in an old wound and your work is not powered by the outward projection of that wound, then it’s just work that you show up for daily I think. It’s relationships with colleagues and students, its small incremental change within a micro context, a local community, it’s writing lesson plans that are fun or that flop and then tweaking to challenge yourself and deepen your own little inquiries and maybe extend that out to the people around you.
I’ll be teaching very part-time, just two classes, which has me in the classroom 6 hours a week. It’s looking like M & W from 11-2. And then there is the planning and the grading and the office hours. BUT, I feel better equipped than ever to not overdo it, as someone who historically MAJORLY overdoes it. I am someone who can easily turn a part-time underpaying job into a fully time even more underpaying job. But I have two kids now. And I am steadier in myself. Work is not longer the primary barometer for my worth, in fact, the eternal learning of my life is that nothing external is. The challenge is how slippery that lesson seems to be. Sometimes it sits in my palm like a heavy stone. It’s a fact I can see and touch, and then - inevitably - it disintegrates into sand falling right through my fingertips.
I started seeing a new therapist. She is a Jungian analyst and she seems right out of a Woody Allen movie (sorry, I know it’s taboo to mention him). She is preppy but quirky a la Diane Keaton. She has long white hair that she loosely ties back in a low pony tail. She is tall and gangly with the exception of her wide hips which give her a stately appearance that matches right up with her elder wisdom. When I pull into the driveway she is always tending to her purple azaleas, caressing the petals between thumb and forefinger. As we walk to the back house where she holds our sessions, she seems to glide, each step slow and considered, and I become acutely aware of my own frenetic pace.
My favorite thing about our sessions is the dream interpretation. My least favorite thing is that I have to start. When I sit on the couch, she just stares at me. I say. “I start again, don’t I?” and she stares a piercing stare. “Yes.”
A few sessions ago I told her about a dream I had in which my house was flooding, but it wasn’t rising water from the ground up. Water was seeping through the walls, everything was water logged and disintegrating. The house was folding in on itself and I was watching the kitchen cabinets go mushy and sort of flop off the walls. Oddly, the primary anxiety in watching my home crumble was not where we would live or the financial loss or really any of the practical elements of losing the house. Rather, the potent feeling was what will people think. I was worried about judgement from people in my life who would say “why did you buy this old house? why did you restore this old house? you made a bad choice. I knew this would happen.”
When I woke up from this dream I thought it was about an unhealthy preoccupation with what other people think. I thought it was an example - taken to the most extreme - of putting other people’s opinions above my own livelihood. I mean, I was drenched in gritty water as my house fell on top of me, and still I worried about what someone might say in the aftermath. But when I told my therapist she said it was about the crumbling of an old structure. She said when we are in the midst of a big upheaval in our identity, it is as if the house we’ve lived in is falling away. It’s the first step in rebuilding, the decomposition of the old to initiate the creation of something new. She said that water was an important symbol in my dream. Water. Not fire. Not wind. This element is part of an alchemical process called solutio discussed by a Psychologist called Edward Edinger who says the images like the one in my dream signal “something larger and more comprehensive than the ego which threatens to dissolve it.” So, hmmm, there’s that. I was a little stunned by how apropos this interpretation felt given the last three years of my life, in which I’ve become a mom, left a career, been pregnant five times, quit a Phd program, toiled over whether to stay home with my kids or take them to daycare and how often and where and is it okay if they stay until three? I’ve attempted and failed and attempted again to break old patterns in my relationship with my body and my ambition and food and work and family and mostly self worth. I guess the house is dissolving and the biggest obstacle in rebuilding is my own outsized idea of external judgment.
Okay, don’t let me go this long without writing again. Nothing feels more right. The list of priorities goes:
My family
Writing
Love you,
Stephanie
I see you. Most importantly, you see yourself.
Looking forward to more of your writings.
Great post! I chuckled at your description of the therapist's stare and "yes." Been there. And my priorities are exactly yours. Glad you're back.