I really like Elizabeth Gilbert.  I like what she has to say about happiness, health, and creativity for women.  This is a great interview she did with the Chopra Center.

Choosing Happiness

"It is amazing how much of a deeper love I am attaining for a school subject simply because I have teachers who show how much they care." 

I read this in a student paper today. It touched a very sensitive chord in my heart.  

Confession: I have been teaching for eleven years.  When I chose to continue teaching instead of going on to get my PhD, I was told that I was making a mistake.  If I wanted to get anywhere, I would have to have my doctorate.  All I wanted to do was teach.  

Then my health progressively deteriorated.  I ran out of money. I ran out of energy.  I almost ran out of caring.  For a great while, I have been trying to pull myself out of a deep well of teaching depression.  Luckily, my personal life was practically idyllic, other than not being married,  and the care I was receiving from doctors so personalized that I was able to survive. If it had been otherwise,  I think I would have stayed in that dark place indefinitely.  I was beating myself up to be the best teacher I could and I wasn't getting paid enough to live.  I had to take on three jobs sometimes just to make ends meet.  I had three semesters of some really tough students and some dire health problems.  I began to hate teaching school.  I was stuck in a viscous scarcity cycle of financial and physical trauma. I decided to leave teaching and enter the corporate world.  

But I couldn't find a job.

I was severely underemployed, but I kept teaching because I didn't want to leave the only income I had.  It was really hard. When I started teaching I was so bright eyed and bushy tailed.  My mentor warned me I would burn out, become cynical.  Guess what, I did. I went from being so open-hearted, to feeling like I had to protect myself constantly from the germs, the stress, the criticism, the lack of support. 

Then last year in January my best friend called.  She had recently moved back to Arizona to be with her kids after graduating with an illustration degree.  Things were not going well. She couldn't find a job.  She was deeply depressed. I sat in my car and watched the clouds lowering over Utah Lake, and listened to her talk it out.  Then she said that we should go to a writing conference.  I had not told her about my own financial stress or about my current health situation.  Before I could tell her no, I said, "Okay. I don't know how, but okay."  We both cried and made each other promises that we would help each other to make GOOD ART no matter what, and that when we made a million dollars we would take good care of each other.  You know, all the promises you make to your best friend. 

And things began to change. 

What would ensue was another really horrific year of financial and physical trauma.  And yet.  My attitude had changed. I had something to look forward to.  I had something to write about.  I started sharing my ideas with my students.  I opened up about how I felt and why things were hard.  I felt my heart opening.  I started working with my doctor on changing some pretty ingrained ideas about myself and what my life had to be like.  I started to let things go.  I approached teaching in a different way.  I set more firm boundaries and then went with the flow.  

Circumstances had not changed.  I was the one who changed.  

I worked on healing some really important relationships:  pouring love and sunshine on the people in my life, trying to show gratitude, and gracefully receiving help when it was offered.  I looked for the good in my students and realized that it had always been there.  I forgave.  The people in my life didn't change; I did.  I got closer to my friends. I made lots of therapeutic phone calls where I actually talked about how I honestly felt.  My friends didn't walk away; they stayed.  I got closer to my family. I made lots of calls and wrote lots of cards I gave what I could and stopped feeling so bad about what I couldn't do.  

At the beginning of this semester, January, one of my students approached me after class.  She had been my student the previous semester and was taking me for English 2010.  She said that she just wanted to thank me for helping her have such a good experience.  She said that I was the first teacher in her life who actually showed that I cared about her.  Knowing that I was working just as hard a she was to make the class successful changed things for her.  In my heart, I saw how much I had changed from the bitter, sick, and tired person I was two years ago.  It wasn't like I was a bad teacher, but I had closed myself off from them.  All the warmth and love was gone because I just couldn't feel it anymore.  Here I was in almost the same circumstances, and I was so different.  And yet I wasn't.  I was back to who I was before the trauma.  My best friend is my best friend because she was my student and I was a loving caring person and we took a chance on each other.  

As I sit here blogging and grading today, I realize that we may not be able to control our circumstances, but we can control our response. I knew this truth.  I supposedly lived this truth.  But when I read my student's comment about how much love she feels in my class in just the first few weeks of the semester, I realize that I have changed my response.  Is it hard to do?  Oh yes.  Is it worth is. 

Oh yes. 

Keep choosing happiness my peeps. 

The Purge

It is an interesting thing to raise up the darkest parts of your childhood.  It is cathartic.  It is weird.  It is maddening.

It is necessary.

When this story stopped being about me and became about Abigail, a strange thing happened.  I was able to write the pain, but not get consumed by it.  I have been singed, but not consumed.  When we got back from WIFYR, Lee worked in my room while I was out and about.  When I came back from church on Sunday she said she had been looking at my collection: my books, my pictures, my stuff. She turned to me and said:

We are hoarders.

I laughed and she laughed. And then we looked at each other. It is true.

The conversation progressed over the next few weeks and late one night we had a deep discussion about what books had become for us.  Don't get me wrong. Books are wonderful.  But books had become more than just pages.  They were symbols, evidence of survival.  Proof of worth.

There is an old Simon and Garfunkel song: "I am a rock, I am an island."

The lyrics go like this:
I have my books, and my poetry to protect me.
I am shielded in my armor.
Hiding in my room,
safe within my womb,
I touch no one and no one touches me.


 . . .
Woah.

Yeah.  So. Huh.

I don't need things to prove that I am a person of worth.  I don't need books as a symbol of my intelligence.  I feel like I am doing some deep healing here.  And as with any major change of behavior, there has been some blow back.

"There are a lot of worse things to hoard than books."
"How many books are you getting rid of?  What if you need them?"
"Are you just going to dump them at the thrift store? Don't you think that is a little irresponsible?"

You don't have to have the pages to still have the story in you.  Those experiences are priceless and they will always be with me.  

I went to my bookshelves and I pulled all the books that I haven't re-read in the last five years. I am a compulsive re-reader. If I haven't read it again yet, I am not going to.  I got rid of the books that I wasn't ever going to read, but were on my shelves because it was a book and that is what I do: collect books.  I got rid of teaching books that I am never going to use again.  Old editions.  You may not be able to see it but there are 220 books in those bags.  They are two deep and three tall.  

It may not look like it, but this is a huge change for my bookshelves.  I am not going to get rid of all my books.  But I want them to mean something, something healthy.  A lot of my fellow writers have been writing about the need to divest ourselves of stuff.  Maybe it is a byproduct of creation.  Make new stuff, get rid of the old stuff.  

Write hard and clear about what hurts. ~ Ernest Heminway