A couple of things. . . .

My sister-in-law had this on her blog and it is exactly what I want to say. So here you go.

Also, today I got done with class (which was so totally awesome) and was getting my mail from the English office--wow this became a long sentence so I will stop it. Anyway, a colleague was putting small flyers in each of the boxes. One was about a special Environmental Artist and Writer titled WICK. "You should go to that one. Wick isn't bad it means life."  I responded, "I know." He said, "Really? How?" I said in a voice that should end all of the intrusive questions, "I read The Secret Garden," and added a mental "duh!" "It isn't bad", well really now. I think I baffled him, as I am wont to do.

Fall and Comfort

So I have been craving comfort lately. So when I am troubled I cook. And I cook for people I love and it makes me feel better.Saturday was a crazy day. Rain and storms outside and inside.  But I found a haven at my friends' house. Ty and Alicia are just so awesome. I don't know if it is the fish tanks that emanate calm or the constant stash of dark chocolate--but they just make me feel better. So I made them Mac and Cheese. Well I made Lee Mac and Cheese because Tyler has issues with cheese sauce. And we had glazed baby carrots and peanut butter cookies and watched Pinky and the Brain until  I felt that life would be better.

So today, a strange day after feeling like I have lived half a lifetime in the last week, I went to my cousin's house and made her  . . . . Mac and Cheese for her birthday. We talked and baked Pumpkin bread and talked about how today's 66*F felt like Fall and Fall is sweet and sad and full of endings. Maybe I have melancholy. But I do know that good friends and good food and good hugs and good religion can heal just about everything.It is hard now, but it will get better. There is a plan.  So don't give up, never ever give up. You  know who you are.

School

Ahhh, school.  This year is a bit different for me.  During the great office debacle I decided that I wanted more from life than getting shunted in a corner.  If I am going to have to support myself and have benefits for any possible health monstrosities(which I am not going to have, but I am a planner.) I needed something more stable.  On my 30th birthday I took stock of my life and discovered that other than the ultimate dream of being a wife and helpmate and rocking my own bundles of giggles I had accomplished an alarming number of dreams in my life. I know I have said this before, when I was two or three I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up: I said a princess and a high school English teacher. I have been able to teach some high school, but not as a bona fide licensed teacher. So I set out today on another grand adventure. I am getting my teaching license. 

While in class today I thought about how cool all of these teacher wannabes were and how honored I felt to be able to do this. It got me thinking about an essay I have been working on, a small piece of a much larger project. It is about what has made me into me. I posted on my school blog for my students but I wanted to post it here too. I have been reminded lately by a very nice person about how great I truly am.  Sometimes I think in the gore and guts of living life we forget who we truly are and are astonished when some other amazing person lets us know who we are again. So here is the essay:

All The Difference

Bookstores are a Safeplace. One word. A place I run when panicked or in danger, or in need of comfort. There is something in the air, a ventilation system set up only for me that makes it easier for my lungs, my cells, to breath.

There is order in the bookstore. Categories. Alphabetical organization. I can walk in and start to process my life. Sad? Go to Self-Help, Humor, or Children’s Fiction. Confused? Non-fiction, Gifts, Music. Need to be challenged? Classics, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels. Somehow I can find myself in those categories. It is the same reason I love libraries.

How did I get this way? Well, it is kind of a long story. When I was eleven I got really sick. I was unable to attend school, and for some time I was unable to leave my bed. I had horrible insomnia. Days were filled with never ending exhaustion: tiredness that would pool in the contour of my jawline into my neck and be cradled in the hollowed space above my clavicle. There was no demarcation between day and night; I was always in my bed. Mentally there was shadow, dark, and the darker time. At first my mom would have me go outside and sit in a chair or lie on a blanket so that I could be in the sun. It felt good. But as the sickness worsened I began to give up. One month turned into two. Two months turned into eight. A year. Two years.

I remember distinctly the moment when I knew that I was not going to get better any time soon. May. I had missed the last two months of seventh grade. I was still pretending to be normal by doing my homework assignments and reading The Last Five Aprils for English class. Mom had gotten me to go outside and sit in the sun because it would be “good for me”.

The last time I was on the grass my throat had gotten worse, to the point of not being able to breathe easily. (That was before we knew I was allergic to grass.) I had opted to sit in the cement carport on a lawn chair.

My eyelids felt so heavy, yet I could see through the thin layers of skin. See red blood vessels pulsing, little dark brown things dancing and playing across my closed eyes. It was mesmerizing. My body felt heavy too. It was becoming harder and harder to move, to stay “up”. It was too difficult to fight the exhaustion. My body was changing. My face was swollen, puffy, yellow. My eyeballs were also yellow tinged. I had strange pains all over my body. I would lose lots of weight and then gain it and get all puffy.

The doctor had already thrown so much medication at me. Medication that made me pee more, or not pee at all. Medication that made my stomach hurt but my throat felt better. Medication that felt like a dull fire burning in my bones, eating away at all the marrow inside of me. Medications that caused weight loss, medications that caused weight gain and water retention. Medication that gave me yeast infections, in my mouth! Medications that made it even harder to sleep. Medications that put me so deep into sleep that it scared me. Life had become a series of multicolored pills, big and small. Chemicals seeped out of my pores and I started taking two baths a day because of the stink.

Last time the doctor suggested that I be put on Prozac. We all played a delicate game of dancing around the word depression. I knew he thought that the tests were right. There was nothing wrong with me. But there was. I had a raging fever, but my temp was 98.6 degrees. I had all the symptoms of Crone’s Disease, but I didn’t have it. Cancer? Same thing. The only test that was any different was on my liver titers which were super high and a white blood cell count that was also screaming high. There was something wrong, but no diagnosis. Mom believed me. Dad was checked out in his own world of illness. But the doctor’s voice echoed in my head, pulsed as the blood in my eyelids pulsed. “There is nothing wrong with you. This is all in your head.”

I let the sun soak into my pasty thick body, not even trying to hold on to what would be the last day of light I would remember for a long time. I stopped going out after that. I was separated from friends by the very fact that I wasn't around. My family had to keep functioning. My mom tried to take care of me and my dad, and run the world. She worried about me spending so much time alone and tried to supplement my lack of human contact as much as she could. But after everyone went to bed I faced hours of silence and alone time. The Dark time. This lasted for about three years.

One of the ways to deal with the loneliness and separation was to lose myself in a book. For small moments of time I was no longer sick and could live an avatar life in a story of my choosing. Mom would go to the library and bring back books from the "Best Books for Kids" which I totally outgrew in a month. Then "Best Books for Teens" and finally "Best Books of All Time."

I consumed books at an alarming rate. I read things that most eleven year olds had never heard of: Moby Dick, Little Women, A Room with a View, Meditation's of Marcus Aurelius, Cold Sassy Tree, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Walden, the Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Les Miserables, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, To Kill a Mockingbird, Dandelion Wine, Anne of Green Gables, Ivan Hoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Center of the Earth, HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Wizard's First Rule, The Dragonriders of Pern, The Star Wars extended Universe books, the poems of TS Eliot, Walt Whitman. I read all of my parents' old college text books--my mother's Victorian and Elizabethan poets were an especial treat. I read Hamlet for the first time and then moved on to what my brother was reading two years ahead of me in English.

I began to write myself into movie plots and book plots, peopling the night with friends and teachers.Especially Star Wars. Luke Skywalker and Jo March became my constant companions. The sheer power of their written characters inhabited my room and kept me company.  I also watched a lot of movies, documentaries, TV shows, and read magazines and academic journals. And all this before the internet. I don't really remember anything else but the books and knowledge I received from that time. At one point my optic nerve was affected and I couldn't read. It was like literally going blind, I could see but I couldn't focus enough to read, so I felt like I couldn't see. Reading had become seeing and writing had become living.  I began listening to books on tape and that was a whole new ball game. I listened to everything--with good taste of course. I became the family librarian. I would send my mother to the library with a long list of books for me and then I would distribute to the family.

By the time I got better and made it to high school I was a rather peculiar child as you might guess. I had begun writing in journals and writing stories and though health had kind of returned, I still kept up my habit of binging on books. Health has been a wary visitor for me, and I often have to keep in touch with reality through my books. I realize I didn't have a normal childhood and I don't expect anyone else to go out and lose themselves in a library. But I think about all that I know, somethings I wish I didn't know, and all of the knowledge I have amassed and realize that I am who I am--the sum of all of my experiences. Even though many of them were incredibly painful or scary, I realize I could never be who I am with out them. For me reading and writing were my only contact with the world--even the Science Fiction seemed more real than my life at that time.

Though I was away from others, I connected more with my inner world--my writing, my imagination.  That rich inner life has informed everything that I do. I wouldn't give it up. Sure, I didn't go to eighth grade at all. Most people would agree that Junior High is worth missing. And so I affirm that though the path is long and winding, and less traveled by--"it has made all the difference."

" . . . Both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tales were grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors."

Jack Zipes, Spells of Enchantment