The Blog #3: Freedom

My biggest struggle lately has come from getting what I most desparately wanted… the chance to teach again.

The last time I had a class I could call my own, I had to leave 2/3 of the way into the year to fight for my life against cancer. One of biggest griefs I suffered was having to leave the school year unfinished.

One of the gains, though, of that year, was the fact that I finally began to write again.

After I was cured I came back to the classroom, but I was really just partner teaching with the teacher who had taken over for me. It was in what had once been my room, but they were not my students and I depended on my partner for many things I would have otherwise have done myself. I was still in recovery.

Sometimes during both periods, (when I was sick, and when I was starting back to work) I debated the possibility of never returning to the classroom. If I could prove that I could make a living from writing, why not do that instead?

But besides the fact that it’s really really hard to make money writing, I didn’t want to do it that way. I love to write so much. It’s part of my soul. But writing in a lonely room, even though I’m producing a concrete product of which I can be proud, is dead compared to the rush I get from teaching… the creativity that goes into every lesson and every interaction, the chance to love so much, the challenges, however frustrating, that teaching offers.

So now I’m teaching again, in a new school, in a new city, and I’ve no time left for my regular writing. I go home exhausted, and don’t want to write, even if it relaxes me. Because for me, writing is another job. I have things I want to finish writing and to publish and that involves work.

This blog has offered me a new chance to write. I relax when I do this because I will not dramatically revise it. And no one depends on the work I do here. I do it for me, though I hope others will engage in it. Sometimes I visit my own blog just to smile at it. I don’t even read it. I just feel proud that I posted something. And I hope that someone I care about is reading it and thinking of me. Or I boggle at the idea that maybe a stranger will find it, although I wonder under what pretext.

The same with the magnetic poetry. Playing with words with no expectations.

How strange that the written pieces that I labor over hard may never see the light of day, and yet these sporadic thoughts do.

How grateful I am that I have this. It is just one choice of something I can turn to at the end of the day instead of making more work for myself.

And yet I also have room in my heart to look forward to writing again, some night when I find I have my bearings. Some night when I choose to do it.