I keep secrets

It's interesting, the things I don't mention or can't find the time to mention. It's nearly always good things, like starting yoga teacher training and teaching my first yoga class. I decided I was being stupid about not saying anything, and needed to announce all of this to the world (which, these days, means Facebook).

The thing is, I hate narcissists. You know who I mean. The people who have to have everything be about them. Think of someone making a speech that steals the spotlight from the guest of honor, the person who shows off on the dance floor, or butts into every conversation with their opinion or personal experience, no matter how irrelevant. The person who just has to tell you a story that seems designed to impress or convey the teller's importance.

Nicolas Bernard Lépicié [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I am someone who routinely fails to be impressed. You know the owner of this coffee shop? Sure, but you still pay full price. You once sold T-shirts at that performer's show? How does that make you closer to him?

So when I have something to brag about, I fail to do so. I get so tired of social media being a brag-fest: look at my cute significant other, baby, degree, new job... So tired of it that I fail to see it as a tool for sharing information. So tired of comparing my struggles, about which I know every detail, to everyone else's highlights.

So I'm quiet. I don't ask for attention. And, not surprisingly, I don't get it.

But look what happens when I do.

To reframe bragging as sharing good news, I have to accept that people genuinely do want to hear good news and consider the idea that people succeed in groups. I'm not entirely sure that this is true, or what it looks like.

It also requires seeing things I do as success, which is perhaps the biggest challenge for me. It just feels like the things I do are the things I do. I don't generally attach any particular value to them.

I do, however, attach value to the things other people do, that I have not done.

It does make me wonder about how I am seen by others, and if what they see is more or less accurate (or differently accurate) than what I see.

Not coincidentally:

Thanks so much for volunteering your time last Thursday, I know we all really enjoyed the class! After you left Mr. S--- said it was the best class so far, because it was more challenging!

First step

I taught my first yoga class Thursday night. Even though I had anxiety tummy all day, I was not overly hyping it up in my head. My thoughts were these:

1. It does not have to be the greatest yoga class ever
2. I just really don't want anyone to be injured
3. There is something "more" that isn't quite there yet, and the only way to figure it out is to teach. So enough already, start teaching.

And just like that, an opportunity came up to fill in as a volunteer teacher for a group organized through Americorps for people without health insurance. I am both an Americorps grant recipient (paid off my expensive grad school degree!) and a person who doesn't always have health insurance. Plus the class was 10 minutes from both work and home.

I got there early, did the aura kriya, had my usual when-are-they-coming am-I-in-the-right-place-even-though-I-asked-and-was-told-it-is-in-this-room head thoughts, meditated, and the volunteers showed up. Granted I only had 4 students, but that's a good number, sufficient to watch and see what they're doing.

It was a little not-real, in that it was in a cafeteria. So it didn't feel yoga-ish. They didn't say "namaste" back to me, but then, why would they. Still. They did good work, didn't get hurt, and even though I forgot about 5 minutes of my sequence (It was right on the floor next to me, but I was looking at my students, not my notebook, which is probably how it should be if a choice has to be made) and wondered why my class ran so short, they'll never know that I left something out.

What I understand from my first "real" class is that there is a continuum. That I have started on this journey. That I have made the leap from yoga-teacher-trainee to beginning yoga teacher, and that it's only going to get better, more natural, and more me from here.  The only way to do it is to do it.

By Ciro Duran from Caracas, Venezuela (Master Yoda) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

A year

In the last week I have found that I am able to say to people that I lost my job, and not feel the tears coming. Even a month ago this was not the case.

It has been a year.

I don't think I will ever completely forgive what happened, because so much of what happened was morally wrong. I should not have been asked to do the things I was asked to do. I should not have been fired for maintaining my integrity.

This is a big part of why every day I feel the loosening of my grip around the idea of myself as a classroom teacher.

I have held onto this idea for a long, long time.

I held onto it by working in a daycare for two years, and by going back there when I lost my job. At least there I could say I was doing important work. That it made a difference that I was there.

I looked at it as working on my behavior-management skills. As a break before I got back to my real work. As a chance to be creative and not have to worry about people breathing down my neck.


I got to make and do a lot of things, work with some really sweet kids, and have a lot of fun.

 

But when I eventually decided to go back to being a classroom teacher, it all happened so fast. I applied, was interviewed, was swept up into the job. That first year I even got an award.

And so when I began to push back, I felt like I was sending a message: This is what good teachers do. Good teachers hold students accountable. Good teachers expect to be paid fairly for their time. Good teachers know their job responsibilities and don't have to worry about those responsibilities changing every month.

Because people are fond of creating either/or situations, we were told again and again that caring about ourselves meant not caring about children. As if there were a limit to how much a person could care, or how many people a person could care about.

So I find myself again not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. With less certainty than I had. But also with a lot fewer boulders to push up hills.

Bits of identity

Inevitably when I start clearing out the house, I run across things that I'm not ready to let go of. Here is a short list:

• Pants that fit me last year, but are now three sizes too big
• Books from my classroom library
• Other teaching supplies from my classroom
• Picture frames that are perhaps broken and perhaps salvageable for alternate purposes
• Paint cans
• A massive collection of cassette tapes

Honestly the vast majority of things I find fall into one of two categories: Things I Need to Find the Proper Way to Dispose of and Things I Am Going to Do Something with Someday.

The teacher things and the pants, though, they are different.

They are bits of identity. I once was this. I might be this again. 

Do I want to gain back those 20 pounds? No, of course not. Not that I was by any means, needing to lose 20 pounds, but it did take me from the high end of my healthy weight range to just below the middle of it. But my weight has been known to creep upwards in a slow but steady manner. I might fit into those pants again in a year's time, and who knows if I will be able to afford new things then. Right now I'm certainly struggling to find things I like and can afford.

Did I want to lose my teaching job? Not really. But I'd been struggling to teach for years. For two and a half years I looked for and despaired of looking for a position. The one I had lasted a year and a half, and was a far cry from what I'd been doing in my New York City classroom. I felt like my hands were tied, like no one cared, and like we were purposely isolated from one another. Five years now, I've been holding on to classroom supplies and books, wondering if I'm ever going to use them again. I've moved this stuff twice. Every time I clear out, I let a little more of it go. I put the pens, staples, and other general office supplies into use. I donate books to the library. It's not all gone yet, but I'm starting to feel like the desire to use it, is.

Toughen up

One of the most enduring images of myself in my own mind is me, at 3 or 4 years of age, sitting in a swing at my preschool. I was younger than many of the kids in my class and therefore shorter. My feet dangled from the swing, my legs not long enough to reach the hollowed-out ground beneath it to propel the swing on my own. I had to ask for help to swing, when other children did not. That was when I began to feel as if I were set apart from others.

As a first-year teacher I was constantly told to develop a thicker skin. I was told I would not make it as a teacher if I cared about what the kids said about me.

Well, I'm sorry. I never learned how to thicken my skin. I never learned how to protect my heart. I never learned how to stop caring about the people I met, the children whose lives were even lonelier than mine had been. I never stopped being affected by their pain, even when they were taking out their pain on me.

I never learned how to stop getting my heart broken.

I think I might finally be okay with that.