I haven’t been writing – for kind of a long time – for kind of a lot of reasons. However I had a little revelation today (can revelations ever be little?)… Growing up as an anxious kid with OCD, I have always been a classic oversharer. When a thing happens, one that jostles and pokes at my vulnerability, I become a human possessed, wanting everyone I have ever met to know every single detail no matter how minute or minuscule, so I can be told that I am good. For the less anxious and obsessive out there, this is called seeking reassurance. The great irony of my life is that it totally doesn’t work and yet I, and maybe others out there like me, still do it – constantly. For the people in my life who have hung in there with me and those who are new and are doing so right now, I thank you. I thank you for not abandoning me to face the depths of my mind alone. I can only hope I am doing the same for you. That being said, I’ve realized that when I am not writing – when I am not getting the thoughts of my wildly full brain out in some way, all of this becomes exacerbated to a critical degree.
I had an incident, actually that’s not true, I have had innumerable incidents recently that have been peeling away my layers of protection leaving me bare and vulnerable and raw to the world. It has been nothing less than an exercise in agony, and as a result I have been, by my own estimates, insufferable.
So I guess that means I need to start writing again and I guess that since you’re reading this, it’s not enough to just write for myself, I also must put it out into the world. <heavy sigh> I could go on about how this too is insufferable and perhaps by doing this and also by writing this I am again seeking reassurance by some other means, but at some point I just need to cut myself some slack. It feels right and maybe I should just trust that. Maybe that can be enough.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk – let’s get into it.
_____
This week I have been thinking a lot about childhood and adulthood. I have come to the conclusion that something happens when you become an adult. Something like a blending of all the parts of your childhood. You look back at all the stages you went through and everything seems to be lumped together into one, singular experience. As in, ‘that was my childhood.’ We say things like: My childhood was idyllic, I never wanted for anything – Or my childhood was suffering, I never had enough – Or any array of vast and nuanced experiences that are a part of the human condition. And while it’s true that at some point we all leave childhood behind – although at what exact point that was, or will be, for you I cannot say – there comes a time when we look back at that period of our lives as something bygone and separate from who we are today – as if it were another life entirely.
And it makes sense. Childhood – at least for me – felt confusing and frustrating and harsh, not all of the time, but a lot of the time – and this is coming from someone of extreme privilege, who, at least from the outside, had little cause for suffering and yet did.
No matter what, it’s hard growing up in this world.
Maybe it’s the lack of autonomy, or the world forcing you into boxes and binaries, or that you never had a choice of when and where you came into existence, or the cruel repetition of stories you never asked to hear, or that mental illness took its toll, or that you never did, in fact, have enough, or that you were looked over, or that or that or that…. Perhaps though, it is the simple brutality that experience and knowledge demand as its price of possession. In a sense, it makes sense and feels safer, to try to leave all of it behind.
As many of you know, I started teaching high school this year. Going in, I knew it would be different, I knew it would be difficult, but truthfully, arrogantly, I never thought it would be this hard. Turns out, a sixteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old… not the same. You’re probably thinking “umm, duh.” And yet, hold on a second. Here’s the more nuanced truth: they are totally not the same AND they are totally the same.*
*I’ve been exploring the reality that many things can be true at the same time. It has helped open my eyes to the vast complexity of humanity and the world.
Okay, so let’s unpack that. I don’t know exactly when I began to feel separated from childhood. I do know that having just turned 40 I can say with confidence that I now feel completely and utterly removed from it – only now that I am starting to become nostalgic about it. I think it’s perhaps the reason why many adults feel so completely baffled by kids. Though for as long as I have worked with them it seems like there should have come a point when the bafflement would be over, and yet, it continues unceasingly. There have been times this year that I have been so completely perplexed and bewildered by my students that I question whether, in my thirteen years of experience, I have learned anything at all.
Adults, it seems, have always attempted to create a culture of distinction between themselves and children they raise. As a result of this distinction a hierarchy arose, and because of that, an inflated sense of self-righteousness plagues us all (us being fellow adults). As grown-ups we presume to know more, because we have lived longer, and have paid the brutal price that experience demands, and yet, because of this we forget what is most true:
There is a throughline to all of this.
And maybe that’s the reason so many of us adults feel the need to exert power over the youth – for they are the mirrors we are trying to avoid. Children have an unconscious tendency to bring up our most intense feelings of vulnerability. They remind us of everything we have already survived. They reveal to us what we could have been. They lay at our feet everything we may have missed out on.
The beauty and the brutality is that no matter how hard we try, we will never leave our childhoods behind, not entirely. No matter what, we will never fully heal from what we went through – we will never be able to entirely make sense of it all. We will learn and grow and become and forget at times that all of who we are is dependent upon what has come before:
make peace
with all the women
you once were.
lay flowers at their feet.
offer them incense
and honey
and forgiveness.
honor them
and give them your silence.
listen.
bless them
and let them be.
for they are the bones
of the temple
you sit in now.
for they are
the rivers
of wisdom
leading you toward
the sea.
i have been a thousand different women
– emory hall
In the end we all are who we are. Things happen to us and we grow up if we are lucky or unlucky, and yet the core of us remains the same: our goodness and our value and our specialness – these are not up for debate. They are there, at the center of us, whether we want them or not. It’s just that there are, simply and complexly, times along our paths when we get lost – for short, painful jaunts, or tragically for lifetimes.
It is this goodness and value and specialness that is the throughline we neglect to honor and because of this we despair – because of this, we suffer.
As adults, as educators, we get bogged down by the sheer relentlessness that can oftentimes pervade our interactions with children. There are systemic issues that could be addressed to help minimize this, and yet this is the current reality, the one we face day in and day out right now. The one that I will face come Monday when I arrive back at work.
So when I say that my students are not the same and are the same as who they once were, this is what I mean. What they need in order for me to build trust and be successful in teaching them things requires that I remember this truth – demands that I honor and meet not just who they are now, but also who they have always been: good and valuable and special. They are closer to this truth than we are as adults, and as a result we should be fiercely advocating for and protecting this truth – for them and for us. That is our job – that’s what distinguishes us from them. Not that we have all the answers, but that we will do everything in our power to remember this truth in and about ourselves so that we can witness it in them.
Out of all the years I have been in the classroom, it is this year that I will look back on as teaching me the most – or rather, the one that helped bring me closer to embodying this throughline.
I’ve cried and yelled and talked shit and questioned my life choices and made mistakes ad nauseum this school year – and as much as I would like to think I will one day wake up fully enlightened and never do any of that again, the truth is I will – it is inevitable, for I am human and therefor imperfect – AND – I am human and therefore good and valuable and special at my core.
As are they.
As are you.
As are we all.
That is not up for debate.
If you want something wise and beautiful to listen to – something that will bring you close to this throughline. Check out On Being’s latest episode: On Being Young in America.
Stay open-hearted and vulnerable.
Danielle~