January Resolution #2: Practice Trust

I do feel a little more trusting than I did at the beginning of the month. I don’t feel like everything and everyone is disappearing, etc. Maybe it is simply a Seasonal Affective matter and most of my issues could be solved with full-spectrum lightbulbs, I don’t know.

Anyway, the other day I did a pretty cathartic act of trust—I gave away a whole bunch of my previously hoarded school supplies to a school that had recently burned down.

I didn’t give way the real capital—I kept my Poetry Speaks books and my Kenneth Koch lessons and my Poetry 180s. But every time I feel insecure and unworthy of teaching, I tend to spend money on supplies. Last summer when I was afraid I would never teach again, I bought mountains of stuff for my summer classes, only a fraction of which got used.

Dropping off that stuff was like getting rid of the fear and loneliness that lead me to purchase it in the first place. What a relief to turn that psychological baggage into something productive.

It was an act of trust in my well-supplied current job and in my future teaching life.

Of course, if I end up teaching in a public school I’ll expect to shell out for supplies again, but I hope I’ll be doing it out of necessity and not as a way to soothe feelings of unworthiness.