Thanks Bookstore! And What Comes Next

Yesterday was my last day at the bookstore. It’s hard to overstate the gratitude that I feel for the place—what I took for a straightforward and undemanding job ended up, of course, meaning so much more.

The day back in February when I emailed the OM to see if I could pick up some hours, the email was the only thing I was able to accomplish that day. I was still panicking hard, trying for an hour walk each day, writing down my dreams and not much else. After I sent the email, I was petrified that I would let everyone down, especially Amy, who’d be one of my supervisors.

I was worried that I was so broken that I couldn’t even do my old standby day job, which I love and which has brought me so much comfort over the years. I was still having panics in the grocery store sometimes, feeling unworthy of groceries I knew my former students’ families couldn’t afford. (Once a lunch-party guest, the brightest and most determinedly positive girl in the class, expressed envy of my baby carrots, she said her dad couldn’t afford things like that. I gave her all of my carrots and was never the same again.)

It was hard. For the first few bookstore weeks, I could pretty much only work and sleep. I rode with Amy to work most days, which, like the job itself, ended up making me feel both comforted and trapped. The shadows of school life lurked around with me, I was never sure if I was acting normal or like a mental case.

Sometimes, the young people who worked with me wanted to talk about Important Topics, and I would feel the fear and self-loathing and self-consciousness that precipitates a panic well up and I would have to stop them, but I found their existence so comforting—the wild-haired blogger who declared herself “sick of corporate America” and just stopped showing up, the philosopher who used the phrase “patriarchy as death machine” in casual conversation, they give me hope that everyone’s going to keep fighting evil, even as I move on to cozier ways of doing so.

But what I loved the most, what I’ve always loved the most, is idle work conversation. (This is why Clerks is one of my favorite movies, in spite of my brother’s complaint that nothing happens in it.) (see also: the season three OITNB conversation about the Black-Eyed Peas)

I love the genial, jokey exchanges of near-strangers, the kind that arises from the most exquisite boredom: parsing the intentions of cable radio pop singers, punning on book titles, eventually finding out what creative projects are lurking just beneath nearly everyone’s surface.

And in that spirit, another miraculous thing happened—I got a crush. One day a few weeks ago I was startled to realize that I’d flirted my way through eight hours, with only a break for lunch, and with a mix of embarrassment and exhilaration, I felt a return to myself. Another day went by like that, complete with him recommending an album and me typing while listening to it and settling back to the part of me that has muses, that gets a little giddy and then makes more things. He’s not a viable option, this isn’t that awesome of a story, but just to be off the rails a little, kind of dizzy in the head for someone, it gives me hope that I might still be capable of happily falling when the time comes. Also, it makes me just an eensy bit impatient for that time to happen.

I told someone yesterday during the process of goodbyes that I was broken when I started, and he asked if I was unbroken now. I’ll go with less broken—last week, I wasn’t sure if I had Lyme disease or was sick from all the racism news. I’m better able to engage with the world now, easing back to the Important Topics. It’s still hard to fight the sense of failure and the crippling self-consciousness that got exacerbated in the classroom.

Even though my poetry class is very fruitful and camp seems promising, it’s so hard not to feel like a failure about teaching. Talking to my brother-in-law, a born teacher, over the weekend, it’s hard not to envy the confidence he has with his career, with his place in the world. I envy my friends who all seem so settled, so at home in the world, in their families, in their work.

But playing Mario Kart with my nephew, I wondered aloud why I ended up off road so often. He said “Maybe you’re a…criminal? No, that’s not the word.”

“Outlaw?” I asked, and he heartily agreed.

Outlaw sounds about right. I hate the way that the school system is set up, the way it focuses on data and saps the creativity of teachers and students alike. I feel desperately jealous of my friends who slot so easily into their classrooms, but I have to sympathize with the intensely talented friends who’ve had their love and inspiration sucked right out—that waste isn’t okay with me. It’s not a sacrifice it seems right to make.

Somewhere in my love of connection and my madness for protecting creativity, I hope to find my next line of work. It may be in a nicer school or in homes or I don’t know where. I take comfort in knowing that summer art camp is a job that makes sense, that pays well enough, so maybe that can give me hope for the jobs that follow. My brain is still fragile, but I’m so grateful for the healing that the past four months have brought—thank you, self, for making summer come in February. Thank you, friends, who’ve supported and loved and written with me. Thank you, work, for bringing me back to myself. I’ll do my best with the road less traveled, and I’ll always choose the Kart with good offroad capabilities.

Panic and Progress/Little School Stories One

Last week was such a fruitful one—my poetry class’s book release party produced such a special and heartening collection of poems, I got to go on the local radio station and read from my own poetry book, I even got to visit a friend at her family’s lake house and float around in a paddle boat looking at water lilies and goslings while catching up.

But underneath all the wonderfulness was an inexplicable (okay, actually very explicable) panic. Twice at the bookstore I was working in benign but enclosed spaces and felt the hot dizziness sneak up on me. The music felt too loud and my vision went swimmy. “Sorry I’m a little bit out of it, I panicked in the T-shirt closet” is not the least embarrassing thing I’ve ever said.

I’ve been having bad dreams about school, of the principal observing me and calling me out for mistakes, of having a double class plus a baby to take care of, of having to translate Urdu on the spot. I dreamed of a flying, broken house coming at me with a beautiful black and white drawing (the kind you see on paste-up street art) of Ganesh on the side. All of this means something and nothing. Though life is doing an amazing job of moving me forward on its own, I felt trapped and stuck, blocked in a way I always think I should be able to solve.

I’ve had this sad mentionitis about school, like the “This one time, at band camp?” girl except with failure and trauma. This makes me feel like the conversational angel of doom. The other day at work I kept oversharing, talking to anyone who made the mistake of standing still near me about angry parents and lockdowns. I know it all has to come out, but I honestly don’t want to give those places any more than I already have.

Still, let’s talk about the lockdowns. They came every month or so at the first school, every few weeks at the second. The announcement would come on and we’d be told to lock all of our doors and stay in place until further notice. I never had a door that locked from the inside. I was never actually trained for lockdown procedures, so I’d turn out the light, sit down, and do my best. Sometimes we sat in a row on the floor in the back and played Whisper Down the Lane; sometimes we stayed at desks and just put our heads down. Though we were supposed to be silent, I think, to wait for further instructions, (“So we can stay alive,” I’d tell them.) sometimes it helped to sing the peace song:

“When I breathe in, I breathe in peace,

when I breathe out, I breathe out love.”

(Unitarian hymns are so easily adapted for  the classroom.)

Sometimes the lockdowns were because of gun violence in the surrounding blocks, sometimes just for a kid who was momentarily unaccounted for. You never found out the reason until rumors circulated later in the day, after the threat was over.

In the moment, it never occurred to me to be scared, just to get that deep, eerie calm that grownups sometimes need to have. I took solace in the fact that these were the only times I felt truly justified in just letting them sit and draw. Only now does in occur to me that lockdowns were scary. Those kids, for as much trouble they gave me, were among the most beautiful human beings I’ve ever known. The light shined out of them so purely, so defiantly, so much more miraculously than I can possibly put into words. Despite their harsh circumstances, or because of them, the force of their aliveness was so dazzling that if they had been the proverbial rose-in-concrete, they would have vined the city and the world to its senses.

The horror of being charged with keeping the kids I loved safe in a situation that never would be was one of the many part of my job that was both futile and vital, both deadly and absolutely banal.

As a mark of progress, this is the first easy time I’ve had writing about school—I’ve written maybe ten drafts of blog posts that collapse under the weight of their own sadness, so maybe little stories, a few paragraphs at a time, could be the key.

I think part of the reason this has been a fearful week is that bookstore time is almost over—in many ways, it feels like it already IS over. I’m doing two days a week until camp starts as a way to focus on a couple of projects and get my act together. The part of me that grasps at routine misses the ritual of it, the lunch breaks in the sunny break room or by the fountain, the weight and comfort of organizing my beloved textbooks, my workplace cliché of a coffee cup—Charlie Brown exclaiming “Good grief!”

Good grief indeed. These past few months, though tricky, have been a charmed time. Things have fallen into place through faith rather than effort, or just the effort of singing through the commute or sweeping the terrace for poetry class. I’m sad to let the spring class go even though the summer one starts tomorrow. A big fear in my soup of fears is that I’ll let down the writers who’ve already given me so much.

Reading aloud from my own book of poems brought up so many emotions, too. I’ve got such deep shame for the unrequited loves that defined my life for so long, making it both agonizing and prolific. There was grief over a lost marriage that once seemed so certain. And there was also this: Huh. This is a good book. How did I come up with all this stuff? Will I ever be that productive again?

Returning to art and poetry as the organizing factors of life definitely pulled me out of depression and back to something like my real self, but it also brings with it an enormous amount of vulnerability, one that I can only tackle a little bit at a time. Whereas I have 100% faith in my ability to bring forth good poems from others, my faith in my own work feels Bambi-footed.

Being on stage, both literally and metaphorically, has gotten tangled up in my mind with the everyday humiliations and failures of teaching. The fear of being scrutinized, jeered at, stupid, even hated when I go out on a limb a little is harder to fight than ever before.

I’m frustrated that panic is still holding me back. I see so much possibility in front of me, so many friends and opportunities and gifts. It’s getting harder to take the alone days I still need, that I’ll probably always need. I love the weeks that go by where I feel back to my old self and absolutely hate that I am still so broken. But it is getting easier.

April Checkmarks, May Goals (So Much Artsy Happy!)

March Checkmarks, April Goals

It truly was one of the happiest months of my life--how could it not be? Look at all of the art and sleep!

Last Visit to the Old School (Or: Anger Is Magic)

Every few weeks or so at the old school, a parent flips out in the office, screaming, cursing, and threatening. The administration calls it “performing,” as in “His mom performed last night so we had to transfer him.” I’ve always empathized with the exploding parents, even when I was one of the things they were screaming and threatening about. Friday afternoon I got to feel a little more of what it’s like, standing at the office counter being boxed in, talked down to, and treated like a threat. Nothing inspires rage like helplessness against a system that thinks you are nothing. I didn’t scream or curse, just seethed and spoke softly, but the anger feels just as wild and hard to wrangle.

After feeling so good for most of the past month or so, I dreaded revisiting the place. Amy and I were scheduled to leave the bookstore at two to run some other errands and then go get the rest of my stuff. (I don’t know why I couldn’t just leave it, or send Amy with a list, but it felt like part of my soul was stuck there in the guise of baskets and cute file boxes, and I could rescue it. I almost crowd-sourced a shaman for the occasion but I figured I could be my own. I was right, go me.) Around noon, the feelings started to come, the freezy crick in my spine, the foggy head, the tightening at the front of my brain. My work tasks, which as you know are beautifully Candy Crush simple, got harder. Whole rows of sale sweatshirts became unfindable. I felt the urge to run and hide.

When we arrived just after dismissal, the first person I talked to was my former grade partner, who was pulling out just as we were walking up. She seemed genuinely happy for me. When I told her I was doing well, she said:

“See, it’s like I’ve always told you. As long as you’re…”

“Taking care of me, I know. I am!” I laughed with joy. She was so taken by my tale of clocking out at five that she might go into retirement early. I like my new identity as someone who inspires others to do less work.

Most of the teachers I ran into were kind and distant. They were on their way to their Friday happy hour, and I admit it hurt a teensy bit to not be invited along—though I would never be able to keep up, ventingwise!

The best part was seeing some of my former students who were there for afterschool programs. As they showered me with hugs, their faces glowed like little angels I don’t have to order around anymore. I loved them so much.

“Why can’t you come back and teach us?” they kept asking.

“Because I’m too sensitive. But thanks for being so cute and smart and good.” They nodded solemnly and I could not have imagined a nicer moment. I kept running into them in stairwells in the course of moving stuff, and every time they said “Come back! You have to teach us!” It wasn’t sad, it was like a game, it felt wonderful to keep telling them I’m too sensitive. It was a joy to finally be with them as myself, even just to say goodbye.

Cleaning the room out was HARD. The longer I was there in the past, the more my brain constricted, so that easy tasks like sorting the scissors kept getting harder. The teacher who took over doesn’t share my organizational skills, so I had to really dig to find what I wanted to take.

But I found the things: I found the book an afterschool student gave me years ago about growing a rainbow garden. I found the watercolor set and paper I’d been daydreaming about. I found Apples to Apples Junior and Mancala. I found an almost-full can of coffee and a pack of fresh scrubby sponges, items I was happy to cross off the grocery list. I got the rainbow shelves my mom gave me for teacher graduation (now cheerfully holding all manner of art supplies) and my blue file boxes with cartoon foxes on them.

The principal came in and was cordial, but weird. She didn’t seem fully aware that I’d resigned, even though I’d emailed her and put the paper through weeks ago. She seemed really out of it, but then, as I learned from Gretchen Rubin, people who don’t sleep are often more impaired than they think they are. “We don’t sleep,” the principal always said proudly in meetings, as I fought back a bratty “Well, I do.”

She was concerned with what I might have taken—a set of workbooks I never got, some missing laptops. The poor tech guy kept coming in to ask where the missing computers might be, until I got exasperated.

After all of the things were loaded into Amy’s car, the principal called me into her office one more time. she said she needed to “hold me accountable” for the missing laptops and she was filing a report with the district.

It was one of those rare and beautiful moments when I got to say exactly what I wanted to. In my best quiet teacher voice, I said “I have never been more livid. I will NOT be held accountable. The part of my life where I take the blame for things that are not my fault is OVER.” Though I’d been gone for six weeks and two other teachers had keys to the computer cabinet, she kept asking, “Well, who SHOULD be held accountable?” which for some reason is the thing that fills me with the most rage to think of.

It’s not really about the computers or that fact that they might somehow prevent me from getting the money from my summer account (what I was thinking of as my work-retail-and-heal money)—I felt the familiar sensation of being trapped by the place, dragged down by it, stupid, worthless, as if the idea that I might ever be free and happy was an illusion. That’s how I used to feel every day, and I must say I do not miss it.

I think that this was really her way of expressing the hurt of the situation—of losing a teacher, of seeing evidence that perhaps there are some holes in her plan, of plain old losing a person she used to like and believe in. She must have worked so hard to protect herself from the emotions ricocheting around her all the time that the only way she could express hurt was by filling out unpleasant forms. At least, that’s the most compassionate way I can come up with to see it.

Although I know that no one can really take this new life away, that’s what it felt like in the moment, like the happy flow I’d imagined myself floating along was a stupid illusion, like the bright and colorful new path I’d devised for myself was gone. I felt like a fraud and a drain on everyone I knew, especially my family and close friends. As I drove away, I put on “Ukelele Anthem” as loud as it goes and sang along, but I couldn’t really feel it. The poison of the place had taken over my system, and it’s taken a LOT of writing, closet-rearranging, and art-scheming to make the toxins start to fade away again. I’m still impaired, but I know what to do and I’m doing it.

This month has been among the happiest of my life. I’ve gotten back in touch with my dream-driven Jungian side and begun to stumble into some gorgeous synchronicity. For the first time in a while, I can see a real future on the horizon, one full of art, friends, writing, and love. If it could also be filled with making a living, that would be helpful, but I’m pretty sure this new happiness, this new self is nothing any principal can take away. There is no form for that.