But lately, I’ve had the feminine urge to wear a corset, don a three tier hoop skirt, and leave this world behind. Maybe I’ll make my home in the woods? Away from people and all the punishing norms of society. There’s not much in our modern world that allows us to escape and just be. For a few hours a year, I get to do just that. Drink what I want, eat without shame, and have the hem of my skirt trail in the dirt while I look at handmade things to clutter my home with.
The Florida Ren Fest is a silly, good time. I am free to express myself how I would like to be every day. I feel trapped in life. I crave the simplicity of a world I have made up in my head. It may have a lot to do with why I write. So I can escape this reality. Every year I get excited to pick up a bow and arrow and aim it at a bail of hay. I live in Florida. There are many areas where I could live and do that every day. However, I live in town, in a townhouse, where my space is limited. No wonder why I feel trapped. I used to think this is what I wanted. To live close to everything. But the older I get, the more I crave the distance from the noise.
My husband and I battled it out with our 12 little arrows. It doesn’t help that he has hunted before and I have only done this a few times. When I look back at our grouping, I laugh. If I had to bring home dinner, we would be eating leaves and berries, because those don’t move. But by the time my quiver was empty, my grouping was getting closer together. Think how much better I would be if I had the space to practice. Still not sure about bringing home Bambi for dinner, I might just leave that up to the hunter in our family.
I haven’t been a teenager for a very long time. Over twenty years have passed since I had high expectations of what my life may be. I think back to what my life goals were and how much pressure I put on myself in some areas, and how I let the world pass by in others. Sometimes I wish I had more guidance on real life struggles rather than the obsessive thought process of college. However, none of that compares to the conversation I would have loved to have had with my fifteen-year-old self.
I would love to hold her and tell her to let go of all her pain. She is beautiful and the pain she feels daily will one day fade away. That she isn’t crazy or a hypochondriac, the doctors that she’s been going to have been awful. Instead of doing the research, they were lazy and failed her. But her mother never did. She needs to appreciate how much her mom does, spending many days off in and out of the doctors trying to find out why her daughter’s body is attacking itself.
I would tell her to watch for her brother. He’s suffering in his own way. He bottles up his emotions and releases them in the only way his brain can process. What you do for your four years of high school pulls him from his dark place. But keep doing that in college. You don’t want to lose your bother. Thankfully, you don’t. However, you won’t find out until years later you came close to it.
Your older cousin becomes more than that. She fills the void of an older sister. One that you are so desperate to fill. Even though she is 16 hours away, she becomes your best support throughout all the emotional struggles you go through as a young adult. Virgina becomes your solace and eventually you two travel the world with each other. Yes, you have friends outside of blood, but you will be so surprised by how close you two become.
You are about to meet two of your closest friends in high school. You’ll spend four years studying film in high school, then go to college, and eventually work together before she moves to Virginia. Instead of mourning your loss, you two make plans to spend your summers together, because, as fate would have it, somehow you both end up working in education. Your other friend will also be by your side in college, though she drops out. Your kids have grown up with each other, or as much as you can, for having three kids in sports. P.S., that’s like the hardest thing about being an adult.
The bond you make with another you’ve shared the same name with since first grade is out of a pain no one should endure. Fail first marriages, abuse, rebuilding one another. Nevertheless, there is something to be said about this. Alex’s are strong. We are tenacious. We are crazy but support each other.
You will meet two people in college, one male, one female in the strangest of places. The male you meet at a hookah bar during an open mic night. He now knows your innermost secrets and you torture him daily about finishing editing your writings. He is your best friend outside your husband who we will get to in a minute. Your female friend becomes your other half. You met her at a gymnastic studio and bond over how annoying children are when they are trying to kill themselves on a balance beam.
Lastly, love. Don’t worry about love. Don’t search for love. I want to tell you to avoid all the pain that I have gone through. But that pain has made us strong. It has made us reliant. Those dark moments give us the ability to bond with the man who gave you your first kiss. He reaches out to you after what feels like a lifetime. You don’t know it then, but you’ve saved him. He was going to eat a bullet, but the universe stopped him when you said “Hi” thirteen years later.
Actually, your friendship has saved many people. You never give up on those who are diving into the darkness. You are that annoying friend who won’t let people wallow in their misery and that’s sort of passed on to teaching.
So 15-year-old Alex… hold your breath. Shit is about to get real.
Today I took the first step in actively working on my mental health. I had an hour-long session with a therapist. This isn’t my first time with therapy. The last time I sought help was to deal with my postpartum depression and anger. However, that ended quickly after the therapist said to me, “have you ever been to therapy before? Bec” Because this isn’t how it works.” The woman said, after I bared my soul… That may have been word vomit of emotions and feelings, but she wasn’t correcting me, just being rude.
Even though I had an awful experience with therapy, I have always suggested it to family, friends, and my students. My husband is alive because I pushed him to speak to those are the VA who were trained in his combat related PTSD. I have guided more than a handful of students into either talking with a guidance counselor or a mental health specialist. Even my own little clone is in therapy, learning how to handle her massive emotions. So when my husband told me I needed to get help, I didn’t fight him. I didn’t want to do it, but I did it. I would hate myself forever if I always suggested those to seek help while I became lost within myself.
Somehow I got lucky. My new therapist seems wonderful. She has a kind voice, and she genuinely seemed engaged when I spoke about the things I’ve lived through. I can’t explain why I went with the first therapist I contacted, but a tiny voice inside me said, “this one.” When she asked me to fill out the pre paperwork, she asked if I had any trauma. In that millisecond, I finally stopped running and decided I didn’t need to be strong. I said “yes.”
While I have documented my sexual assault by my boss on here before, I have lived through a lot of other extremely dark things. Situations that I don’t feel comfortable putting out in the world, I will say this: I’m essentially a statistic for many things that can go horribly wrong to a female.
One thing she was gauging me on was to see if I may suffer from PTSD because my scores were pushing me there. However, that I don’t avoid situations that have caused me trauma means I don’t qualify. Part of me didn’t like that response because, for most of my trauma, there’s no way to avoid it. As I keep finding out, Jupiter/Gardens is a small ass town and the only way to avoid being triggered would be to move.
But fuck that. I’m not leaving my hometown. This is the place I’ve always wanted to raise my kids. It’s a wonderful community offering more in one location than any other community I’ve lived in. Another reason I throw my middle finger in the air at the idea of avoiding things is that I won’t be the victim. I am stronger than that. Those people who have bruised my soul will not now or ever win.
After an hour of jumping around and explaining pieces of myself to this woman with a trusting voice, I felt drained. However, even though we didn’t dive that much into the crap burdening my soul, I felt a small sense of relief. One that I can only hope will grow.
When your brain thinks it’s still in its twenties but you’re closer to forty. You looked at my hands and wondered who they belong to? Why do they seem to belong to a person who is decades older than you? You wonder if someone has replaced my skin with an alligator’s. There are days when you wonder how you’re an adult and you need an adultier adult to fix the situation, but you are the adultier adult now.
I wonder how I’m in charge of helping the three young beings grow into being adults. It feels overwhelming and exhausting and rewarding all at the same time. I wonder if I’m going to fail? How much will I give to watch them succeed? I know I will never give up, but how much of myself will I have to sacrifice for them?
I feel the same way about my students.
I know my seniors, for the most part, really don’t give a fuck.
They just want to graduate and get out of school. I grasp that mindset completely. I wanted to do the same thing at their age. But my younger students I work hand in hand with. I try to make sure, as many of them as possible, understand what we are doing and how to create different things. But it’s just so frustrating and demoralizing when some of your students either won’t do the work or lie to their parents and say that I don’t care. I can only do so much. I am only one person. But I will never brush a student aside. I am always willing to help them. I make myself available outside school hours; they have my phone number, and know that they can text me if there’s ever an issue. I just really wish sometimes I could record my classes and show the students who put no effort and how I call them out in class. When I ask them where their assignment is and show their parents the shrug or nonchalant response that I receive. You would think I was asking them to recreate End Game instead of requesting them to put just the tiniest bit of effort into their schoolwork.
I have enough shit on my plate to deal with. I’m not completely sure why I thought being a teacher could be rewarding. Thankfully, transitioning to high school there have been more positive days than bad. However, on days like this, where I already hate myself, I just wonder if it is easier to return to the newsroom. Maybe 2am wake-up calls weren’t truly that bad.
I’m a millennial *queue annoying montage of people saying that over and over again.* But I am and growing up we were force fed the idea that college was our only option for a good life. However, as we know now, our generation is the over educated and grossly underpaid. So when the topic of “If you could un-invent something, what would it be?” was presented, I had a bunch of options run through my head. Did I wish for social media to disappear? Could bombs not been invented? Maybe I wished for AI to vanish? But as I was driving to work, a different thought crossed my mind. I wish the push for college education had never been invented.
Now I can hear people saying that colleges have been around for hundreds of years. But I am not talking about being rid of higher education. I am talking about the propaganda that college is the only option for a successful future. I’m pretty sure my generation is a prime example of what can go wrong in a short amount of time if we rid ourselves of trades. We have a world filled with consumers and hardly any people who know how to produce. People complain about how hard it is to find someone to fix their AC or plumbing. Well yeah, we were told growing up that those jobs were beneath us. That no one of value should want to work with their hands. But now we’re seeing how untrue that logic is.
There’s a social media trend discussing how millennials are skipping the midlife crisis phase and jumping right onto “grandparent hobbies.” I mean, do you blame us? We burnt out. We didn’t spend our lives outside like wild men like our parents did. Our parents kept a watchful eye on us because they had the chance to be free. They wanted us to experience opportunities they never had, and the advancement of technology pushed us in that direction. We were the generation of kids who took AP classes and dual enrollment classes, so we had a head start on college. Millennials don’t need to have a midlife crisis. Most of us had one during college or our twenties, as the world fell to shit for the third time.
Now I look at my gen-z students and see how that process has amplified. Some of the most creative kids are being told they are failures because they don’t test well. However, I am proud of my school because we have a construction and automotive academy. These are amazing opportunities for our students to work with their hands. Also, my program of TV production is another outlet for students to challenge themselves outside of core classes. Within these programs, we are pushing students to earn their certification for the software or skills they have learned. Certifications are being more sought by employers over college degrees. We are giving students the opportunity to obtain them without the high cost they would have to pay if they were an adult trying to earn them.
The shift in employers’ expectations is giving me hope for the younger generation. May now they will branch out into other professions without the stigma my generation faced. It would be nice to see blue-collar jobs appreciated for their worth. Because if we don’t have HVAC technicians, plumbers, mechanics of any kind, our world will fall apart. We need to encourage students to get out there and get dirty. Not everyone is meant to sit in an office all day. Not everyone is meant to write a twenty-page paper on the meaning of the color red in a film. Some people are meant to build homes, have grease under their fingernails, and make sure the world can still run. We need those people.
