Finally some good news!

It's been a week since I last wrote, probably the longest break I've taken from this blog.  I needed it.  Had to apply to a bunch of places for teaching work - which seemingly endless task will continue this week.  I had a realization:  I need a job, as in a full-time job, as in not adjuncting, not just freelancing - a real job, teaching preferably so the PhD doesn't have to seem entirely meaningless, on which status it now flutters.  I also would like to not be continually plagued with money anxiety.  I feel a bit like I'm giving in to something, put perhaps at 48, it's just adulthood.  I've given permanent adolescence a long run.  Wouldn't trade it.  But right now, would like a break in the action so I can catch my breath, have some health insurance and maybe afford a decent apartment.  Crazy talk, I know.

So, what's the good news?  I'm teaching my Cutting It Up workshop on Saturday at The Brecht Forum and so far a good sized group has signed up for it, including folks coming in from Washington D.C., Boston and Philadelphia.  This kind of blows my mind.  People are making a trip into NYC to take my workshop.  Perhaps it's because it coincides with Easter, Passover and Spring break, but for whatever reason, I'm delighted...especially since we thought the group would be really small because Passover and Easter coincide this year. Oddly enough the first day of Passover is on Good Friday, which just seems like some sort of existential joke between the Old and New Testament God/s or something...Kierkegaard would get a laugh out of it anyway.  Can't speak for the Jewish scholars simply because it's not my patch. Anyone want to comment on that, please feel free.

Was asked by the extraordinarily supportive Martin Denton to do a guest blog post on Indie Theater .  This is about the workshop and how this work relates to my writing.  If you're interested, you can link to it here.  That probably helped bump up the numbers for the workshop.  Speaking of which, if you're interested in the workshop itself, come on by on Saturday or if you can't make it April 7, come on by May 12.  Would be lovely to meet you!

It is now also - praise Jesus Allah Buddha Mohammed Vishnu Kali and Whomever Else Desires  Praise - spring break this week.  I am beyond exhausted, so am grateful for this.

However, I have enjoyed teaching this week.  My acting class, as always is a joy, but a surprise was my interpersonal communications class - when two different students today handing in their research papers said - and I quote - "Thanks for this assignment, I really enjoyed doing this work."  Please re-read that.  Please understand where I teach and feel the miracle.  I almost cried.

After months of grading short essays, driving the students insane by requiring writing (not to mention driving myself insane by needing to mark all these essays - in homework, on tests, etc.), there was this unsolicited response.  I was floored, in a good way.  Just when you start thinking: what's the point?  Why do I do this much work?  No one cares.  No one even seems to be listening in class.  I wonder if perhaps I may be the most boring teacher on earth, etc., this happens and it seems, at least for one afternoon, all worthwhile.

Beyond that, I feel I am beginning to find my footing in these unfamiliar classes, beginning to allow whatever passes for the 'real me' into the classroom.  Last autumn I was so scared that while I was present, I felt like a cardboard cut out of a teacher - someone following rules others had laid down and hoping no one would find out that I was only 2 pages ahead (which last autumn I was - not that I lied to anyone who hired me - they knew that - so at least I didn't have to worry about the administration - I just felt for the students).

I love teaching my own work so much, however, that this Saturday just seems like a 6 hour play date to me, not like work at all.  That is an amazing feeling.

But I also feel that this dragging students along into maybe actually, for a moment, enjoying writing has value, too, even if that work is much more taxing and definitely feels Like Work.

The other good news if you want to call it that is that I really Felt this past week that the grieving, sitting through all the emotions surrounding, the separating from B and our impending divorce is like detoxing from alcohol and drugs.  In other words, the marriage was a state of being, one that was clearly getting increasingly toxic and so to move away from it is going to feel as disorienting as getting sober.  That process can take years and I believe this process will also take years.  I don't know when I will be ready to get involved with another person, because I really, really, really need to find a way to believe in myself as OK - by myself.  I don't mean by that that I don't want to be with someone else again, because that's not true.  I simply mean that I want to go into any new relationship as a whole person.

I am a whole person, that's not the problem - it's my perception of myself as Not a whole person that is the problem.  The part of myself that feels I need to Perform in all ways to deserve to draw breath on this planet and certainly in order to be with another person.  This is gut wrenching work and means going through what I am increasingly seeing as emotional DTs - wherein strange hallucinations appear and there be dragons.  Of course there not be dragons.  The dragons are dream figures.  I know that once I can see them that way, but in moments they seem quite distressingly real.

A few days ago I called and regaled my mother for about an hour with said dragons, which she did a brilliant job of helping me see as shadows - not by haranguing me or saying "hey, those are dragons, you fool!" but by listening and helping me see this myself.  I have good friends who help me this way, too, and for whom I do the same.  Without these friends and family, I know this journey would be impossible.

These people who love me, one of whom also includes my cousin Darcy who I finally got to speak with last week, keep me sane and let me know there is love and allow me, in moments, to feel loveable, when I'm about to throw in the towel on myself.  I don't mean by that I am suicidal by the way, because I'm not.  It just means a kind of giving up that would mean not physical death but living life in a husk-like way, skating on a surface of wafer-thin ice...therefore always afraid of really skating, hovering at the edge of the pond, clinging to branches of trees, hoping not to fall into the ice-cold water...mixing metaphors and never really resolving them kind of like this sentence...OK, forgive me.  You get the idea.  I'm too tired to mop that one up.

In fact, I'm too tired to keep writing.  But did want to post something.  I will eventually post some lovely spring photos from Central Park but too tired to upload those right now, too...

Oh speaking of which, my sublet is coming to an end on June 1, so I'm looking for a place to live - in case any of you out there are in NYC and know me - just a heads up on that.  Was hoping to stay here this summer and not have to move again but them's the breaks with subletting.

Have cat, will travel...somewhere within NYC...that is affordable.  Wish me luck.

I close out this post listening to a chance-operations version of Handel by Gavin Breyers (sp?) thanks to Jonathan Schaffer's 'New Sounds' on WNYC, which was preceded by a piece by Alvin Lucier that used dolphin sonar locators.  Sometimes life is just so good.

The miracle of true fellowship and friendship

As anyone who read the last post knows, I was feeling about as low as a person can feel yesterday.  That lasted into today.  Teaching was hard.

I then started calling friends, and they started calling back.  After each phone call, I felt a little bit better.  Later in the evening I went to a meeting with more friends, some known and some unknown, and celebrated my 25 years of life without alcohol or drugs.  Other people were celebrating their anniversaries and we were telling stories, laughing, sharing pain - emotional, physical and every other kind - talking about walking through fires without the use of substances to dull the pain.  The gift is - after the walk - feeling joy, what Rumi would call "the sweetness that comes after grief."

We went to a diner and ate chocolate cake, drank coffee and talked with, to and at each other - laughing, listening, not listening - a muddle of humanity, people who you would normally not see sitting together.  You can see the confusion in other customers at the diner: who are these lunatics laughing their asses off - how do they know each other, they all look so different.  The miracle of our true connection transcends all the boundaries we usually observe in this country between class, race and various status groups, careers, styles, etc...the bullshit boundaries that in this atmosphere, happily, dissolve.

So now, I feel loved, human, vulnerable, OK and definitely: not alone.

I find this simple human contact and connection a miracle.  It has saved my life in every way for 25 years.

Thanks all you friends of BW and LW.  Wherever you are.

Thanks, too, to my civilian friends who reach out their hands with equal love and devotion for no other reason that this simple, beautiful fact: they are my friends.

I love you all, more than I can say.  Thank you.  I can walk through this fire because of you all, even those of you I've never met.  You can, too.

Weird, sad day and I'm too damn busy to even have time to cry it out

Had a very sad conversation with my soon-to-be-ex-husband today.  We haven't talked in months and I was kind of looking forward to speaking with him - until we spoke.  He is apparently now "more comfortable" that we have been separated for a while - which sentiment made me feel about as worthless as thimble full of shit. There is history here, meaning my history, for taking it this way, I'm aware of that, but still...Then we get to talking about divorce stuff, etc.  It seems there is some urgency here on his end.  He wants to be free and clear obviously.  I feel like a disease, the plague - something of that order.  It's not pretty.

I don't think he's trying to make me feel that way, just to be clear, but that's how it feels nonetheless.

He mentioned, because I was stupid enough to ask, that he's had "some flings."  I said that I had not, which seemed to surprise him.  His surprise surprised me because I have not ever been the "fling" type, which is kinda Julia 101.  Maybe I made this up but I thought when we first got together we both felt this way, but did he?  I don't know what of my memories of our relationship to believe right now.  I wonder at times if I made up the last 10 years.  It's that time of the separation - the time of the Stranger - the Who Are You? stage...through the looking glass.  I remember this bit.  Another repeat, last seen in a slightly different chord circa 2000.  I hate it.

I feel like that stupid-ass song those of you of a certain age will remember, the grating "I'll never fall in love again" - but without the sappy defiance - just a statement of sad, worthless thimble full of shit feeling fact.

Rejection sucks.  It doesn't matter what the fuck, whether it's the best thing that ever happened on God's green earth that you separated, it sucks.

And then I had to go get my teaching evaluation and pull an acting class out of my ass.  And yes, of course, I did.  Anyone who knows me knows that I did and can pull an acting class, rehearsal, show, PhD examination, whatever the fuck out of my ass even if the sky is falling in.  It's a "gift."  Ok, it probably is a gift, OK, OK...whatever.

Anyway, the evaluation was great - I'm a really good acting teacher.  I love being an acting teacher.  This continues to astonish me on all levels.  This does not feel like second best.  Teaching this class is giving me the same joy working in my own labs did or being in rehearsals has.  I just fucking love it.  And I really hope I get asked back, but because of the vagaries of adjuncting, there's no way to know if I will.

I found out on Saturday that I also love being an aunt.  I never really thought I'd be an aunt other than an honorary one, but my step-brother's son, Carson, was up in NYC and I showed him and his lovely girlfriend, Quinn, around the East Village.  They are theater kids (18 year olds from Florida), so showed them all the downtown places from PS122 to St Marks to La Mama to Red Room, The Public, New York Theater Workshop, The Kraine...and the travesty that is the boarded up Charas...told him the history of the area in my experience from 1981 onward...Tompkins Square Park, the squatters, Life Cafe and Rent, Allen Ginsburg, St. Marks books, East Village books...the Russian baths...diners that still exist and those that have closed.  We all had a blast.

My good friend Spencer who also is childless said to me recently that it comforted hum when he remembered as a teenager the adults that were the most influential on his life were all childless.  And I thought - hmm, I think that may have been true for me, too.  We - the childless - have the time.  We can hang out.  We are not burned out by being parents or besotted with one or two children who are Ours.  It's kind of cool.

Then Sunday had to spend An Entire Day Grading Midterms for my other class (not acting).  70 students in all.  You can imagine.  Horrendous.

I have so much to do this week and no time to do it.  So today after the phone call from hell, I had to talk with some folks including my mother to deal with the emotional black hole, all the while thinking: but I'm supposed to be writing stuff about my workshop at The Brecht Forum for posting on this and that website...but that I could not pull out of my ass.  I just cried and cried like a baby.  The only thing that got me out of the house was the acting class.

Once back had to post midterm grades and try to eat.  As doing both was watching Pretty in Pink, which I somehow managed to miss in 1986, and that made me cry some more (it's actually a pretty good film and record of teenage life circa 1980s).  When feeling as I do, seeing tales of young love is not wise.  I am neither in love nor young and feel as remote from both of them as one can feel.  New wrinkles appeared on my forehead today or were grooved in more deeply.

I should also be applying for teaching positions and am trying to cram that in along with everything else - like teaching, marking and having emotions...too much apparently.

So there it is my sorry tale of woe with nice bits mixed in...because it's all the truth.  If anyone wants to assure me that I am not too old for love and not past it, you are certainly welcome to do that, either in private or on this blog.  I could use a little propping up right now - just exhausted trying to keep the cardboard cut-out standing up all by myself.

Oh but before I leave off, a sincere and loving RIP to Adrienne Rich who died today.  An amazing poet and human.  Bless her for her wise words and brave life.

Go see GATZ by Elevator Repair Service at The Public - astounding

OK, so ever since I first read about Elevator Repair Service's show GATZ wherein an office worker reads the entire text of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which leads to his co-workers acting out the book in their office setting, I thought: that sounds brilliant.  I have wanted to see it for years and finally got my chance today at The Public Theater - all 6 1/2 hours of it.

I cannot say enough good things about the production itself or the brilliance of F. Scott Fitzgerald's book. I read it in high-school and loved it then (especially as a scholarship student at a boarding school, I could relate on a pretty visceral level to the Gatsby motif - the outsider who attempts to penetrate the inner sanctum of extreme wealth and privilege and finds himself thwarted in many ways small and large).  On the off chance you don't know the book and want to see the production with little knowledge of the story, I won't go into too many details.

But here's the thing: Fitzgerald wrote perhaps a perfect book that works on the micro-personal level and that resonates even now close to 90 years later on a political-philosophical level.  It has an almost mythical, tragic feel to it in the way it circles around and punctures with precision the illusory nature of the American Dream even for someone (Gatsby) who believes in it with all his heart and Almost achieves it, but then falls fatally short.  The last lines of the book make it clear that Fitzgerald believes this is true always - the green light on the other side of the bay seeming tantalizingly close, but is forever out of reach.

Even more extraordinary is that each sentence is necessary and works on at least two if not more levels.  Fitzgerald's words are meant to be read aloud (this becomes clear as you hear them read by the extraordinary Scott Shepherd - who reads the whole book night after night - that alone is amazing...).  Apparently, Fitzgerald read his words aloud to himself as he wrote.  The experience of hearing the whole book would bear this out.

The brilliance of ERS is that they decided to put this jazz age story in a contemporary, rather shabby looking office and populate the story with office workers.  This environment adds another layer of metaphor onto an already metaphor-rich novel.  It also keeps it from seeming nostalgic or dated in any way.  Further, the office set itself is in a liminal state between modern and slightly old (like the office of an off-off Broadway theater company, say whose office is furnished by Materials for the Arts).  The office worker who plays Gatsby (the amazing Jim Fletcher) types at an old-school typewriter.  Nick (Shepherd) tries unsuccessfully to boot up his computer, which leads to his discovery of the book that he begins reading.

There is also a gradual trajectory over the 6 1/2 hours from a literal office environment in which the book is an intrusion and the reader is an office worker to a gradual clearing of the space - not entirely - it's still an office but much more spare - able to evoke possible other realities (due in no small part to the extraordinary lighting design of Mark Barton, the gorgeously subtle, evocative and visibly orchestrated sound design by performer/designer Ben Williams and the deceptively simple but quite ingenious set design of Louisa Thompson).  By the end Shepherd transforms from a guy reading a book to the narrator himself, speaking directly to us, the audience.  After spending 6 hours, the space we share becomes obvious, the sound of his voice and his presence is intimate.  Fitzgerald's words resonate from 1925 to us in 2012 as a revelation all over again.

All of the actors are great.  The decisions about when/how to create certain moments from the text (which I sense were created by the actors and directors in collaboration) are done in such a masterful way, sometimes before, simultaneous to or after the text.  Sometimes carelessness is shown via a seeming accident with a drinking glass or throwing a large idea away is evoked by throwing a paper into a file cabinet.  Something being distasteful shown as a literal distaste on the tongue or delays happening onstage after the mention of delay in the text.  This does not take away from the feeling tone of the piece, though.  While there is no direct play at 'being emotional' and we always know we are in a theater, this gives space for the audience to respond, as it did tonight, in a visceral way.  They aren't having the emotions for us or trying to make us Feel anything, so we can.

ERS has been performing this piece since 2005 and it shows in the best possible way.  The ensemble is tight, people work off of each other with turn on a dime precision.  Many of the actors have been involved with ERS since its inception in 1992 and that shows, too.  John Collins has built an astounding company and in this piece the whole company has created an extraordinary show.

I rarely use this many positive adjectives in any review or writing about a piece of theater.  This was a privilege to experience.  Tonight, we gave the show a standing ovation, which it richly deserved.

If you want a theatrical experience that will restore your faith in theater, the power of words and the ability to evoke tragedy without being in the least bit nostalgic or sentimental, this is your show.

staying still enough to feel the profound exhaustion

It's simple: I'm exhausted...on a profound level.  In some ways this exhaustion is from the past few years, in some ways it's exhaustion I've been keeping at bay since I was a child.  I kept it at bay because it was not safe enough to be tired.  I don't remember ever sleeping very well, though that doesn't mean I never did.  My memories are of restlessness.  The crazy babysitter I referred to back in January 29 post used to keep me up until 2 or 3am and make me scrambled eggs with ham.

Then there's all the moving we did, from the beginning.  Born in Providence, move 2 weeks later to Milford, moved after that from one house to another.  My father and mother splitting when I am 2, and I am left at my grandparents' place.  A few months or so later when I am 3, my mother arrives with new step-father, and we move to Maine.  In Maine we move 4-5 times, that is unclear, but at least: Peaks Island, Bangor, Pembroke, Gorham.  These moves happen within 3 years.  Then we move back to Peaks Island with another father.  Then to Waterford, Connecticut.  We live there for 3 years, interrupted by my 3-4 month stint with Mrs. Levine (the babysitter) in New London.  Then I am shipped to my grandparents in Cape Cod, to live on sofa to wait for father to summon me to San Francisco.  That doesn't happen. Remain on sofa for 2 more years.  Eventually brought back to Providence, where my mother and father no. 3 live.  2 years later, my mother and father no. 3 divorce, and I get a scholarship to boarding school in Connecticut, so go there each year and come back to another place in Providence with my mother, until the last year, when she gets together with eventual father no. 4 and they move to Washington, D.C.  I go home one vacation from boarding school to a place I'd never been in my life.  The next summer, I live in D.C., then go to university, back in Connecticut.  The next year I move to NYC to work in a theater.  The next year back to university.  The summer is spent in San Francisco. The next year to Italy for art school.  The next year back to university and finally graduate.  Then in the autumn move to San Francisco.  Take a breath.  Get sober.  Come back to Connecticut in summer to teach.  Back to San Francisco, to Palo Alto for PhD program, leave within a month, back to San Francisco.  Move in with roommates for about a year, then a studio, then move back to NYC after that.  Within NYC move to 5 different apartments.

Long pause while staying in one apartment from 1993-2003, but within that time lose one husband, live alone then live with man who will become my second husband.

2003 - move to London accidentally and live in 3 different places until 2011.  Travel to many countries during my time there and get a PhD from a university in Northampton.  Get pregnant, married and lose baby in 2007 then eventually in 2011 separate from second husband and move back to NYC in October.

So you can see why I might be tired and why, aside from that one time in NYC, I have little experience being in one place.  Also, during my whole adult life I have been focused on at least two full-time adventures most of the time.  Needing to make money and make my work, the two rarely happening at the same time.  Some blessed years yes but not many.

So now I am doing my teaching and precious little else.  Going to meetings, doing some yoga at home and meditation.  I am beginning on my writing project and will be teaching some workshops.

Still I keep thinking: you should do this and that and the other thing, but - probably due to meditation and a good friend's counsel, I am not.  I am sitting in the profound discomfort of a jonesing workaholic waiting for her fix.

Because of this, I am now in touch with this exhaustion - which feels both physical and emotional - like my whole entire fucking life is catching up with me.  From age dot onward I was a workaholic kid - always writing, poems, numbers whatever, doing something...was not allowed TV so was reading a lot too.  No complaint there, by the way.

But there was no space to grieve any losses, feel any pain.  I did go on crying jags when I was very little and when my mother was around and we were alone, she did comfort me through those.  But I think after the Mrs. Levine episode, I totally shut down.  There was no more room for any feelings.  I don't think I exactly had a rich inner life beforehand but whatever was there was snuffed out, especially by the time I ended up on my grandparents' sofa.

So guess what?  Getting my feelings back kinda sucks.  Doesn't make it any less necessary, but it sucks, it's painful and frankly I don't like it one little bit (as if I had a say in it - ha!).

My tiny little prayer to the universe is that whatever the fuck this process is all about that it is of benefit to others in some way.  I think it helps my teaching and my service work.  I have college students that come and cry to me now, literally, and I give hugs and help guide them through stuff.  I doubt that would be happening if I was cut off from the neck down.  I can hear them and see them, and that is good.  I can help others going through excruciating pain.  That is good.

Saw a Patti Smith documentary late last night and now remember her lyric "Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand."  She has suffered.  She is a mistress of grieving and working through it to create amazing gorgeous gentle angry music, poems, art.  I don't know what I will create out of this.  Haven't the littlest clue.

I have created a largish body of work but feel something new is coming and I really haven't the vaguest what it will look like.  Maybe it's in this writing project about my grandmothers, maybe something else. Maybe it's something completely new.

This is all I believe right now: I need to let it emerge.  As the wise woman said last Friday I cannot sculpt myself.  My higher power's will for me is to become who I am...even if that is always becoming, multiple, shifting...it's who I am now...and now...and now.  The longer I try to control this, the longer I prolong my suffering.  But I can't force myself to let go of this process anymore than I can force anything else.  The paradox.

Time to allow for the exhaustion.  Time for stillness.

I may begin writing here a lot less.  I already am writing less.  I don't want to just churn out words for no reason.  Tonight though wanted to note this process...

Now, to rest...

Words of wisdom heard today

Sometimes when you are feeling at your lowest, you are lucky enough to hear someone truly wise.  Because of the meetings I go to regularly, I think I may have an above average chance of that happening, but today was spectacular.

I was in a bad state, even after meditating a long time, in a swirl of negativity.  I got to this meeting, and the woman speaking who has been in recovery for close to four decades reminded us that we don't sculpt ourselves.  Instead we allow ourselves to discover and become who we are.

This may sound simple, but it's not.  Or rather it may be simple but it's not easy.  To allow oneself to become whomever one is supposed to be means letting go of All preconceptions either of one's own or from outside as to what/who one Should become.  That's really hard.  It's also crucial to allow whomever one is to emerge - even if that is fluid, the shoulds still need to fall away for the multiplicities of one's own to dance to their own unique beat.

I spoke with this woman after the meeting, and she said that what I am going through right now is grieving, not self-pity or depression (except inasmuch as that is part of the grieving process) and that grieving has a life of its own.  She said ever since her mother died eight years ago, her life has rearranged itself.  A few years ago she was telling a friend that she wished she could have her life back, and her friend said: this is your life.

Yes.

Maybe, she said to me, you're not supposed to be a workaholic anymore.  Maybe this is the new way.

This is your life.

Like they said to the unsuspecting subject in the show back in the day....

This evening I had a conversation with Rik who directed the reading of We live in financial times, and the 'plan' had been to talk about that, which we did a bit, but then the conversation veered off into an unexpected direction talking about educational outreach and ways I could bring my vision of teaching theater to fruition in our community, especially bridging the great East and West of Broadway divide (that seems utterly senseless to me on a million levels, but is a holdover of racism, classism and every kind of stereotyping on both sides of the divide - I know this because I live on one side and teach on the other).  This is truly exciting and allows my excitement about teaching at Hunter to have another possible outlet.  The more the merrier.

I just now spent hours working on my grandmother project, pouring over old poems of Jani's, answering questions I had about her life through them.  Matching it against the writing I have already done - seeing I got some things right by wild guessing and some things wrong.  Staring at photos of her with her first husband that I never met.  Seeing what I could discern from these photos about the nature of their relationship, trying to remember that in those photos she is only 20 years old.  People looked more mature then I think, their hairstyles, clothing and such, so if you saw that photo without knowing, you would assume she was in her mid-late twenties, not the child she was, holding a baby like a kind of trophy but clearly without even the vaguest clue what to do with Barbara Jane, her first child.  The poem of hers I found about giving birth to Barbara is all about pain.  Seriously, just pain.  I mean I know childbirth is painful and all, but wow.

Reading Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily about her parents (Lessing having also been born the same year as both my grandmothers, but still alive) talks about how great it would have been if people like her mother had never had to have had children.  She talks about how great it is that women can go through life without children these days and how horrendous it would be for women to leave work and go back home to raise the children, because then they'd be like her mother from whom she spent her whole life trying to escape.  Her mother who basically said, as did/do many, I could have been this or that or the other thing, but then I had children and all that was over.  Basically the women's version of "I coulda been a contendah."

To walk through these poems, Jani's writing, Dick's photos, etc. is to walk through so much sadness.  Jani did try to reach her potential and in many ways did but at such a personal cost (not aided by her battles with various addictions).  Dick (Betty) never did.  But what does that really mean?  That's a whole other question and as it is 4am and I've been working most of the night on this, I'm going to wrap up this post and report back on that later.

Here's to the unexpected turn in the road, the rip tide, the brisk wind, whatever it is that blows you off your chosen path (chosen by whom?) onto the one you're actually on...walking by faith, even when (especially when) you don't believe in a damn thing.

The Trauma of Being Observed & The Grace of Not Knowing

OK, any of you out there who are teachers know what I'm talking about.  It's that time of year again, when someone comes into your classroom to Observe you teaching.  Horrendous.  I was observed back to back at both places I teach this week.

I felt the teaching went pretty well in both cases but the cosmic dread I felt, amplified in one case by mispronouncing the name of the person observing me (in my defense, we had never met, but still...it's up there in the irretrievable gaffe camp).

After both classes, I nitpicked myself to death and in one case (the mispronunciation case) decided this person would only say dreadful thing about me consequently.  Now the irony here is that I just taught a chapter on self-concept and how self-esteem affects self-concept and that those with low self-esteem do not act well while being observed, whereas people with high self-esteem shine.

I think, given that, I have either (a) schizophrenic self-esteem or (b) medium self-esteem or (c) self-esteem in things I know really well but in the basement when teaching something I don't know as well or am taking a risk that may or may not be working.

Before all this observing business, I was also rejected by a writing residency, so my so-called self-esteem was not at its highest level.

I wish, oh I do wish, how I wish that I believed what I say.  I say: oh, it doesn't matter.  Oh, yeah, being an artist means lots of criticism and rejection.  Hey look at van Gogh, Kafka, Emily Dickinson!  Oh, yeah, sure, I'm used to that.  Oh, yeah, sure, not everyone will like me.  No problem.

Lies.  All lies.

Reality: one person in a room of 500 doesn't like me.  All 499 other people do.  Guess who I notice?  That one.

Reality: every piece of criticism hurts like hell, especially when it's about my artistic work.

Reality: I can now accept, for real, constructive criticism...which is an improvement But if I don't agree with the criticism, I am not good at fighting back (another sign of positive self-esteem: being able to defend yourself against criticism).

You know how many years it's taken me to admit how worthless I actually feel?  This many years.  Even though it feels like eating glass, at least it's real.  I'm not deluding myself into some kind of piece of shit the world revolves around stance wherein I can diminish all critics in order not to feel the sting of the criticism.

On the other hand, for the record and all that...I do wish I was not so affected by criticism and rejection.  I wish I did have a modicum of healthy, actual, real self-respect.  I am guessing/hoping that staring at this steaming pile of shit called my self-concept means I'm on my way there in real life rather than in name only.

I can be equally swayed by positive feedback, and perhaps in some ways that can be even more dangerous (oh you think I'm good at this, OK, watch me do it again and again and again...applause please!)...but in any case the point is: it comes from somewhere else and where it needs to come from is me.  Not that I be impervious to others' opinions but neither swayed unduly.

On the good side, I am still working on my writing.  I have survived the traumatic observations, and now have to wait - impatiently - for the results.  I do know I did my best, was prepared and showed up. This is actually all I can do.  However, with one of them I was dreading it in a more despairing way because I thought the class (reviewing for a midterm) was going to be about as interesting as watching paint dry and think I may have made my own experience harder by that dread.  Thank goodness for meditation and prayer, without which I may have simply imploded.

Another good moment: having students in both classes ask me questions privately about things in their lives that are fairly intimate.  I feel good that I can answer some of these questions, hear them out and give good guidance.  This reminds me of the most important thing of all: I don't actually know why I am anywhere doing anything.  The most seemingly 'random' situation may lead me to a situation where I may be of more profound service than anywhere I could plan or expect.  This is not to diminish my artistic work, which I believe/hope is a form of service, but it's not the only kind and it's not really for me to say what is most important.

Back and back and back to the same place (a la Raymond Carver): if you should be dead, but you are alive by grace: "all the rest is gravy."

This ain't my show.  Over to You.