Humans

I’m seriously stressed out. I have a school of fish swimming inside my brain, squirming around and chewing on my cortex. It’s insane how much one person can endure. As a teacher, I see kids suffer through chaos and heartache and pain, and not just the normal, teenage angst. These kids have problems, but don’t we all? I can’t find focus because of the stacks of papers I have to grade and the book club book I didn’t have time to read and writing a speech and graduation obligations and letters of recommendation I need to write and lessons I must create and I have to move in the middle of it all. These may not seem like huge problems but they are for me. And I can’t stop thinking about you and the aching I have to hear your voice. I try to drown it, smother it with lists of priorities and papers, but I always come back to you. And I seem so insignificant in the face of the odds set against my kids and I feel like I shouldn’t complain. But maybe that’s what makes me human, makes them human. Our worries and fears and doubts and stresses are our own to bear, to share, to witness with. I know what my students feel because I remember how it felt to be them. I feel the same now but with bits of peppered wisdom. They don’t tell you this when you’re young–we never feel grown up. We are always that young girl madly in love with the dangerous boy whose skin is inked with rebellion. No matter how many bills we pay or how many jobs we lose, we will always be who we started out to be, we will always feel like our sixteen year old selves, in wild love and wide awake with eyes towards the horizon.