Tag: healing

Musings, Teaching, Unbound

Reality Bites

Carrie Villarreal

Three and a half weeks. Twenty-three days. Five hundred fifty-two hours. Thirty-three thousand one hundred twenty minutes. That is how much time remains until Christmas break.

It’s a bit comical that school resumed from a week long Thanksgiving break today and I am already counting down until the next one.  Don’t get me wrong. I love my job. I have the best kids that a freshman Pre-AP English teacher could wish for.

It’s just that I feel I can’t hear myself between the shuffling of papers, clickety-clack of keyboards, white noise of whispered conversations and sometimes garbage truck rumblings of class discussions, and the high pitched bleating of a period bell. Even now I am struggling to really put out what I mean because thoughts of tomorrow’s lessons and papers that need to be graded are vortex within me.

Last night, I wasn’t tired when it became time for bed. I wanted to write, but the words were stuck behind the grading, planning, and professional development I felt I should’ve done over the break. Instead, I stayed up to watch a few episodes of the show I’m currently bingeing. Two and a half hours after I should’ve been asleep, I lay stationery in bed while my mind raced against the coming of an early morning.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a few tendrils of light filtering through my curtains lit up the edge of the journal on my nightstand like an invitation. I tried to remember when I had last written an entry and what that entry had concerned. I knew then the real question should have been why haven’t I written in so long.

Before the Thanksgiving break, I was a frenetic madwoman on the precipice of panic. I teetered back and forth in the cacophony of sound that was my day to day, and my ability to be who was needed in the classroom and in my relationship started to fail. Over the break, I had the chance to listen and to write and to renew. I knew this is what I needed, of course. It’s just sometimes that voice is drowned out by life.

Looking at the neglected pages of the journal, I was promptly reminded that I am only as successful as my ability to hear myself emptied upon the page.

In response to Daily Prompt: Bite
Featured Image: Pixabay – “Silence” by pasja1000 (CCO Public Domain)
Musings, Unbound

Taking Flight

Carrie Villarreal

A little over a year ago after my mother passed away, I sat down and created a space to share my thoughts and writings. This space, actually. In my ambition, I thought: “Surely, I am at the stage in my grieving process where I can begin to write and heal my heart.” Turns out, grief is a tricky thing, and it is not as linear as I once believed.

On July 8, 2015, my mother passed away. Even today when I say this out loud to people, the air goes out of my lungs and there is the sting of tears as I remember the switches being turned off, the audible silence of breaths being held, the unending screech of a flat-line, and the soft, damp patter of the CPAP machine artificially inflating her lungs even though she had already flown away. Then this millisecond memory passes, my breath returns, the tears don’t fall, and with a bittersweet smile, I can say, “My mom passed away. She prayed for God to take away her pain, and He did.”

It’s hard to deny that she’s no longer of this earth, no bargaining to be made, so I’ve spent the better part of the past year and a half between anger, depression, and acceptance. Admittedly, acceptance has been tough. It’s hard accepting that the world just moves on when you know it’s lost something so precious. Yet the sun continues to rise, oceans continue to kiss their many shores, oxygen continues to fill your lungs, you wake up, you go about your day, you go to sleep, and you find that, after awhile, you are moving on, too.

That’s really what this is all about. Moving on. Taking flight. Letting go of the pain and filling myself with purpose. Finding truth and solace in the infinite arrangement of 26 letters. I am still grieving and wrestling with anger and depression, but I accept that this is natural. I accept that, though this will never go away, it will lessen over time. I accept this grief, slightly cracked and antiqued on the edges but beautiful nonetheless, is a part of myself.

A little over a year ago after my mother passed away, I sat down and created a space to share my thoughts and writings. Today, I give true thanks to her memory and take flight.

Featured Image: Pixabay –  “Dandelion” by Comfreak (CC0 Public Domain)