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.
Unbound 