Posts Tagged → resilience

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

Ultimately nothing did happen

This blog wasn’t exactly a new year’s resolution; it just so happened that I started blogging again at the beginning of a new year and was somewhat resolved to blog every day. Like any pedestrian chump, though, I fell off after about a month.

Sad!

The trick is, I’ve learned, not to beat yourself up over resolutions that you make. Buddhists always say “Everyone suffers,” but if I could add a western spin to that idea, I’d say, “Everyone fails.”

It’s just true. No matter what you do, how often you do it, how good you are at it, or whether or not that thing is your passion, you will have setbacks and you will eventually face failure.

Imagine two people who make a resolution to go jogging every morning. Both people, being regular people, will eventually fail at this resolution in some wayshaperform. It just happens — they have a sick day or they forget to set an alarm or the ground is covered in ice — the world conspires against them and they can’t jog.

Womp womp! But how do they react to this failure; that’s the question.

Person A says to themselves, “My perfect record is tainted! I’d planned to run every day, but now that I’ve failed, what’s the use? Everything is horrible and life is a crap chute!” So they stay home and feel bad about their failure because it wasn’t perfect.

Person B says, “Oh, I couldn’t jog yesterday. Whoops!” and then goes jogging anyway.

I have, unfortunately, always put myself in the former category. I wish I wasn’t there, but here we are. I beat myself up for failing at goals that I have set for myself and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Other than to keep plugging away at this blog as if nothing happened. Because, ultimately, nothing did happen.