The first day of school has always been so full of emotion for me. As a teacher, the night before meeting my new students, my stomach would be in knots that would not release until the last person filed out of the classroom and I could lay my head on the desk for a moment and breathe. Thank you God, we all survived. I was never a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants teacher. Extreme preparedness was my armour, because somehow in the back of my mind I must have believed the classroom was some kind of battleground. In the evening after the first day, I’d always crave KFC; fried food is good for an unsettled stomach, right? It was an unapologetic indulgence I’d earned having survived that first day of teenagers, whom, to my knowledge, didn’t hate me. And, as much as it is embarrassing to admit, no matter what lofty ambitions I might have had about what I was going to teach, I was still very much like a child who just wanted to live through the day, hoping to make a connection and not an enemy. I wanted to be liked.
Years later, without a classroom of my own, the first day of school is still kind of painful.
Every September I miss teaching. I miss the nervous energy I shared with my colleagues. Even the most stoic still want the first day to go well. Even the surprises (new students enrolled at midnight, schedule changes, first day belligerence) were kind of predictable after a while. But now? I wish I could predict my writing life the way I could plan out a semester of Spanish 101 or Grade Twelve History. My teacher day book was so comforting. I liked knowing when the big tests were coming, the late night marking marathons, the parent-teacher interviews. I wish I knew the future now.
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This is going to be a great year! Mais oui!
I woke up this morning feeling all the same butterflies as in my teacher days, except there was no one to try and win over with my charming French accent or tantalizing syllabus. (Ha ha.) The truth is, as a writer, I’m not always sure if I’ll keep going. When the rejections pile up faster than the wins (“Publishing is very subjective … another agent may well feel differently”), it can be hard to pick up my pen again. Am I completely deluded in pursuing this goal? Should I be teaching right now? Am I a fool to have walked away from a pension in pursuit of this dream? Maybe if I wasn’t so lazy, I could just wake up at 4am, write until 6am, and still go to work every day. Maybe I’m delusional, lazy and untalented.
Maybe.
But…
The teacher in me wants to encourage the student in me. “You’re learning. Try to have a growth mentality. You’re not there YET.” That teacher is awesome. But the student in me doesn’t always believe her. The student in me needs some hope.
This past spring I took advantage of pandemic-time (not sure if that’s a real thing, we’ll see) to meet with a vocational life coach and talk about next steps, to say aloud some of the major self-doubt I was experiencing. Beyond my writing and storytelling work I live a committed life serving my community, and lead in all kinds of different ways. The teacher in me loves people, and the student in me loves to learn. But, I was scattered across a lot of different organizations and, as a volunteer, could only give so much before writing called me back to my desk. My writing has been like a demanding spouse and I was beginning to wonder if it was taking more than it gave.
In contrast, as a teacher, the relationship was clear, even if it wasn’t always easy.
Teach the students, cash the cheque, go home. (And stress about the students. I did that a lot, too. They were teenagers, after all. Some of their frontal cortexes were not developing at the rate of their decision making. But I digress.)
I miss the structure, the transactional nature of that particular calling. I miss going to parties and people asking, “what do you do?” and having a very clear, precise you-can-put-me-in-that-box answer. “Teacher”. Follow up, “high school.”
I still like going to parties, but meeting new people makes me anxious. “What do you do?”
Option 1. “ I used to be a teacher…”
Option 2. “I do a lot of different things…”
Option 3. “I’m a… writer?”
All of the follow up questions make me squirm. I’ve rehearsed so many different answers. I’m an expert at reframing my failures and false starts to make other people comfortable. I want to be liked (still) and well thought of, so as quickly as possible, I try to ask people about themselves. Fortunately, it works really well. When I used to teach French and Spanish, I would often say to my students, “forget learning how to answer questions, learn to ask questions. It’s way less work and you’ll never be a bore at a cocktail party.” Funny how so often we offer the advice we need.
I miss being the one to give the tests.
As a writer, every day feels like a test I give myself. And what does passing the test look like?
Will readers like me?
Will they like my story?
Will they like my characters?
Will they find the plot believable?
Will they stay up late to read it or fall asleep on the couch?
Will they come hear me read?
Will they review my book?
If we meet at a party, will they avoid me because they haven’t read my book? (Or, worse, because they have.)
Will they tell me what I got wrong? What I got right?
Will they ignore me altogether and sit with someone else in the too loud cafeteria…
Wait, what? For a moment I slipped into my high school student self.
Speaking of which… this post would go on forever, except that I have to run and pick up my firstborn from her first day of high school. (What???!!!) I thank God for the gift of parenting, which gets me out of the hamster wheel of my own brain each and every day.
You better believe fried chicken is on the menu tonight, friends. In the meantime, keep those first day pics coming. I feel a kinship with all those very forced smiles. Tomorrow will be better, you just gotta show up.
