"Well, that's all over with".
One of my favorite lines by one of my favorite actors (Sigourney Weaver) from one of my favorite movies ("Dave").
I cannot quite get my head around the fact that my year of voluntary servitude is done. I'm torn about identifying the town - though I suppose since it's on my website bio there's no point in being coy.
I keep having this stomach-churning feeling - like a bad roast-beef sandwich trying to come back up (to cite the latest example - not working there means my chances of avoiding such another sandwich gone bad have improved greatly...), just a heave from deep inside my body.
I admit that when I got in my car I started laughing uncontrollably - I've been holding it in since being told I wasn't coming back - holding back a heaving sense of relief, anger, confusion, fear and joy, all happening so fast, in such vivid intensity that I could only come home, sleep, rise and teach each day.
It was easy to just stay in that place, to feel it all - even some tears - on the lovely drive back to town.
Thank goodness for the people - teachers, support, administrators and especially the students - who, along with my friends, made it possible to finish with grace and laughter.
I have failed as often as I have triumphed - and I know that some good has come from all of this. I've rarely been in the position of simply not - being - able - to - do what I had set out to do. It was an impossible job - and we all sort of knew it...
...but I needed the money - they needed someone to try to make it work - and I couldn't do the job they were asking of me.
As one of the admins told me, several times - no one could.
If I've learned one thing it's that you have to take chances to be yourself, to be who you are, who you were meant to be.
I think, as of this foggy, foggy evening, sitting in the window of JavaNet, that something has run its course. A part in a play I was trying to force myself into, something grotesquely unfair to myself, has come to an end.
I am not that kind of teacher - I thought I always wanted to be a band director, that that was the best expression of my need to use my voice - not in singing, but in expressing myself. Twenty three years of my life have been spent speaking with that part of my voice.
Now another part of me is going to speak...I cannot, cannot, cannot wait to hear what I'm going to say.
