ghosted

I had a snack, a pen, a journal, and two hours to kill before my next class, so I hopped on my bike and headed to a park by the beach.  I sat on a bench and wrote and wrote.  I wrote about a wide range of topics that included anything and everything that popped in my head.  I wrote about my excitement for my parents’ upcoming visit.  I wrote about my ever-growing frustration with patriarchal societies.  I  wrote about my teaching experience at the Lutheran high school that morning, where my 15 year old student asked me the English word for ‘Sugar Daddy’ right as my co-teacher, who I haven’t seen since my first day at the school in October, walked by the classroom (luckily he just did a quick double-take and kept walking).  Finally, I wrote about how I had nothing to write.  Nothing to write for my blog, that is.  Writing in my journal is easy.  I just write whatever crazy thought pops in my head and get to re-read it later, laugh, and think, Thank God no one will ever read this nonsense.  Blogging is harder.  Virtually anyone can access it and read what is going on in my brain while simultaneously forming assumptions about this complicated and beautiful world I’ve found myself in.  It’s a lot of pressure for someone who, as a friend correctly pointed out at orientation after only a week of knowing me, always wants to make sure people understand exactly what I mean (a problem I have encountered a time or two in a country where my language skills are very basic, but that’s a whole other topic).  I’ve found it’s more natural for me to tell stories in person where I can interact face-to-face and have a back and forth conversation, clarifying things I don’t articulate well the first time through.  Blogs don’t work that way.  Writing blogs was a fluid process at first.  I found I could easily write about struggle and lessons learned with this life was so new and different.  Now, it’s becoming routine.  Normal.  I don’t stop and stare at mass goat crossings on the street on my way to school.  I figured out how to buy bananas, and I don’t even rehearse the conversation in my head ten plus times before approaching the stand anymore.  Instead of hyperventilating when a flying cockroach twice the size of my thumb decides he wants to have a sleepover, I calmly grab my broom and get in some batting practice swatting him out of the room.  It’s difficult to think of what to write when everything that used to seem so astonishing seems so ordinary.  At the same time, my thoughts and feelings about this country and what I’m learning and living here have become increasingly intense and complex.  Sifting through the mess of thoughts and feelings taking up every inch of my brain is a daunting task, and then to articulate those thoughts and feelings in an appropriate and meaningful way?  Seemingly impossible.  My computer houses a large catalogue of half-drafts of blogs that don’t amount to anything, but forming a cohesive piece hasn’t happened in quite a while.  As I wrote about this problem in my journal, I started to think about the blogs I’ve written before.  Almost all of them are centered around a theme and include stories and my interpretation of how those stories fit the theme (even as I write this blog, I realize I’m subconsciously following that same blueprint).  That was when I realized: maybe it’s not always my job to interpret.  It’s not always my job to solve problems.  But it is my job to share my stories.  It is my job be authentic, and I can’t be authentic if I’m silent (let’s be real, we all know muteness is not a part of my personality).  As I put a period on the sentence in my journal vowing to just write, without worrying about any formula or expectations, a small girl who couldn’t have been older than 18 months toddled toward me, mouth stretched into a giant smile and arms wide open.  I smiled and greeted her happily, and she took my pen out of my hand.  I held out my notebook and nodded encouragingly.  She put pen to paper, slowly at first, and then deliberately and thoughtfully marking up down and around the page, even turning the pages to make her mark throughout the journal and in my mind.

The majority of my student teaching semester was at a preschool, and my primary role with curriculum was to increase activity in the writing center.  A developmentally appropriate writing center for preschool involves meeting children where they are in the stages of writing.  It doesn’t start with the expectation of forming sentences, words, or even letters.  Depending on the child, the first goal might be as simple as putting pencil (or crayon or colored pencil or marker) to paper.  I found myself frustrated and saddened at times when we first opened up the center and the children would refuse to make even a small mark on the page, claiming they didn’t ‘know how to write’.  The parallels between their and my refusal to write were obvious to me after thinking about the fearless young girl who approached me at the park.  I believe most of us are afraid of failure to some extent or another.  Doing something I am sure I cannot do perfectly is a unnerving task, but perfection isn’t the objective.   The goal should be to share my experience, to be like the girl who didn’t worry about trivial things, but took a stranger’s pen and just went for it without fear of the outcome (although I don’t think that thievery will be my method).  Even as I conclude this blog, I am tempted to leave it in a folder in my computer never to be seen again.  However, I think it’s important to explain my recent ghost status on my blog, and to publicly promise to do a better job sharing my stories despite my fears of articulating these stories through writing.

     Coming Soon: Blog of stories of random children that have approached me, immediately brightened my day, and became my favorite people on this planet.  Some things never change.