Where there’s smoke, there’s fire…

I have been struggling to sit down and write. The words gathering in my head seem to stick like honey-sweet, sticky, and sickening. Robert Frost and Rudyard Kipling speak from the grave reverberating truth from a bygone era. “Two divergent roads” screams Frost. “If you can keep your head” whispers Kipling. Will I look back “ages and ages hence” to realize this was all a dream, a reckoning or something completely transcendent?

I am an English teacher who relishes the written word and God knows, I obsessively love what I do. I write lesson plans, give feedback to my students through the written word, create assignments with objectives and purpose, send out endless emails, and give all of myself to each student. But self-reflection, recharging the battery so to speak is an afterthought. So, the honey drips clanging against my soul driving me mad by its sweet allure. These are the moments I now feel with all parts of my consciousness. Anxiety, depression, and PTSD have molded me into a hypersensitive being.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire. Cliché but fundamentally true. Walk with me a little longer because I smell the acrid smokiness of the all consuming fire, and the sickness which comes from denying who we are and who I am. Smoke drifts through the leaves of my emotional forest warning of the consuming wildfire seeking to burn down my mental house of cards. In the midst of this smoke, I have a support group who speaks Truth to me. They dig the trenches around the fire creating fire breaks and they themselves set containment fires that burn brighter, hotter, and faster than the darkness. I am grateful for this group, but what about those millions of people who do not have similar circumstances.

I heard my family say today that I sounded angry. Yet I did not understand how they could hear this emotion when I was passionately advocating with administration and other teachers on behalf of my English Language Learners. I sit patiently listening to my inner voice pouring out of me like water out of a fire hose demanding others recognize that my students are drowning in the endless sea of Distance Learning with no life boat except for a Zoom meeting. Do you see what I’m saying now? Are you listening? Am I listening? And that is the real question. We need to listen more intentionally to who we are rather than seek a false sense of acceptance from others. But fire is a dualistic by nature because “there is nothing more powerful than Truth”. At one point, I sat in a bathroom at work with my service gun in my mouth making life and death decisions. I was not dealing with a global pandemic, government imposed isolation, political turmoil, economic instability, literal wildfires burning down homes, riots in the streets, social injustice, Distance Learning, and the shutting down of all external pleasurable outlets (movie theaters, bars, gyms, restaurants, etc.). Click. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. I embrace the fire and the fire in turn listens to me. It wants to consume and I will let it, but not until I teach it how to Create!