On the Eve of No Longer Being a Teacher

Lately I've been thinking a lot about self.

This was my last year teaching. For the better part of 4 1/2 years this defined me in multiple ways. I was a teacher, but also an adjunct. I was paid little better than minimum wage. Making less than $2000 a month. I had other jobs. In the years I taught I also packaged items for online sale, made coffee, worked at a pizza place, wrote food reviews, worked at Publisher's Weekly on book reviews, and freelance edited. I still made less than $40k a year.

As a result my identity was one of not having. More importantly, of over-working only to not have.

I grew up ok. Not poor. My father was in the US Air Force. The buffer of not paying rent hides a lot of the discomfort of low wages for our military. Ultimately, I had a comfortably lower-middle class childhood. I never went hungry. We went on vacation. I had a Nintendo. My childhood identity was one of not thinking about identity and class.

I am now 37.

My adult life has sat firmly in the lower class. I only recently crossed the $30k marker. And I often think about how my identity, while not tied to income, is definitely tied to my relationship to $$$. Mostly, this comes out as a comfort in not ever having it. In spending it when I do.

This feels like a common response in the lower rungs of America in 2018. You use what you have when you have it. Because tomorrow you will have nothing.

For the time I was a teacher I spent most of my hours working at one of the various jobs I listed above. My identity shifting slightly with each. But in the background I was still a teacher. A writer. A person doing "good" work.

One year ago the school I worked at until this passed week announced its closure. It wasn't really a surprise, but it was a blow to both the city I live in and to myself personally.

I have never felt like the kind of person who would move for a job. And the idea of finding a teaching gig out of New Mexico actively made me anxious.

Without the background umbrella of "teacher", who was I. Was I ready to go back to being coffee shop employee, or waiter, or anything else.

It was a blow to my self.

The school officially closes June 1 but my job there is over May 16th when grades are due. At that moment I will no longer be a teacher.

Part of this shift has been trying to find a new job.

I spent 6 months last year applying to academic jobs across New Mexico and the country. Most were low-paying or only part time. Many of the out of state jobs were offering less than I was already making. The concept of moving across the country for $2000 a month is ridiculous. But I know people who took those offers. This breaks my heart. I decided I couldn't do this. That teaching, despite it being what I did, couldn't be this huge of a thing in my life that I would take a wage that couldn't even support me.

Shedding identities is not easy.

I spent most of 2017 in a literal haze. Auto pilot became pretty normal. As this final school year started I looked up for the first time in a long time and realized I had lost myself in the grind to feed myself.

I always told myself I was a writer first. Everything else was meant to be paychecks.

Somewhere along the way I convinced myself that it was ok to erode the identity of writer to the point where it became hard to say that in response to "what do you do".

How does one reclaim land washed away?

I suppose the answer has something to do with throwing the garbage in the water until you can build on top of it.

The more honest one, the healthier one, is that you don't reclaim it. You move. You build somewhere else. You don't repeat the mistakes you made. You don't allow the river in.

A new self will find purchase on the new rock.

Abreaction

Artists interpretation of visual 'prodrome'.

1.
I get headaches with startling regularity.


2.
Yesterday, as we were getting ready for bed, I turned to J and mentioned that I hadn't had one in over a week.

Not one since I got back to New Mexico after Christmas.

Not one while away for Christmas.

The regularity of my headaches is something I have come to expect. To understand and hate. I get them, I deal as I can. I always have Advil on hand.

I carried a big bottle of those oddly candy-coated brown pills in my bag everywhere in NY. I have one in my cabinet here in NM.

Advil was the first over-the-counter ibuprofen. Introduced in the US in 1984. It was available by prescription from 1974 onwards. Before 1974 it was only available in the UK and Europe. It was discovered by the research wing of Boots in the early 1960s.


3.
Boots was founded in 1849 by John Boot in Nottingham.

In June 2012 Boots announced the purchase of a 45% stake in the company by Walgreens. The plan is to introduce Boots to the US and Walgreens to the UK and China.

The two companies have signed a deal to merge within 3 years. The deal will cost Walgreens $16bn.

Walgreens was founded in 1901 by Charles R. Walgreen, Sr. in Chicago.


4.
The halo, or prodrome, before onset is a well-documented effect. Everyone is a little different. I have strange visual artifacts and a pressure that can only be described as 'skull heaviness'. It is like I can feel the weight of the bone around my brain.

My brain weighs about 3 lbs. with a volume around 1260 cm3. The skull on average weighs about 2.2 lbs.

Science has no answers for what 'causes' migraines. Dodick and Gargus call them 'increased excitability of the cerebral cortex and abnormal control of pain neurons in the trigeminal nucleus of the brainstem.' in their  2008 Scientific American article Why Migraines Strike.

Basically it is your brain loosing control of itself.

Control is the problem.

Migraines make it so I can't go outside, can't read, can't eat. They turn me into a person who sleeps all day. The make me pop pills like candy.

Using the verb 'strike' is appropriate. Migraines feel like they have lives of their own. Depending on the person they will arrive and depart in different ways. I know about a day before when I'm going to get one. After, it feels as if there's a soft spot on the left side of my head.

A fading bruise, the moisture after a kiss.


5.

There is a Walgreens in the background of this photo from VJ Day.

6.
From the OED:

abreaction, n.

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌabrɪˈakʃn/ , U.S. /ˌæbriˈækʃ(ə)n/

Etymology: < ab- prefix + reaction n., after German †Abreagiren (J. Breuer & S. Freud Studien über Hysterie (1895) iv. 233; now Abreagieren ), use as noun of †abreagiren (see abreact v.). Compare French abréaction (1913). Compareabreact v.

Psychiatry.

Discharge of the emotional energy associated with a psychic trauma that has been forgotten or repressed; the process of bringing such a trauma back to consciousness, esp. as a psychotherapeutic technique; an instance of this.


7.

I awoke with a migraine.

I had none of the usual clues to its arrival. No visual fuckery. No weight on my head.

I felt light-headed yesterday. Felt under the weather.

I thought I was getting the flu.

The last two months have been stressful. A move, unemployment, etc. Perhaps this is just all of that catching up. Filling out the empty spaces where my mind was occupied with a job, with New York's never-endingness.

Perhaps it was just a migraine.

Quick Side Note:
Treehouse has a rundown of the Best In Journals 2012.

Pink

Packing up six-years-worth of New York in the last few weeks I have found things:

1) The strange laminated obituaries that they hand out at funerals for three family members. Their faces frozen under the heat-sealed plastic. Forever staring out; their accomplishments listed in fine newspaper typefaces. All three were in shades of pink. From fluffy bubblegum to pale lavender. They make a spectrum of mourning. Is mourning pink?

2) Photos from high school. From college. From trips to England in 2004. Back when I took pictures with cameras and then printed them at one hour photos. We don't do things in an hour anymore. In New York, you wait an hour to get a table at a restaurant. And then sit in a moodily lit space and eat your meal. It is like a perfectly curated set for a photo shoot, a movie, a life.

3) 300 fliers for a New Year's Eve 2001 rave. In Santa Fe.

I have not found dead spiders or roaches. This isn't like when I left Santa Fe 7 years ago and kept finding dead preying mantis in the back of my car. Their little green bodies curled and cross-legged on the back seat of my car. Or in the trunk. Or on the floor.

I take that as a sign.

Of what.