As I lie here for a second consecutive night without the ability to rest my mind, I remember a time when writing was a solace, when my vocabulary and memory were better. My memory, in fact, now is so bad that I've begun to worry about early onset dementia, or perhaps some form of stress-induced psychosis, the early signs of which are a sudden drop in one's ability to remember things that you've done only seconds earlier. Am I becoming the man from Memento? Will I start making choices in life knowing that I'll forget them when I wake up the next morning and document according to how I prefer to remember? When I sat down to clip my fingernails and found, upon moving to the second hand, that it had already been clipped--no recollection of the process--I realized that something must be done.
As a teacher, I feel like I spend most of my life working to make others see, mostly kids of course. I try to inspire them, I try to give them tools with which they can clean out their own souls when they need a good mucking. This is utterly depleting, as much as I do love it. But the ecstatic, ego-boosting and momentary bits of insanity to counter the true insignificance of a single action are matched in amazingness--as in I'm still amazed-- only by the ages-long-weeks of no progress, or even regression. Thank God for moments of blissful insanity or teachers everywhere might be on suicide watch, one sob story, ungrateful kid, or short sighted parent away from a the nervous breakdown.
Ironically, as I work to help people "see," I prefer, perhaps to my own detriment, to remain unseen. Thus, I have opted for a public writing forum--a perfect medium for hiding in plain site. Where anyone can read, no one really cares to. Where there is no secret, there is no desire to know.
There is always a secret.
Source: ninbra.tumblr.com via Dorian on Pinterest
