This has certainly been a year to remember (or forget, as may be more appropriate). Personally, I've had a lot of great moments. I'm at a school where the children are great, the staff is supportive and encouraging, and I have the time and space to actually teach instead of fighting behavior issues. I've moved halfway across the country from Mississippi to Maryland, and got to spend my first Christmas with my dad in years.
On the other hand, some rough things have happened too. Racism showed that it's not dead. Influential public figures have passed away, from Prince to Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds within a day of each other. The election. (Not saying anything else.)
I was reading over some of my past entries and marvelling at how much my life has changed. My last post was when I was still in college; since then, I've graduated college with both my bachelors and my masters degrees. I taught a year of 6th grade Language Arts in Mississippi (really a trial by fire) and now teach 5th grade Language Arts.
Last year was a teaching train wreck. The first year always is; it's like reading about driving a race car vs. actually driving it. After that year, this one has been a breeze. You'd never know that I considered quitting multiple times last year because I just knew that I wasn't good at it. Luckily, I had a strong support system both inside and outside of school that encouraged me not to give up. My two best friends wouldn't let me give up and listened to my rants and tears. My principal, mentor teacher, team leader, the only male teacher on the hall, and two consultants all worked together to give me encouragement and support within the classroom. Without these people, I wouldn't have made it.
Likewise, I've had strong support (and pushing) from those closest to me. The thing that drives me the most (besides God, of course) is the belief of my friends and family in me. Its truly uncanny the similarities of my two best friends, who only met four years ago and yet seem as if they've been friends since childhood, so united are they in their support (and constructive criticism) of me. They never allow me to be content and to rest on my laurels, and that is something that everyone should have in their lives.
Hence the restarting of my blog.
My biggest dream, anyone will tell you, is to be a published writer. Yet with the workload of graduate school and teaching, I found my inspiration and time to be in very short supply. I began looking forward to the day when I was finally finished with my degree so that I could actually have time to make my hobby into my living. But when grad school finished, I could not seem to get any inspiration. I read over my countless unfinished manuscripts, trying to decide if I should continue one of them or start a new one. I was stumped.
Then something amazing happened.
One of my best friends was inspired himself to write a musical. He came to me, asking if I would help him. At first, I was uncertain. With my lack of writing "flow" of late, I wasn't sure that I could really help. But he convinced me to try. So we set ourselves a nightly limit, and (through the power of the internet), we wrote the musical in about a month or so.
He doesn't know this, but that was my spark to get back to writing.
I started working on one of my unfinished manuscripts with a will, starting to get my mojo back. It was starting to come together; my ideas on where the story would go were coming back, and everything was starting to make sense again.
One night, I had a dream. Now people close to me know that my best story ideas come from my dreams. My first story was literally a dream that I had, verbatim (and I need to go find that and burn it; it was so terrible!). This new dream was so vivid, so detailed; and owing to some advice from my other bestie, I wrote down as many details as I could remember as soon as I woke up. Now I'm working on that story, and I'm very excited to see where it leads me.
In January of last year, I had a feeling that 2016 was going to be a good year. Notwithstanding the many terrible things that happened, that feeling proved pretty true. Now I'm looking forward to 2017 with a hopeful eye. Who knows? Maybe this will be the year that the musical that I cowrote gets produced. Maybe I'll write the short story that finally gets published, and it will lead me to my dreams coming true. Or maybe I'll spend another year honing my craft, while also working to become a better teacher, friend, and person.
Either way, I know that my best days are ahead of me.
I leave you with one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes from "The Tempest."
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, rounded with a little sleep".
