*emotional writing below*
Here’s my life update: I got involuntarily transferred a few days before I was suppose to report back to my building. I showed up to the new building and it was an incredibly traumatic experience for me. Now I am out on leave due to post-traumatic stress disorder. In the future, I will process through the situation with every one, but now doesn’t feel like the right time. However, for whatever reason, my words below do.
I woke up this morning full of hope and inspiration. After three minutes of being awake, I looked at my phone only to feel the heartbreak hit me once again. I took a deep breath and told myself the text sharing my classroom was packed into 30 boxes and counting wouldn’t impact my day. I put on my brave pants and walked down stairs, only to be met with a frustrating story from my husband about his morning walk with our pups… AKA the last rock to drop that caused the avalanche.
Tears and yells followed as my entire being wanted to give up. It wanted to sulk, it wanted the entire world to stop. With my hands thrown in the air, I shouted “I’m quitting!” and shared I was done with teaching for good. I couldn’t take it any more. I am not cut out for this journey and I’m tired. I’m exhausted.
And the sad truth of my exhaustion: it has nothing to do with my students, my colleagues, my school, or the every day job of teaching. It has every thing to do with the politics that systematically destroy public education, the teachers who teach in it, and the students who receive it’s education. As I yelled those words at my husband the phrase, “I’m a human being. A real human being” flew out of my mouth. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I am in fact a heart beating, lung breathing, alive and living human being.
In the midst of my “I’m quitting” contemplation, my husband grounded me with the right words, at the right time, by the right person– Martin Luther King Jr. Now, I know how cliché that probably sounds… but it’s the truth. If there’s one person that can pull me out of the deepest of trenches, it’s MLK. His words speak to me. They always have– ever sense I heard his infamous speech at an elementary assembly years and years ago. When the going started getting out of hand last year, I found moments of peace in his words. I spent an entire Sunday reading all of his speeches. It’s interesting that the most famous of his speeches is “I Have a Dream” when those beautiful words almost don’t even compete with the meanings that live within his other speeches and written work.
His words speak to my heart and my mind. When I read his complex language and metaphoric comparisons, it stops the tornado in my mind and fully grounds me. I don’t understand how we only celebrate MLK one day of the year– his words should be integrated into every thing our country does. He didn’t only have a dream, he had a plan… a plan that our country would benefit from revisiting and bringing into action today.
MLK left our country with an explicit map of the direction our country was heading and where we needed to go in a book he published right before he was assassinated: Where to go we go from? Chaos or Community. It’s the best book my heart has ever read. Yes I’m a white women and will admit I have made uneducated statements about about race and have been accused of white-washing MLK’s words on social media… In those moments, I remind myself: we all come from different walks of life and the first thing people see when they look at me is I’m white… and the meaning of “being white” changes from one person who sees me to the next. I am not perfect, nor is any one else. We are all on our own walks of life.
To this date on my own walk, I don’t think I’ve ever read a sentence from MLK that I didn’t agree with. He speaks to the deepest and the hardest to reach parts of my soul- it’s hard to explain. Sometimes I feel like I live on an entirely different planet than every one else and speak an unknown language. Yet, when I read MLK’s words, I feel like I’m not alone. I feel there is someone else who thinks like me, or maybe better worded, I think of the world in a similar way as someone else. Now, I’m not comparing myself to MLK in ANY way. One could never do that. I do, however and for whatever reason, find serenity, acceptance, understanding, inspiration, and perseverance fill into the wounds of my soul and surround me with the grace I need when I read his words.
As my husband continued to reflect on the values and character of MLK and posing insightful questions in my direction, I realized I needed to read MLK’s words. I realized I was stuck in the suffering cycle of despair and not the suffering cycle of hope. I needed to turn around and drive back on the hope track, as soon as humanely possible.
I opened my macbook air and read away. As a sea of tears swarmed my face, I took a left and made my way right back where I needed to be after re-reading the words that have and always will make perfect sense to me:
“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’ ”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Loving Your Enemies
As painful as it is and as hard as each day has been, my job right now is to endure the suffering. To suffer and to feel hope at the same time– that’s my job at this moment in time. My capacity to endure suffering for a greater good matters. One’s capacity to endure pain and still remain true to oneself and their values is greater than the misguided’s ability to cause harm and inflict suffering on another, or a group of human beings.
Martin Luther King Jr. reminded me that: “First, the line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often if feels as though you were moving backwards, and you lose sight of your goal: but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.”
Maybe I’m not moving backwards as much as it feels that way and in my case, it’s not a city, it’s my school. At least at this moment, I know I took a set back on the right path, in the right direction. The feelings I’ve felt almost every day since the end of August, especially this morning, had been stomping on my hope and trampolining my spirit– the true essence of suffering. I now know, it’s okay to suffer… it’s okay to be suffering and know you’re probably going to suffer longer. Suffering can continue to live and thrive in hope and joy; not all suffering has to live in hopelessness and darkness… we get to choose where it lives. I’m choosing hope and joy.
Today I found grace within myself when I needed I the most. The final MLK quote I share with you was written after MLK had been arrested and locked away at the Birmingham jail. For any one advocating and fighting for a cause they pour their heart and soul in, a cause they believe in– civil rights related or not, the serenity that can be found in MLK’s words are for you:
“I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.”
I wish there was a different word I could use other than fight… but it’s what I’m having to do, while tryin to heal in the process. Whatever fight you may be fighting, as long as it betters our students, our children, our communities, and our country, keep fighting. Our fights, while may constantly appear too small to matter or too large to carry on, they too are tied up in the destiny of America. Keep being you and don’t let the world allow you to think you need to be any different. Imperfect and all– each of us matters.
art therapy: a vision of my goals
with kindness | ashley