10 things I am doing in the pursuit of happiness

Hello there dear readers. Today is a rough day. If I can be perfectly honest with you, every day is a rough day this semester. I have a tough group of students this year. Not tough, as in defiant, or aggressive, or anything like that. They just do not work. Imagine putting everything you have into every single day and get met with blank stares and apathy of the likes you have never previously seen. That is what I do Monday-Friday from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon. It is taxing. I refuse to give up on the kids, so every few weeks I have try something completely new. Plans are tossed aside with reckless abandon in favor of developing all new lessons, activities, lesson delivery methods, etc. I have created two brand new units in the last five weeks. And know that next semester I am going to do it all over again. The hard part is, I have no idea what these students know. They do not produce enough work to even know what I need to teach. It is possible many of them are innately good writers, but since they are taking zeroes on writing assignments I cannot even assess them. There are weeks when I question why I am in the teaching profession, something that never really happened in the last few years. Until November, I felt all of that BLEH seeping into other aspects of my life. I was not sleeping well, food did not even taste as good. I became even more of a shut-in than I already am, felt myself snapping in my every day life, and felt like my creative pursuits were failing. I was at a complete loss of personal confidence. Chocolate became my calming force. I felt more unhealthy than I have in four years, and what was worse, was that I felt totally comfortable in it. I was quite content to slide back into the life I was living six years ago because it was easier.

What follows are some of the things I have been doing to shake myself out this. They do not work every day, but in the last month and a half I have felt much better. I am starting to feel more like myself.

1. Cutting myself some slack. This is an on-going battle for me. I want to be the best at everything. When nearly half of your students are failing or near failing, it is tough. You want to spend all day every day trying to fix things are not broken. At some point I had to realize that school life was going to be school life, and home life would be home life. What that means is, I take little home this year. In fact, AP Literature is the only class I bring home anymore. The rest of it can wait. I need to take time for myself. Let myself breathe. My friend Megan, who is also my writing coach/task master, has always, many times through email, reminded me to cut myself some slack when it comes to writing too. If I cannot get as much written as I want, that is okay. I feel like I spend a majority of my day reminding myself that it is okay. It is okay if I give myself a break, and spend hours reading in bed when there are other things I should be doing.

2. Keeping my classroom clean and my desk organized. I prefer my world to be organized. I like structure. My classroom is full of disorganized teenagers who cannot keep track of their own brains. It can become a chaotic hurricane if I let it. I try not to let it. The more organized and clean my room and desk, the more calm I am. I try not to leave school with a mess on my desk because when I get to school in the morning, it starts me off on a bad note. It is similar to the idea of not going to bed with dirty dishes in the sink. If I can start my day in a good mood, I can typically get through the day feeling better.

3. Cutting down on idle time. I have been trying, and mostly succeeding, in cutting down on time where I am sitting around doing nothing. My current unit at school is a film unit, so there is a ton of passive time during movie watching. Instead of sitting around watching the same movie all day, or sitting around looking at nonsense on the internet, I am writing letters of recommendation, doing research for grants, grading papers in a timely fashion, researching units, and starting to look at stuff for my grad program. At home, I cut down dramatically on the number of television shows I am watching and I do not binge watch anything anymore. Sunday for the Redzone channel in the only time I sit in front of the television for multiple hours.

4. Getting moving. This feels self explanatory, but this is a blog, so I am going to explain it anyway. I spend most of my day standing in front of a class, or circulating the small classroom area. That stagnancy can be a pain. At the moment, I am finding that I am too tired to get myself up early enough to work out on a daily basis, so I am making sure that during every break, lunch, or prep period I have, that I leave my classroom, and walk around a bit. My classroom is not the best place to be stuck all day. It is small, dingy, with spray-painted over windows, closed off, and sad. It brings people down compared to what I was working with last year. This walking around not only gets me out of that classroom, it gets me talking to other people and keeps the blood flowing. Even a five minute walk around a few buildings leaves me invigorated.

5. Talking. I am talking to my friends more. I am communicating with the world more. I am still pretty much a shut-in unless Martina makes me go somewhere with her, but I am keeping in touch with important people more. Yesterday I spent a lovely ninety or so minutes with one of my best friends. Monday, Martina and I went out to dinner and to a movie. On campus I trying to talk to other teachers more. It is not natural for me. I am not social by nature. I am content to sit in my own bubble. I like my bubble, but I find, that when my bubble is not the happiest place, that talking to those I love, helps me fill my bubble back up with positive air.

6. Reading and writing. Man, do I love words. I have filled my time with words. I am reading them, writing them, consuming them as often as possible. But more than that, I am talking about reading and writing. I am sharing my books with my students when they ask. We discuss books at length AP Literature. Megan and I trades texts about our writing projects, and I am feeling less self-conscious about calling myself a writer. I am talking to people more about what I am writing, how I write, why I write. I am proud of how much I read and I am proud of what I have written. I will never say I am a great writer, but I love doing it. I am getting more comfortable with the idea of people reading my writing, as personal as much of it is. That is another thing, I am trying to be fearless in my writing. I want to put myself into the world, and the only way to accomplish that is to be truthful. No matter what I do, I want it to be full of me.

7. Loving unabashedly. I am trying to express the love I feel for people on a more regular basis. This has always been easy with Martina, as we tell each other "I love you" multiple times a day, but I am trying to be more free with the love I feel for my non-romantic life partners. I find that when you love without limits, and express that love without fear, those people often love you back without limits, and make you feel safe. Feeling safe allows me to take risks because I know that those people will be there to catch me should my risk taking hurt me. Expressing feelings has never been something at which I excel. I prefer the written word for that, but in the last month or so, I am seeing a difference.

8. Living for myself. If anyone ever called me selfish, I would consider it the absolute worst thing. I have never done anything specifically for myself. I am known the world over for putting other people first, even at my own detriment. It is probably my worst quality, something with which I am still struggling, but I am getting better at living for me. If I want to write for a day, I do not put it off if someone else wants something. I applied for grad school knowing that it would limit my time in every other aspect in my life, but I wanted it. I wanted it for me, and only for me. It is weird when you start living for yourself for the first time.

9. Focusing less on things I do not like. This is actually a super difficult one for me, and I fail at it as often as I succeed, but I keep pushing myself to focus on talking about the things I like, and ignoring the things I do not like. On Facebook I desperately try to talk about the things in my day that are good or funny. On Twitter, I am less successful. I do tend to talk about the things that bother me, instead of the things that lift me up, or that I like. Coming out of the final Hunger Games movie, I felt disappointed, but I told myself to focus on the aspects of it that I liked, so while I am able to critique the film for its shortcomings, I try to spend more time thinking about the aspects of it I did like. I will always be a critical person, but I can acknowledge the weaknesses without it taking me over.

10. Putting down my phone. I have to admit, this is the one with which I struggle the most. However, I recognize I feel better when I am more present in moments. The addiction to that device is real, and it is a problem. One of my goals for 2016, which I will lay out in this blog, is to spend less time attached to devices, and spend less time on social media. I have taken great pains to try to rid myself of the people who make social media less fun, but I know, deep down, that I need to stop spending so much time attached to the digital world. When I let myself get lost in the world, life is better. Last night I picked up a book at around 7:35, and finished it without ever checking my phone, checking the time, etc. It was awesome. I need more of that in my life.


There you have it. There are other things I need to add to this list, specifically going back to cooking more/eating more healthy food, and of course, sleeping better, but they will come. Little things make a b ig difference, and many of these changes allow the slightest shift in my own perception of the world, which makes a tremendous difference. What are some things you do in the pursuit of happiness?