I haven't really done any planning for the coming school year. I filled my summer with distractions: work, visiting Vancouver Island, and attempts to rest and relax. In spare moments, I couldn't seem to develop the get-to-it-ive-ness needed to really start planning for something as cognitively taxing as the coming school year. So I didn't.
But I'm here now.
Today we had a Professional Day presentation from somebody with a pretty good handle on the ins and outs of the new BC Curriculum. I'm hoping it rekindles a little of my enjoyment of teaching and helps me feel a little more like my work has a lasting effect on people. I miss that feeling.
A few years into my teaching, it felt pretty natural, like it was an extension of myself. I felt like I could come to the school and navigate it naturally, and it didn't seem to drain my resources too much. I could come to the school in the evening or afternoon and focus on my work and enjoy it, and I genuinely felt like I was getting stuff done. The last few years, however, haven't felt that way. Admittedly, I've been very distracted: separation, drama, and fatigue can make it difficult to focus on work. Come to think of it, my inability to internalize my practice coincides with my inability to write or finish writing a song. Perhaps I'm just in a drained-creativity mode, whether in career or leisure. But I hope that acting on some of my more progressive desires will help me make teaching a more real part of my life, not just a job. Perhaps building an effective in-class curriculum will help me get get my head back in the game. I've been trying to do a few other phone-related things to get my head back in a good place. I deleted Pokemon Go from my phone; it seemed to have served its purpose in getting me to get outside even when I didn't want to. And although I still think I'd enjoy it, I don't miss it. I turned off my data so I'd be less likely to check my phone constantly. I also have decided to stop listening to podcasts when I go for walks; this lets my mind wander a little and helps me to keep from constantly filling my mind with talk. In the meantime, here I am. Starting my 10th or 11th school year, a veteran of sorts who still doesn't feel like he knows what he's doing, who still expects the "Fraud Police" to come to the door and kick him out onto the street. But chances are, things will work out. It will. It will. Things will work out.
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I've struggled with negative self-talk for my entire life. I tend to curse myself under my breath and, on a daily basis, tell myself oodles of BS about my own incompetence and lack of value. It's an ugly habit that I've been trying to unwind from for years, particularly when I first started working through Mind Over Mood in 2009. But the negative self-talk persists—when I'm out for a walk, when I try to make sense of my past, when I realize I should have said something else, when I realize I should have been more thoughtful, when I can't figure out why I'm feeling what I'm feeling.
Some might say I need to make a new story for myself, a new narrative. And within the last few months, a couple of my go-to content creators have made a couple lovely bits to reflect just such an idea. The School of Life's How To Narrate Your Life's Story
I've written about The School/Book of Life before, but this week's video hit home, not only because of the references to Macbeth, but for its practical advice for new narrative-building.
My favorite part of this episode is:
Not all the disasters were wasted anyway. Maybe we spent a decade not quite knowing what we wanted to do with ourselves professionally. Maybe we went through a succession of failed relationships that left us confused and hurt a lot of people. But these experiences weren’t meaningless because they were necessary to later development and maturity. We needed the career crisis to understand our working identities; we had to fail at love to fathom our hearts. No one gets anywhere important in one go. We can forgive ourselves the horrors of our first drafts. The Art of Charm's AoC Toolbox: Narrative building
This "Art of Charm Toolbox" episode focuses on "Narrative Building" as a means to build charisma and a positive self-image.
My favorite part of this episode is summarized here:
Think of your narrative — your hero’s journey, as illustrated by mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a riff on the narratives that brought you where you are today and not a carbon copy of those existing narratives. To know yourself, you need to tell your own story.
So what story to tell though? To be honest, I don't know.
Here are the basics though:
No one wants to read a boring life story, including myself. I don't want to write a self-narrative that bores me to tears. So what story do I need to narrate?
I recently took this blog offline and made my tweets private because I applied to a fancy-dancy job last month and had an interview for it last Monday. I didn't get the position, but I'm a little relieved. I know how to play it better for next time and I can spend some time building my leadership resume.
I'd got myself all dolled-up—haircut and new shirt and pants—and that was kind-of fun. A little jarring after growing that beard, but I wanted to put my all into it. And now that it's done, I can get back to blogging and make my tweets public again.
However, of course, it makes me also wonder if I'm entirely mis-aiming my life right now. Especially when I listen to interviews like this one:
Like, I finished a leadership degree, but do I really want to lead people? And if I do, do I really want to lead a school? Have I totally chosen the wrong approach to this?
Or, as the cliche might read, am I living my truth, my authentic self? The truth is, I don't know. Really, perhaps I'm expecting too much of myself. Perhaps I expect too much of a personal connection to what I do. Perhaps good enough is good enough.
The other day a friend called me an "anxious overachiever."
Perhaps that's my very own personal syndrome, no?
My ability to believe faded years ago; when I left Christianity behind, I left all spiritual beliefs with it. I came to a point where I felt that all unfounded belief systems suffered from the same problem: they depended on a choice to jump past the probabilities, and none of them seemed more probable than another.
But I've never been totally on board with bad-mouthing believers. Even in my most shameful, misguided moment—when I carelessly heckled a Jehovah's Witness student for refusing to partake in a Valentine's activity for religious reasons—I've never wanted to convert people to non-belief. Some atheist-folks have suggested that I should more aggressively haggle with believers in order to have them abandon their faith, but I have no interest in that sort of behaviour. Why, though? I've never been able to provide a real answer. Why do I have so little interest in evangelizing my new understanding of the world? This sort of question has bothered me for a few years now and I haven't been able to put it into words. Last Saturday evening, I attended a taping of The Imposter at UFV in Chilliwack.
The musical guests were Mourning Coup, a group led by Chandra Melting Tallow. During Aliya Pabani's on-stage interview with Melting Tallow, my mind started to wander a bit. It seemed like Tallow chafed each time Pabani mentioned a critic or reviewer of Tallow's work. It was interesting to see this dynamic at play: Pabani's casual attempts to make the conversation work, using data and history, and Tallow's tugging of the conversation back to the here and now, back to the authentic present.
My mind started to wander a bit and a pithy statement hit me: authenticity is spirituality. So I bounced it around in my head for a bit. And, for the moment, I like it. I've been listening to a lot of those self-improvement sorts of podcasts and reading a lot of self-help-type-of-books over the last couple years. I've also visited multiple counsellors and a psychologist, trying to find my way through this rather discouraging part of my life. Most of these resources, including those educational leadership resources that I battled through for my Master's degree, tend to focus on the need for humans to be themselves, to have an uncompromising vision that seamlessly jives with your central being. In other words, I've been hearing a lot of messaging that tells me that authentic living in all facets of your life is essential. So I admit that I'm primed to think about authenticity. But the message seems to keep coming up. Whether I'm listening to The One and Only, or perhaps The Art of Charm, or if I'm reading something by Brené Brown or Marshall Rosenberg, authenticity seems to come up as a theme over and over again. It seems to often appear alongside the need for human spirituality. Perhaps there's a connection there. I couldn't keep being a Christian for authenticity's sake; I couldn't keep justifying many decisions I made during my marriage for authenticity's sake; I struggle at work when I can't seem to make it happen for authenticity's sake. So, perhaps authenticity is the thing that's supposed to fill in that gap. Maybe that's the thing I'm missing from my life, that was missing from my marriage, that's missing on those days when I scramble through work and can't seem to get into the right headspace. Perhaps authenticity is the spiritual goal that I need to seek out and live by, no matter what Andrew Potter claims. Because I'm simply not cynical enough to go full negative. I love people. I want people to get along. I want people to find common ground as much as they can. And when I can't even keep this sort of practice going, I break down. I can't fully dismiss people; I can't fully act cruelly when compassion or empathy might work better. Hence why I can't attack people for believing things I don't, particularly if they appear to be genuinely doing no harm. I think I can flesh this one out more, but that will come in some sort of later post. For now, "Authenticity as Spirituality" is about all I can do.
There's this photo of me on Facebook. My friend Peter, who's playing congas with me here, is playing with me. My guess is that the photo was taken in 2001, but it could have been taken a little earlier.
The thing is that I don't remember what I was singing about. I think I was playing at Felicita's at UVic, but I don't remember why. I have no idea what songs might have showed-up on that setlist hanging from the microphone—printed characteristically on a used piece of paper, a photocopied article. It was 2001 and I thought myself a musician of sorts... but what did I have to say? I have no fucking idea.
This is a problem as I try to find my way through all this separation stuff. In the vernacular, a psychological assessor said my "values are all over the place." And it seems like, as I listen to podcasts and read self-help and leadership books, it's highly encouraged to follow your vision. It seems as if happiness lies in one's ability to live out their singular purpose, to live out their message in such a way that lets them live a life where message and life are blurred and beautiful. I have no idea what my message is, what I'd like to say to the world. I feel utterly lost in this. I don't think it's a matter of religious apostasy, but over the last few years my ability to access my "voice" has diminished until I don't know what to do with it. And I don't have to go back to 2001 to figure it out. I wrote a personal weblog on a near-daily basis between 2001-2005; I made a CD of original songs in 2006; I wrote a CD's worth of as-yet-unreleased material over the few years that followed—but by 2013, my writing essentially stopped. I no longer played riffs and thought "I should use that" and built something around it. I had nothing to say. And I could feel it happening. I tried a few things to fight it: I worked with a drummer and tried to write some songs using riffs; I would record mini-moments of inspiration on my phone and hope to make sense of them when I came back to them; I sat down and wrote journals; I tried to write semi-creative blog posts; I tried to attend open-mic nights and pub jams; I tried to record videos of cover songs, secretly hoping that they'd turn into something of my own. I'd sit down and try to learn proper riffs, hoping they'd lead to new flashes of inspiration. But they never did. And I still feel like I have nothing to say. There are ironies here: I know people want to hear what I have to say; I know people care about me and think I have worthwhile ideas; I know people can see that I have a vision for things. And I'm anxious to get it out, myself. I imagine a good portion of it is separation-based. This whole marriage-falling-apart thing has been a pretty enormous blow to my ego, and it's been a long process that continues to take up an inordinate amount of brainspace in any given moment. So perhaps, as I learn how to be myself again, maybe I'll find a way to articulate my vision again, whatever it is. But it's not there yet. My vision simmers at best. But I could sure use some of that overflowing confidence to express myself again.
And using "simmers" reminded me of this special moment from last summer:
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April 2024
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