Finding What Feeds You

My friend Mary Grace tells me I'm blessed to do so many things well. When I was in Austin in July and we were discussing our different pursuits, she brought up my writing, photography and singing and complimented me much more highly than I am able to easily accept. Because the thing is, I know I can do all of these things well, but I don't feel like I can do any of them well enough. I long to excel and feel comfortable in any one of them. Sometimes when I stare at a photo I've taken but not seen on screen before, I feel a kind of awe, like "oh yeah, I can take pictures." Because I tend to forget. When I came here two years ago, it was a very conscious decision to commit myself to photography. But the thing is, I seldom used my camera. And so after everything, still not feeling comfortable with my camera, and now also a bit turned off by the people and world I've been surrounded by, I'm wondering what to do.

As I mentioned before, I've been reading a lot. Reading good novels. Reading good poetry. Trying to focus on getting into a place where I am happy with myself and my situation. And a lot of this is finding what tools I need and what it is that feeds me. Something I learned in grad school (the biggest thing I learned in fact) is that I love to teach. I love engaging in conversation with students. I love explaining intricacies and trying to open their eyes, as trite as that sounds. I love helping people learn to communicate more clearly. I love that in a class where we were discussing Native American boarding schools, I was able to take my students outside and read this passage from The Sin Eaters, by Sherman Alexie:

War is a church.
In my church, my mother and father were frozen in the stained-glass window above the altar. The red glass of my father's bloody face was cradled by the blue glass of my mother's dress.
Memory is a church on fire.
In my church, a soldier dropped a lighted match at the wooden feet of a crucified Jesus and watched the fire wrap around the savior like a shroud. Flames lifted away from Jesus' body like angels and blessed the parched pews, threadbare curtains, and brittle hymnal books. Two rows of flames sang in the choir box. Flames climbed up the altar and walls to embrace my stained-glass parents.
The glass darkened with smoke.
The glass melted in the fire.
The glass exploded in the heat.
My parents' faces fell to pieces in my mind only moments after those soldiers landed in our front yard. I began to forget pieces of my parents' faces only moments after I was taken from them. By the time I was loaded into a school bus with twenty other kids from the reservation, I could remember only the dark of my mother's eyes and the curve of my father's jaw. By the time our bus crossed the border of the reservation, taking us away from what we had known and into what we could never have predicted, I had forgotten almost every piece of my parents' faces. I touched my face, remembering that its features owed their shapes to the shapes of my parents' faces, but I felt nothing familiar. I was strange and foreign.

I read several pages of the story, and I had a couple of students later tell me that hearing this story was the most impactful part of the entire class. That the emotion and loss that was conveyed in this piece of fiction made them understand the true impact of boarding schools on Native Americans more than the historical accounts we read in class.

And now, here I am, knowing just a little bit more about what feeds me. And realizing, yet again, that it will take a lot of time to get to the point where I can actually teach my own class. Thank you, No Child Left Behind. Thank you, bureaucracy. Even the community colleges that will accept lecturers without teaching credentials require you to submit syllabi of classes you've taught—the proverbial Catch-22. So what now? Well, I have an interview Tuesday for a teaching/tutoring position at an education center 40 minutes away. But how do I get the certification? Grit my teeth and do a one-year Master's program, that I can't start 'til next Fall?

The answer I'm coming to is a difficult one for me, and could definitely change. But this is what I know: I miss writing, and I love teaching. And knowing that I'm going to have to get another degree no matter what, if I want to teach...well I'm thinking about killing two birds with one stone (which, admittedly, is a very unromantic way to refer to a life decision). I'm thinking about going back to school for Creative Writing. The reason this is so difficult is that four years ago, I was accepted to NYU for Creative Writing, went to NYC and experienced this huge epiphany about how I wanted to do photography. And I still do. But as I get older, I want more tools to work with. And I want to have the skills to use them.