I'm not really one to get reflective around the holidays...I usually do that on the High Holy Days. But what I can tell you, with 7 more school days until our much-needed winter break, is that this year has been one of the most eventful in my life. It started out with me trying to make things work at Vh1, with little success (no thanks to the nasty, vindictive women I worked with...that, by an ironic twist of fate, led them both to quit before me)...and I didn't know what I wanted to do next month, let alone in five years.
I didn't apply for the Fellows on a whim. It was something I'd thought about a few times and always said, "Later." Somehow "later" became "why not now?" One weekend my mother came over to my apt and we revised my essay and I handed it in. I got selected for an interview in March. Two days before the interview, I lost my grandmother. I rescheduled, sure I was dooming myself to losing out on the program if I did so. I walked to a school in Union Square early on a Saturday morning in a black pants suit, wearing black shoes and barely keeping from slipping on the ice. I gave a good performance. That's what it was, a performance. I had no idea how a teacher prepared or taught a lesson. So I did what I thought a teacher would do.
My parents were in London when I got the acceptance email in April. I was excited, scared and everything in between. It took me awhile to accept because I had to figure out how I would survive the summer on just a stipend. It also happened that I inherited money from my Grandmother. It's weird to think that she would be proud of me if she was here, but I wouldn't have been able to do this without the money she left me.
I quit my job. My new boss tried to make me stay. I cried after I quit. I was scared that I had made the wrong decision and scared that I'd made the right one, scared that I had just wasted 3 years of my life doing something I had never cared about. Scared that now I knew what I wanted to do. I went to the welcoming event at Lincoln Center. I love Lincoln Center and I get excited to go there for any reason. So I went there that Monday and watched the show that was prepared for us. I remembered my earlier school visits and thinking, "Can I really do this?"
LIU, training, heated discussions about race, disability, you name it. Everyone in the program is so smart and has so many opinions that we're all anxious to have them heard. Summer school was a dose of reality but I felt lucky to be working with another fellow, Johanna, that I ended up getting along with. Training was like camp, we all got close in a really short period of time...and now we don't see half those people anymore.
The fear of not getting a job was overwhelming as training ended. People have told me that they had many offers...I didn't. I had one offer. That was all I needed. I am now working in my 12:1:1 class with unruly 6th and 7th graders and trying to make them stop trying to kill each other long enough to teach them something. I've come a long way, but I've only just started. I feel a direction that I didn't before. I know that when I finish LIU that I want to finish my history major and take arts education classes. Even if I'm not in front of a class all the time, I know this is where I belong.
