Thursday, August 30, 2001

Feelin' The Funk

Okay, what's going on in my life, I've asked myself.

I'm at some sort of mental impasse. Not completely happy, not completely sad. More like completely incomplete. Does that make sense? I've got almost everything I could ever hope for. But it's that one longing that doesn't belong to any particular area in my life that seems to get me hanging up. My mind drifts to that nonsensical place where nothing really makes sense and then I think about some of the shit that my students go through. My life is peaches and cream.

As most of you intelligent and beautiful people know I'm a teacher at some stellar university in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spend half my time in the classroom and the rest runnin' thangs in some big ol' office (no windows and no vents, my office sucks balls). Part of my classroom work involves meeting with my students one-on-one for a "get to know you" session. I've found that this really does help me construct a classroom that is sensitive to where there students are coming from. After all, wouldn't you prefer to have a curriculum that is relevant to where you are coming from and what you are all about?

During my one-on-ones, anything goes. I usually ask them the generic prompt, "So, tell me about yourself..." and off we go. I've met students who have interesting lives. Actors, singers, athletes, and the like. I've also met students who have come from extreme hardship: abused as children, drug addicted, raped, suicidal. It's amazing the amount of duress that humans can undergo, but to be a student and suffer in literal silence as many of my students do, it truly does blow my mind. Working with students who are on the brink of killing themselves is tough, it's demanding to be fully present, and to kick into counseling mode requires a profound amount of inner strength in order to be "there." After one of those kinds of students, I usually crash...it's so tiring.

Today I didn't have to deal with a suicide case thank god/goddess. Instead I had a student who was seriously depressed and man, what's that title of that book, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine? I listened to the student's story, and at first it didn't unfold altogether...After some careful questions, a picture of darkness emerged, and after the session, I sat back in my chair and thought about my momentary lapse of selfishness where I thought my life wasn't coming together like it should. The student cried over the pain. I instead could just snap out of it, but for the student, years of hurt and pain does not disappear with a thought.

The student said, "I wish I could just make all of my problems just go away. I wish I could just forget all of them."

"Well," I said, "there is a way. It's called a lobotomy." We laughed. Wiping tears, the student smiled for the first time since sitting coming in. "We all wish we could make our problems go away. And something like that could make it easier. But the reality is that we have to live with our problems, they are like things we carry around with us all the time, whether or not we know it. And those things affect the way we see life," I said to her. "So the best we can do is to work through our stuff, figure out what we can work with and what we need help with. It's a matter of taking control of our lives before it takes control of us"

Indeed.

Voodoo

posted by Voodoo Child @ 9:52:00 PM