So, Where Were We?

It has been over two years since I last posted on this little blog that was meant to be an outlet for creativity during our temporary-government-enforced-lockdown due to the global pandemic that was sweeping across the country. I was going to write every day and have something to show for my time stuck inside.

I stopped writing in mid-May of 2020. For many reasons. Some of them being that my focus shifted to protesting. Some of them being that there was no end in sight for our temporary-government-enforced-lockdown. Some of them being that I would open the Sims on my then boyfriend’s computer at 9am and not get off until it was dark outside or until my shoulders hurt too much from hunching over to create beautifully curated homes for my sims. I stopped writing because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t really know who I was supposed to be in this new limbo of a reality.

I accepted an in-person teaching job for the fall of 2020. I remember feeling guilty—like I was doing something wrong for working in person. But my unemployment wasn’t going to last forever and I needed to pay rent. I also needed a reason to get up in the morning. So in the fall of 2020 I accepted a job as an assistant teacher in a first grade classroom.

It wasn’t the first time I had taught. I had been teaching improv for the year leading up to the pandemic and before that I taught in a kindergarten classroom. But this time was different. Without the hustle of the theater world to come home to every night, I threw all of my energy into my first graders. I threw so much energy into my job that I decided I needed to go back to school. That is how now, in June of 2022, I am less than 6 months away from having a Masters of Elementary Education.

I couldn’t really figure out who I was without theater. I needed something to become my whole reason for being. And as the months went on and on with theater doors still shut, I wasn’t sure if I was every going to figure out who I was, so I made a new me. The new me got their masters in elementary ed, and they did weekly family zooms with their partner’s family. The new me thought about what sort of classroom they would create once they got their masters. The new me brought home school materials to laminate while watching tv. And the new me dissociated from a lot of their problems because those were old me’s problems. New me got offered a promotion: Director of After Care and Summer Programs. New me moved out of the classroom and into administration. And New me worked so hard at that job even when the school was crumbling around them. New me wanted so badly for this new life to work.

And then old me woke up.

All it took was a little taste of directing again. I directed a friend’s one person show and old me said “ring ring remember me?” And there I was: confronted with the panicked choices of someone thrown into the deep end (aka a global pandemic) and the choices of someone who, in 2019, had left full time employment to freelance. And those two people felt, and still feel, disconnected.

It’s not that I can’t do both. We all have to work to pay our bills and freelancing, to be honest, was not going to pay my bills. But I had spent a good year of my life thinking that the one thing that has always given me a place to call home may never exist again.

So I tried really hard to make some place else feel like home.

Today is my last day at my school administration job and I thought I would feel more joy, but mostly I just feel sad and stressed. The me that worked so hard to make this job work is saying goodbye to a program that I built from the ground up; a program I am really proud of despite the complications thrown my way. I have cried more at this job than I have at all my other jobs combined—and I’ve worked in retail.

This week has been a culmination of so many things. My live-in ex-boyfriend moved out, I finished this job, I got keys to my new apartment, and I need to start planning for my next job.

I thought all of these things would bring me joy, but mostly they have brought a feeling of “How did I get here?”

Where were we? Where are we now? Is there any point in answering those questions?

I simultaneously know way more than I did two years ago, and yet know nothing at all.

Hopefully tomorrow I will know a little bit about something.