"Somebody That I Used To Know"

I’ve been on summer break for a little over a week now and it’s been wonderful. I’ve slept, read, gone to the pool, watched T.V., worked out, and spent time with friends. It’s been a great week. I’ve fully embraced Summer and greeted her warmly each day.

However, in all this relaxation I’ve realized just how exhausted this past year has made me. Riverside is exhausting for a myriad of reasons, my family is, for lack of a better word, “interesting”, and I just constantly kept busy with one thing or another. I forgot about me. It’s so easy to do that too. I “had” to this, or “had” to do that. I didn’t stop for me. I didn’t hang out with friends as much as I wanted to, I didn’t read for pleasure, I didn’t write. I lost bits and pieces of me along the way and now I’m wandering around picking up the lost items, the things that make up who I am. I am beginning to reclaim my identity.

It’s sad to see how much of myself has disappeared since August. I care about my job and I want to do my job well, so I throw myself into teaching and if you’re a teacher, you know just how much it consumes your life.  My days are filled with teaching some of the greatest young people I’ve ever met, to some of the most “behavioral challenged” students anyone will ever meet. After teaching all day I then come home and grade vocabulary quizzes, edit thesis statements, plan for the next unit, correct subject verb agreement exercises, and spend hours pouring over essays.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about all the work, it’s the nature of the job and it’s something I take on gladly. But in doing all this, I carefully gave up small slivers of myself along the way. And summer creates the opportunity to realize that 1. I’ve forgotten what I love and 2. That I have the chance to go back and reacquaint myself with who I used to be. I am eternally grateful to be able to recognize these two opportunities and I plan on exercising them to the fullest. However, as much as I don’t want this to happen, to forget who I am, I’m glad it does happen. It reminds me of why I have certain passions, that I should be proud of who I’ve grown up to become, and how I’m being used throughout the school year and the summer. So thank you Summer, for reminding me who I used to be, and allowing me to fully become her again.