just so you know.
i do consider myself to be pretty normal. i have to dance and shake my way into my jeans. i pick my nose in the car. i think i'm adele when i'm singing in the shower. i cry when i see new babies. i talk to my dog like she's a person i make my life seem cooler on instagram. and sometimes i eat ice cream for dinner. i am a human. and a recently discovered control freak. ok...so maybe i've had "controlling or bossy" tendencies my whole life but i shit you not it did not enter my mind as something debilitating or harmful until monday when my therapist (bless her) asked me if i ever felt let down or disappointed with things in my life. all the time, i said. why do you ask? because, she explained, i think you may be so consumed with controlling and planning your life that you don't spend too much time living it. OH. SHIT. well, brb gotta go re-think my entire life bye. she was so right though. i can recall being a child and purposefully not enjoying a fun thing my family and i did together because it wasn't a part of "my plan." my entire life is made up of things i've planned out and accounted for. everything up to my eiffel tower engagement has been orchestrated, in some way, by me. and you know what? sometimes the most amazing things i've planned turn out to be dissapointing because i have removed the fun from them. i am a fun-sucker. but i'm working on it. truly. my homework this week was to eliminate some negative vocabulary from my life. i took out the "should be, could be and ought to be" in my day to day language. i stopped trying to control the outcome of things and micromanage the people in my world. and then yesterday i literally caught myself projecting my idea of perfect and right onto my kids. we were making birthday cards for a parishioner of the church who just turned 100 years old (#goals). i explained to the kids how to fold the card (fine, normal, not controlling). but then i gave them specific directions for how to make, what in my mind, is a perfect and appropriate birthday card. i made them start over if the greeting message wasn't on the side of the card that i felt it should be on (slow down crazy, slow down!). WHO DOES THAT!? i legitimately stopped dead in my tracks, realizing what i had done. i made it seem that my perfect way for writing cards was the only way. i squandered the creative talent of my nuggets by forcing them to fall in alignment with what i thought was right. i felt so ashamed. because a world with only things that i find pretty and perfect would be horribly boring. sometimes my kids need me to control or guide the way they complete assignments or learn new concepts. sometimes my ideas really are the best ones. and sometimes i need to chill the eff out. my plans are pretty and safe. they are ok from time to time. but not all the time. i hope that if you love control like me, you take comfort in this. you're not a bad parent or teacher or friend. you're a human. a wildly complex, beautifully colorful human. we make mistakes. we nitpick how our mom folds laundry or how our roommate does the dishes. we wrestle with wanting things to be perfect not because we're bad people but because we are NORMAL people. you are a normal person. and by george so am i. we're gonna be ok, friends. i just know it. xo
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it is a truth universally acknowledged that if miss d is absent from school for a vacation she will always return bearing gifts.
since i began teaching three years ago i have yet to come back from my yearly family vacation to florida without a few small treats for my nuggets. i am known for the shells i find. my family and i scour the beach in the early hours of the morning to look for shells along with other precious loot from the ocean. the self-proclaimed "conch hunters" rarely come up empty-handed. until this year... by day four of hunting and finding nothing more than partial shells i began to get nervous. these kids are expecting shells. full, beautiful, shiny shells. how would they gloat to the third and fourth graders during recess if i came back empty-handed!? all i had were a few pieces of conch that i found during low tide. it was infuriating. i found all these parts of what i was looking for but could not locate what i sought in full form. these tiny fragments of shell were so beautiful and yet so disappointing because to me they represented something broken and useless. what good is a piece of shell? one day i began to pick up the pieces of broken shell and put them in my red shelling bucket. i studied them hard when i returned from my walk. it dawned on me as the sun began to rise in the sky that these shells didn't lose their beauty when they broke up into different pieces. the cracks represented life. a full life. they proved that the shells housed living creatures and protected them from the sea. a shell that's been broken is a shell that's been loved. it's funny how people are like that too. humans don't lose their beauty by being broken. if anything it adds to their worth and potential. a heart that's been broken is a heart that's been loved. and i can think of no better lesson for my students than that. today we celebrated the life that came and passed through our shells. we took time to study them and all that makes them lovely. we drew portraits of the life we imagined our shell had during its time in the ocean. my kids didn't love the shells less because they were broken. if anything the brokenness made them cooler. we're all a little bit like broken shells. but that doesn't mean we're not worth loving. from one broken shell to another, with love. ld my skin has always made me feel weird.
since i was a child it has made stick out and has separated me from the rest of my family. my father and i share fair, freckly skin while my mom and sisters share dark, spotless skin. if you were a pre-teen which would you opt for? yeah, me too. no offense to my darling father but my pasty disappears-in-bright-photographs complexion has never been my favorite thing about myself. i can recall the way i envied my sisters' dark tan lines during the summer when we were growing up. i call to mind how lovely they looked in white while i was suited for a "nice coral." now, i realize there's much to be thankful for and god made me just right and all that jazz but level with me and remember, just for a moment, the way you envied something about a woman in your life. maybe it was her perfect hair. maybe it was the way her smile was never crooked. maybe it was her perfectly clear skin. maybe it was her size, or her voice, or her features, or her confidence. we all have that one thing (or many, if we're being honest here) that we just don't care for when it comes to our bodies. after my melanoma i developed a respect for my skin that i never had before. i am kinder to myself now when it comes to my fair skin. but try as i may i cannot see my scar as beautiful no matter how many times i listen to the alessia cara song. it makes me stand out. it makes me feel ugly. the scar represents what i always felt about my skin: that it was ugly. it's easy to find beauty in other people's scars. in other people's stories. in other people's lives. the hard part is finding the beauty in your own. i write this today, in the office of my dermatologist, to tell you: i'm working on it. and if you're working through something similar: i know how you feel. all my freckly love, ld |
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