I'm reminding myself

This is something that occurred to me today. Even as much as I've had a lot of down days this spring, as much as outside events have colored how I react to the world and feel (and I need to learn to break out of that somehow, I'm just not very good at not being swayed by what goes on around me), things are fundamentally pretty good for me. You could say in a lot of ways I seem to lead a charmed (or perhaps, blessed is a better word) life:

a. I have good health. I know a number of people right now who are wrestling with bad health stuff, from hand issues to mobility problems to cancer. My biggest health issues right now are allergies and high blood pressure, and that second one I can mostly control with diet, medication, and exercise. And even at that, my high blood pressure was not so very high; I was only in "stage 1 uncomplicated" hypertension when I first went in.

b. I have a job, and most of the time it's a job I enjoy. Oh, there are parts of it that can be aggravating and I come home pretty tired the end of many days (and emotionally/intellectually tired, rather than physically, which is sometimes harder to recover from). But I do have a job, I have as much job security as pretty much anyone gets in the New Normal that we have to deal with. It is almost entirely likely that I will wind up retiring from this job in fifteen years or so, and if I don't, it will be because I chose to go somewhere else.

c. Even though I took a pay cut for the summer because I felt I needed to teach my small classes because graduating seniors were in them, and they signed up before all the budget cuts hit the fan, things have mostly worked out. My chair is appreciative and has promised me a couple of small perks (especially: someone to help me clean up and refresh the prep room before fall classes) in return, and I know I've accumulated a bit of goodwill (political capital) for doing this, and I may want to use that some day.

And on top of that, I have these textbook chapters to proofread, and I can make up part of the missing paychecks from the summer with that.

And at any rate: being generally frugal about things means that I haven't had to dip into savings to cover the summer bills and I do not anticipate that happening. And I've been able to throw a little money at a couple causes I want to support. And I've been able to buy a little yarn and a little fabric and keep the Doki Doki boxes coming over the summer.

d. Things are currently semi-stable at church; we have someone to fill the pulpit for the rest of the summer. Hopefully we find someone to start in the fall. I think we're okay enough financially we could keep going, it's staffing that's the issue. If worse came to worse I suppose we could do a lot of "Let's get together and sing and have a communion service and then dismiss" because the elders and the music staff could certainly run that. Though that doesn't lead to growth.

And again, if worse REALLY came to worse: there are other churches in town that would welcome me. I would most likely follow whereever most of our current members went, and if that seemed a bad fit, maybe try somewhere else then....I know our Episcopal church just celebrated a milestone anniversary (my brother and sister in law belong to an Episcopal church; they started going to an Anglican church when they lived in Chicago because they were frustrated that the churches close to the denominations from which they came all seemed to do very non-traditional services, and like me, they tend to be somewhat traditionalist)

I know I'm one of those people who tends to freak out when I see some big change (or the potential of one) down the road; I think "I do not know how I will survive this" but I always do. I am thinking now of how about 17 years ago, now, I was sitting in the crummy old (now since closed) Kettle restaurant chain outlet here in town, crying because I was scared. Crying because I was scared because my parents were leaving for home the next day, and leaving me here. Crying because I was afraid I wouldn't succeed. Crying because it was a new strange place and there was very little right in town and Sherman - the nearest place with a large grocery store and a craft store and a bookstore - seemed so very far away and I didn't like the idea of driving an HOUR'S round trip for those things.

And yet I managed. Oh, that first year was HARD - I think everyone's first year teaching is hard, especially if you're in a new place that is even slightly culturally different from what you knew before. But I managed, I kind of fit in here now - at least, I fit in as much as I've ever fit in anywhere, and maybe that's all I can hope for. And it doesn't seem so strange and awful now to have to drive that hour's round trip and I will drive even further for something really good (the hour to Whitesboro for the quilt shop and yarn shop, the three-hours-plus to Longview for their yarn shop and a meetup with Laura)

And that's another thing I have to remind myself of: so many things in my life that looked like "How the heck am I going to manage this" when I was staring them down, whether it was an emotional thing ("My grandmother, my last grandparent left, is dying") or a logistical thing ("I have to prep three lecture classes completely from scratch and write all the exams and stay a couple weeks at least ahead of the students!")

A not-quite-complete list of things that seemed emotionally impossible at the time, but which I managed to stare down:

- losing my grandmother and going to my first-ever funeral. Not first-ever as a grownup, first-ever first-ever.

- being asked to leave (for "lack of progress," really, I think now it was more "She doesn't have a lot of outside experience and we can't expend the effort on her") my first graduate program.

- having someone I was kinda sorta going out with (I don't think we ever did the formal talk of "so are we boyfriend and girlfriend now?") start seeing someone else.

- at the same time, realizing my brother was really serious about my future sister in law and he was going to marry her. The younger sibling getting married, which as a reader of fairy tales from way back, was kind of discombobulating to me.

- Having some changes in my research plans laid upon me, not quite at the last minute, but it felt like it at the time, and winding up taking a year more to complete my degree than I planned on.

- Applying for jobs. And that's a big scary thing. Doing phone interviews. Being asked to articulate a "statement of faith" by a school with a religious affiliation that I was applying for a position at, and not being really prepared because I wasn't expecting to be asked that.

- Flying down here all alone, trusting that the guy who met me at the Dallas airport was the guy who was going to safely get me to my interview, going through the interview process. Then being stuck  in the St. Louis airport for HOURS in the middle of the night because my connecting flight home couldn't take off because the midwestern-states air traffic control computers shut themselves down.

- Accepting the job, making that decision.

- Moving halfway across the country to a state I had never even BEEN in before my interview. Not knowing the culture. Being told by numerous people I "talked funny" or having people say "you're not from around here, are you" and trying not to hear that as hostile. (Most of the time it was not, but still, it feels very isolating to hear it)

- Prepping three classes from scratch in the fall, and then another one in the spring. Having my laptop die and be in the shop for two weeks during that time, all the while I had no internet access on campus because the person I replaced had not wanted it (!) and so it wasn't in the office that person used to occupy.

- getting my dissertation published through long-distance communication with my major advisor. Having it rejected from two different journals - one where I was told by the old editor to revise and resubmit, and then while I was revising, the editor died of a heart attack (IIRC) and the new editor who took over claimed no knowledge of the revise-and-resubmit thing and told me to not bother resubmitting.

- Other paper rejections. Some I rewrote and resubmitted elsewhere, others I just ashcanned because I didn't feel they were worth the effort.

- Applying for tenure and worrying that if I didn't get it I wouldn't know what to do with my life.

- At the same time, living through a congregational split that turned really ugly, in the sense of there being untrue rumors started by certain people.

- My dad having a few health scares. My mom having one that turned out to be nothing but was scary for about a day and a half.

- A cousin committing suicide.

- A couple other estrangements within my family.

- Losing both my aunts on my mother's side. She's the only one of the kids in her family left now. (She was also by far the youngest)

- Being part of a small, constantly struggling congregation that has a hard time keeping pastors (for various reasons). Worrying about if there's enough money, if there will be enough people to do the various service jobs in the services.

- Applying for Full Professor, worrying about the humiliation and shame if I didn't get it.

- Living through the budget cuts this spring. Seeing a colleague who had been here longer than I had let go simply because she was untenured (did not have a terminal degree, had never wanted to go tenure track: she wanted to be tft even knowing that carried less security). Worrying A LOT about my own position or about what the future would hold, whether teaching here would become sufficiently unattractive I'd need to pick up and leave.

And in amongst all of that, other littler things: deaths of people I knew and cared about (friends from church, friends from AAUW, the spouse of a colleague). The various weird slings and arrows of life (my mega-problem-student of 2012, my class full of gigglers of a couple years ago). The loss of the local quilt shop, which hit harder than I realized it would. All of the ugly news that happens in the world, the mass shootings, the political ugliness, the way some groups and people want to "other" people that are not like them and give them nasty snarky names, which looks to me like a step on the way to declaring them non-human and therefore expendable....

And yet, I'm still here. I still manage. I have good days and bad days - it seems more bad days of late, though like I said a lot of that is me being more affected by situational things than I should let myself be. But in some ways I am a tough old bird myself (I think of my friend at church who is recuperating from some SERIOUS health stuff, and how her survival was partly attributed to her being "a tough old bird.")

I do need to get back to how I once was formerly, before I was so tired and so affected by what was going on around me, where I was able to wrestle more joy from life. Oh, I still can do that - the other day, driving back from field lab, a roadrunner ran across the street and I exclaimed to the students in the van with me, "Cool! A roadrunner!" because really, it still IS cool to me to see one. And the happiness I felt last night opening my box from Fat Quarter Shop with the new jelly rolls in it. And the satisfaction of finishing some project....it felt good to finish that first chapter earlier today.