Day 7

I feel no doubt. I am not sad. The guilt is minimal and underwhelming. The anger no longer bubbles to the surface with ease. I regret not seeing my friends, and the awkward position my actions may have put them in.

But, I do not regret walking out of my job one week ago. It was the right choice. It was healthy, self-serving, liberating, and the most ethical choice I could make at the time. I conducted myself with dignity and integrity. Even though I knew my actions would cause harm I was never, at any moment, intent on hurting anyone. I don’t know if that makes a difference for anyone else, but I feel comfortable with my belief that it makes all the difference for me.

This blog has become my full-time job in the past seven days. I wake up in the morning, putz around the house or watch a movie, and then I go out into the world to sit among the public and write the post to be published for that day. I’m actually quite sick of this routine already. My posts this week have become erratic and rather pedantic for my taste. Each post has been a reaction to my action of walking away from the pool. I either sit at Townshend’s, Falling Sky, or The Wandering Goat typing my post for the day and publishing it immediately. This technique was helpful at first. It allowed me to spend the daylight hours of my first week being unemployed feeling as if I were accomplishing something significant. But, let’s be honest, that’s bullsh*t.

Being able to purge my thoughts and feelings into a post written and edited thirty seconds before publication was constructive because it helped to organize my thoughts into a narrative. I now have an idea of how my story should be told. I realized with my post last night that I want to put more thought and time into telling my story. I want to have more reflection upon all the interconnected elements of my experience as I write about them. I want to decrease the amount of reactive emotion being incorporated in my writing, and instead learn to focus my storytelling on the issues of disability discrimination, gender, race, sexual harassment, hostile work environments, obsolete administrative structures, effective communication, retaliation, rampant rumormongering, and the harmful damage caused by the process of labeling others as ‘different.’ These are the issues that I struggled to learn how to recognize within my experiences at the pool, but they are not the only issues I am concerned with in our society.

A decade of living with diabetes, instead of building a career in education, has given me the unprecedented ability to step back from everything I know about our society, and truly begin to understand what it is I want to educate our young about how to survive within our society. Survival for the human species, and planet Earth, will depend upon a shift in global attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. If we continue to live the way we are currently, then we will kill all life as we know to exist. I want to teach kids how to change their world by modeling for them how I change my world everyday. They will need to deeply understand the concepts of community resilience, local government, sustainability, reduction of consumption, a renewable energy-based economy, collaberation and cooperation, as well as conflict resolution skills, which are all woefully neglected within the pedagogy and currriculum of our nation’s public education system. I want to use public education as a vehicle for helping students to create a global community built upon the values of self-sacrifice, stewardship, and civic duty.

These ideas are too big for me to write about while drinking a pint, or three, of beer at the deli. So, this is my last post to be written in public and published immediately. I had an image in my mind of writing everyday and telling my story in pieces, but the strain of keeping my thoughts flowing in a linear stream to make each post directly connect to the next is not working for me. Instead, my story is simply going to come out in random chunks. Each day will still be met with a published post, but each post will no longer be an attempt to tell my narrative in a linear fashion. I will be jumping from chapter to chapter of my life, telling the stories I have accumulated over the years of experience I have lived through.

My plan (for now) is to label each relevant story under the category of either Education, Diabetes, or Pool. That way, those interested in reading my stories can choose which narrative to follow. I think this may work. I have high hopes. *shrug*

Otherwise, my daily posts are going to be random stories from over the years that may actually have nothing to do with my disease, my time at the pool, or my convictions about public education (I have climbing stories up the wazoo!). The only thing connecting all the various narratives will be the simple fact they all happened to me at some point in my life. That is, after all, what this blog is ultimately about: me. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my blatherings. I appreciate the support and love your action of reading provides me!