December 9, 2004

Yep, it's Christmas.

What's a girl to do?  The internet didn't offer up any answers to my conundrum, but I somehow figured it out anyway.  It didn't hit me like an epiphany (I was sooo looking for a Caravaggio moment, here!) but rather it crept up on my slowly, until I finally realized that I had only one choice:

I need to be a teacher. 

I wanted the epiphany, the moment of clarity, because that would have presumably been coupled with a sense of relief and euphoric joy.  But no, I got the reluctant realization that I had to do the painful thing that I was trying to avoid.  I have to go back to school.  This was a tough pill to swallow.

As it turns out, things it might not be as bad as I feared.  I came across some reassuring information by (ironically enough) going back to school.  Going to the Credential Program Pre-Enrollment Orientation Thingamahoocher, to be specific.  I dreaded it all day long.  I didn't want to go--it was in the evening, it was a rainy, I was tired, and it was at school.  In my mind, I had a slip of paper that said that I never had to go back to school, if I didn't want to.  But, I went anyway.  For a long time, I've had a bad habit of undermining myself by not doing things that I have to do.  This has been on every level, from picking up my clothes to applying for college.  I can remember sitting in second grade, staring out the window, unable to make myself do the simple assignment in front of me.  Lately, this has changed.  It's taken twenty years, but I have managed to drill it into myself that things just need to be done.  And so, even though every fiber of my being was trying to tear me away from that class (I swear, that's what it's like), I knew I had to go.  So I went.

It was the most awesome thing ever.  There, in a stuffy little room, with sixty other thirty-year-old-ish, non-teacherly-looking hopefuls, I was presented with diagrams and timetables of how the credential program operated, and I had an epiphany:  I can actually do this!

There, on overhead transparencies, was my future.  In that moment, I finally understood that it was going to work out, it was possible, and I was going to do it.  In my mind, all my doubts were replaced by the question of How.

That was Monday night.  Since then my brain has been a whirlwind of questions and ideas.  I have marked out my calendar for the application process.  I have called schools to find a place to volunteer.  I have created an Amazon wishlist of books on teaching.  I have begun to actually wrap my mind around the idea that I am going to be a teacher.

Today I got an interview request from an environmental consulting firm that I sent my resume to a couple of months ago.

When it rains it fucking pours, doesn't it?