You Can't Go Home Again

I came across this journal I wrote for an English/History/Humanities class that I had in seventh grade and it made me want to start keeping a journal again. It’s so interesting to laugh at the former version of yourself, yet also recognize your current self in little comments that you probably hadn’t even fully understood at the time. Like, I could not have imagined that writing the following would later make my pro-Euthanasia-self want to high-five my seventh grade self, who didn’t even know the term or understand the controversy of the topic: “I think if a doctor told me I was going to die, I don’t think I’d have any hope in my heart for living. I’d probably spend my days preparing to face death, not fight it.” And then there’s the early, albeit naïve, pacifistic musings that read, “One of my favorite things to do is to read. When I read, I can focus on one thing and not have my feelings all jumbled and swimming around in my head. It also gives me more things to think about. Like how much better I have it then other people have had it in the past. It also helps me to see how much America has grown and how much people have changed for better or for worse. One of the things I have learned is that when we used to have World Wars we would not try and think of solving our problems. We would just worry about winning a battle.”

I also figure that this is a good time to document my life again because I’ve finally decided to stop running away from what Irish poet Seamus Heaney masterfully designates “the givens” of my life. After running away to graduate school in Virginia after Chris’s death five years ago and staying three years to teach at a Jewish private school in the D.C. area as news of Jonny’s schizophrenic episodes floated to me across the continent, I’ve decided to move back home for a year while I get certified to teach in public schools back on the left coast. Today was my third day of teaching as a long-term English 9 sub at the place to which I swore I’d never return on my graduation day in 1997: my own high school. The ironies are abundant: I walk past my old hangout every day and chuckle to myself as I note that it is still occupied by the same old crowd of oddball outcasts; I am teaching the youngest brother of my arch nemesis and probably the only “enemy” I’ve ever felt I had, for that matter...the list goes on and on...

I’ve been feeling inordinately lonely the past few days. I tried to strike out in search of people during my 3^rd period prep the other day, but no luck—everyone is hiding in their classrooms or teaching, I guess. It’s kind of depressing. I’m sure most of my melancholy was prompted by reconnecting with Meg, who is feeling the same loneliness in her new office job at a lobbying firm back in D.C. We both miss the office banter incredibly. I keep thinking that it’s probably more healthy not to be so wrapped up in and distracted by office social interaction, but it only really is if I have a social life outside of work, which I don’t.

I am enjoying the student population, though. They aren't as enthusiastic about learning as the kids at my last school were, but they aren't completely uninterested, either; refreshingly diverse; and, most important, grateful for my expertise (which was taken for granted and even second-guessed pretty regularly at the last school where I taught). I think the area has grown a lot since I was a student at the school myself, which is part of the reason why it’s not as bad as I remember, but I also think I probably overdramatized my memory of high school. That’s what teenagers do to everything, after all.