A Life in Flux

     

Even though it’s Christmas Break, and I should be going boneless (mentally) and doing a lot of nothing, I am a teacher, so my job doesn’t end just because we’re not in session.  My students had a 10-12 page memoir due right before we went on break, so I have been grading those off and on for the past two weeks.  It’s strange to get in the head of a 16-year-old and rummage about in their thoughts.  Yes, often their thoughts are jumbled and poorly articulated and grammatically incorrect, but they tell stories as they see them, with honesty.

I have read about the generic pains of being a teenager:  sports, the opposite sex, and family dysfunction, but the human condition isn’t constrained to ignorance and apathy in teenagers.  I have read several essays about suicide, depression, anxiety, self-mutilation, substance abuse, and crippling self-doubt.   Wouldn’t it be nice is young people could just enjoy being young? 

I don’t mean to sound like a fossil; I certainly had my share of angst as a young person, but the older I get, the more I find that the crushing burden of life creeps in earlier and earlier for people.  There is no such thing as a simple childhood anymore, because the complexities of life creep in on people as soon as they hit puberty.  (Or get on Instagram.)  While I’d like to think that I’m helping my students with some sort of catharsis by making them write a piece of their life stories, my English class isn’t going to save any lives. 

And how am I to respond to these guttural recollections of life?  By correcting their grammar?  I don’t think so.  I DO correct the errors, but I feel like an asshole every time I write a note about verb usage next to a student’s confession about their private life.  It’s the only way for me to express to them that they shouldn’t feel pity for themselves, even though I do that all the time.  (And that they need to write coherently, or else their message is lost in shitty, careless language.)

So … to the students (past and present), I feel your pain.  Your pain in the human condition.  It did not start, nor will it end, with you.  Take a deep breath and then exhale slowly.  As it turns out, the sorrow doesn’t actually kill you, but it will stay with you for the rest of your life and contribute to the person you will become.  Tread carefully, because some choices never really fade away.