Weekly Wide-Awake #46

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake

back

Love. Diagnosis. Heartbreak.

Living the Comma #18

Love. Stevie Wonder. Mondays. Ross Gay.

Love’s in need of love today/ Don’t delay/ Send yours in right away/ Hate’s goin’ ‘round/ Breaking many hearts/ Stop it please/ Before it’s gone too far — Stevie Wonder

Good Morn or Evening Friends,

I want to bid adieu to February with a nod to one of my favorite albums, Stevie Wonder’s Songs In The Key of Life, paying particular attention to the song, “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” I would be rich if I had a penny for every time I turn to this album. I would know despair more deeply if not for this album. I would know love a little less if not for this album. Creating — and by extension, writing — is an act of love, and love’s in need of love today. Our group is engaged in sending love, stopping hate, and building hearts. Our work is that important. Our voices are that necessary.

Read entire post here.

Spit and Spaghetti #12

Pitches from Wind and Wall

The Sun — Readers Write

Diagnosis

A diagnosis is a line. There is a before and after. It carries information and intent and intensity. It builds and crescendos and resonates. It clarifies and shakes and scares. I am middle aged women living with Turner syndrome — a genetic condition in which a female is missing all or part of an X chromosome. The syndrome occurs in one of every 2,500 live female births. Ninety-eight percent of babies with Turner syndrome are miscarried.

My diagnosis was delivered when I was 15, following a year of pain, blood tests, and questions. It changed everything. I shrouded my diagnosis in silence for years — except when talking with my medical team — until I participated in a study at the National Institutes of Health, one of the few places in the world studying people like me. (I was living in Washington, DC at the time, right down from the National Institutes of Health, and decided to break my silence.)

I live life downstream from my diagnosis. I am not even five feet tall. I struggle to reach the peddles when I drive and the top shelf at the grocery store. I have a dilated aorta and two heart specialists. I have witnessed thirty years of shifts and changes in hormone replacement therapy protocols — managing all the symptoms of menopause over time. I traded invincibility for vigilance before I got my driver’s license. I completed a Ph.D. focused on wide-awakeness to live into a life I was not supposed to have. I built a career speaking a “just watch me” mantra. Today, medical appointments and prescription drugs and tests are my rhythm. I do what I can to stay present and not live waiting for proverbial shoe to drop.

My diagnosis taught me a few things. It invited me into a life that knew too much too soon— too many big words, too many specialists looking at every inch of my body, too many dreams changed before they were even imagined. It taught me who I am and who I am not — to learn, and relearn, that my diagnosis does not define me. It forced me to confront mortality. It gave me gratitude for it all.

Read entire post here.

MONDAYS ARE FREE EXERCISES 186 —190

Leaving. Tension. Heartbreak. Invitation. Goodbye.

EXERCISE 186: DOCUMENT THE LEAVING

not dear to you

Freewrite for as long as you can about leaving a person or a place that was not dear to you.

I quit my first teaching job the Friday before Christmas vacation my second year teaching. I was 27 years old — young and on fire, creative and committed, ready to thrive like a plant in the summer sun after a perfectly rainy spring. The job was my dream job. I dreamed and trained and worked toward it for years. I busted my ass working with students, leading rehearsals, planning lessons, grading papers, talking with parents, building sets, managing facilities.

The job was dear. I had to leave.

I was crushed under the weight of “work smarter not harder.” I was crushed under the weight of asking for help and being ignored. I was crushed under the weight of new teacher tears falling on industrial tile floors.

Leaving meant boxing up my books in the dark night, rolling up my posters and taping them closed, returning my keys to a colleague who had become a friend, completing my lesson plans and tests for the end of semester — just in case they would have a substitute teacher do anything but have a study hall, and hiring a lawyer to write a letter to explain my departure and make sure I would not be sued for breaking my contract.

Leaving was hard and right. Hard, like not being able to say good-bye to my students and colleagues. Hard, like learning we can want things so much we can taste it and have that still not be enough. Hard, like watching a dream burn. Right, like I could not survive a life carrying that weight. Right, like Wallace Stevens’ search for a blue guitar. Right, like unmistakable knowing.

Read entre post here.

Thanks for reading Weekly Wide-Awake. Subscribe to the Wide-Awakeness Project to explore writing, pay attention, build community.