This beast that you're after will eat you alive

I could quote a thousand lyrics that have helped me over the last 4 years as I came to terms with the need to leave my dream behind and start something new, but this has been one of the hardest hitting.

I have a tendency to get pretty manic and hyper focus. Maybe that’s the undiagnosed ADHD in me. I mean, heck, I just made this whole website on a whim on a Monday afternoon cause I thought “that would be cool, I should do that”.

So as a kid I was always so so interested in music but I just couldn’t get the info on how it worked. I wanted to play piano but never learned (college classes don’t count— but stay tuned cause that’s on my to do list). I tried guitar but I never remembered to practice til the night before (years later, I emailed my elementary school music teacher about this to tell him what I had been up to to which he replied “you had this guitar that led me to believe was probably from Walmart, and you carried it in the packaged cardboard box it came in. I remember how excited you were--it had been a Christmas or birthday present. I don't blame you for not practicing and then quitting; those things are hard to keep in tune! Actually they're difficult getting them tuned at all. A lot is coming back as I type this, believe it or not--I spent a lot of time trying to tune that thing!”

In middle school I was going to be a chorus teacher, then a history teacher, then “I don’t know, some kind of teacher”. I was a regular Mary Ingalls (yes scarlet fever, no blindness, yes wannabe teacher).

Then I joined band in 8th grade (again, on a whim). I wound up on trombone cause I wanted to play trumpet but I didn’t want to sit with those boys and I really liked hanging out with Grace (it’s also stays pretty basic until you get to the real hard stuff so I would have put me on it too).

The problem with trombone is it’s really hard to fake it and thus really embarrassing when you’re on the end and wrong. I still look at my old sheet music with wrong positions written in- I have one framed in my office.

So (this is the real TL;DR btw) I get to high school and I’m locked in on marching band. I’ll talk about that more at some other point. I go to college, I marry another trombone player, I’m ready to teach. (10 years, 3 sentences.)

I start teaching and it’s like

BAM behaviors are BAD. BAM your cooperating teachers are burned out at 55 and you’re supposed to go til you’re 63.

And then I have a fabulous first year teaching (I miss you so much, Val). But MARCHING BAND.

So I change jobs, and BAM no funding BAM no support BAM gaslighting (no gatekeeping or girl bossing) BAM burned out retiring teachers who again are supposed to retire 8 years before you would BAM covid BAM pregnant and never seeing your kid and also getting kicked at work and BAM you have a crippling anxiety disorder with a light dose of depression.

So I left

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

But I thought even if I did everything right and I was being listened to and supported that wouldn’t be my dream until atleast 15 years away. Then my kids would be grown up.

And I’d dump all this energy into this beautiful, wonderful, special thing. This thing I had worked so hard for. This thing I had built my entire life around. This person I was supposed to be.

But who decided who I was supposed be?

I did.

So if I wasn’t happy — what was the point?

After Bandtoberfest, exactly 10 years after my last one

Don’t get me wrong — this was one of the happiest moments of my whole life. It hurts to type this. There is still part of me who wants this so desperately. I LOVED teaching band. But it was sucking up every part of the rest of me. It was crushing me at the same time that it was filling my soul.

I’m crying. You’re probably not but just imagine me here — a mess.

Am I better now? 1000%. Do I love my job(s)? 1000%. Do I need Mike to talk me out of it every time there’s a band opening near me?

You see the pattern?

This brings me only joy

It reminds me of the Vlogbrothers video about Gussie Manlove, a woman whose tombstone cause John Green to wax poetic about life, as he does. The video is Thoughts from Places: Small Town America” and in it he talks about a man who died young. His wife’s name was engraved but she either wasn’t burried there or no one was around to carve her dates into the stone.

“Maybe she survived to 113 and outlived the century she'd committed herself to. Maybe she forgot to pay for the plot next to him. Or, more likely, maybe she had a life that the 28-year-old widow couldn't have imagined. Maybe she married someone else and built a life, and although haunted by her unkept promise, chose to be buried with her new spouse.”

In some ways, I’m Gussie Manlove now.

I’m hoping that somewhere in the coming years I can tie these two lives together. But my babies are little now, and I’m going to sit in this moment while it’s here.