The Writer's Oracle

Tag: creative writing

  • Fare thee well, teacher self

    Fare thee well, teacher self

    Hannah Baker

    It was one of those weeks where my mind was two steps ahead of my body. My eyelids fluttered open while the earth’s were still closed, and thoughts began rapid firing:

    What am I going to have for breakfast? What am I going to wear today? Just five more minutes. No, I’ll be late for work. Will I be the first teacher there again? Who is still sleeping while I’m holding my coffee steady running out the door? Which activities do the kids want to do? Not play-dough, someone sneezed in that yesterday. Better throw it all out. What songs do they want to sing? Gotta keep it fun, gotta keep it engaging. Otherwise they won’t listen to me. Oh, this person needs me? Be right there! You peed your pants? That’s okay, it happens to everyone. If I peed my pants, would they send me home? Probably not. I don’t even have spare clothes to change into. One more minute until lunch, and then BOOM I’m out of here!

    I collapse in the driver’s seat of my car at 3 p.m., a hollowed-out shell of the vibrant woman I was that morning. I have nothing left to give—not to my writing, not to my friends, not even to myself. If my emotional labor muscles weren’t strong before, they’re absolutely shredded now. Some days, I sit in my car in the driveway staring through through the blur of my rainy windshield, letting my gaze relax and my ears soften as if I am a rock and the world is a river that rushes around me.

    If I—a single, childless woman, with only myself to care for—feel this depleted by the end of the day, what must it be like for my colleagues who go home to their own children? Or for any mother in this society? They perform this emotional gymnastics at work, then start a second shift the moment they walk through their front door. Mothering is perhaps the ultimate thankless job in this white, capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative culture—a 24/7 position with no benefits, no sick days, and certainly no living wage.

    This is the plight of teachers everywhere: overworked and underpaid. At my school, I am the only teacher without children of my own. Only two are single parents supporting their kids on one income, and only one of them has kids under 18-years-old. The rest have husbands who are the literal breadwinners of the family. If you assumed that all of the teachers are women, you assumed correctly, and that’s part of the problem.

    Teaching is historically considered “women’s work,” built on the assumption that all women should have a man in their life—husband, father, or equivalent—who will handle their financial needs. A woman’s job is to manage domestic duties and raise children. Well, if she has a man to take care of her finances and she was going to be with children all day anyway, why bother paying her a living wage?

    I finally put in my notice. After four years, I gave a generous six months—more than ample time for the school to organize fall class lists. One particular coworker keeps dismissing my decision with a wave of her hand. “You’re not leaving,” she states flatly, as if announcing tomorrow’s weather. “You’re not going to find anything better out there.” Her voice takes on that deprecating tone reserved for naive dreamers. “You’ll miss this too much. Even if you think you’re leaving, trust me, you’ll be back.” The desperate edge beneath her words is palpable—a plea for nothing to change, for no one to challenge the unfair standards we’ve all silently agreed to settle for.

    I recognize what’s happening beneath her words. My departure forces her to confront her own choices, her own settling. If I succeed in finding something better, what does that say about her decision to stay? It’s easier to believe that better options don’t exist than to acknowledge you’ve stopped looking for them.

    Most of my other coworkers are sad but supportive. They know teaching was never my intended career, that it fell into my lap on my journey as a writer. But it wasn’t just a side job. I gave a piece of my heart to all the children I taught that I will gladly never get back. I fell in love with the work, even though I always knew it wasn’t my destiny.

    Teaching has given me invaluable gifts—emotional intelligence, patience, creativity under pressure. But writing has always been my destiny. Now, the question is how do I merge that creative energy with my writing in a way that earns me a livable wage? I don’t want to fall into the trap of undervalued “women’s work,” nor chase the empty promises of hyper-productive “men’s work” that values output over meaning. Somewhere, there exists a third path I’ll have to pave for myself. I likely already am.

    “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.” Paolo Cohelo, The Alchemist

    Success to me isn’t bestseller lists or literary prizes. (Although, I wouldn’t say no to that!) It’s being able to afford food on my table and a roof over my head while creating work that matters. It’s being surrounded by a loving community. That’s all I want. And if I start now, who knows where I will be in six months? I owe it to myself—and to my inner child who promised I would always be a writer—to at the very least try my hardest to become the creator I was meant to be.

    From the Moonology Oracle Cards
  • My Favorite Kind of Writing

    My Favorite Kind of Writing

    Hannah Baker

    I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

    No– I always knew I was a writer. I still am. 

    I am one of those kids who grew up to be exactly what I wanted to be. I often stop and wonder if this is a result of nature or nurture. Somebody complimented my language comprehension when I was a child, I ran with it, and to this day I am beaming with pride whenever someone likes my writing.

    But I never stopped writing. Even when no one was looking. And that was the easy part. The not so easy part was sharing it with people. The scariest part of writing, for me, is pressing the “publish” button and knowing someone else— anyone else in the world with internet access— can stumble across my innermost thoughts and press “subscribe.” I can let words flow out of me like water gushing through a drain pipe. But knowing that other people are receiving it, interpreting it, seeing their own version of my story… terrifying.

    See, I used to only write for two reasons: for myself, and for school. 

    I wrote as a way to vacation into my imagination. I befriended my characters, bounced from planet to planet, and spoke my own language. I filled binders and scrapbooks full of fantastical plants and animals, songs and poetry, people and places that I would have never known had I not written about them. I have a shelf of journals dating back 10 years (and counting) that document my life experiences and emotional development. I understand myself, and thereby the world, better when I write about it. This was always my favorite kind of writing. 

    I also wrote as a way to earn praise and validation from the adults around me who appeared to hold my future in their hands. I wrote the way they taught me to, with my grammar in check and my sentences on a short leash. I used their templates, their formulas, and their theories to craft essays they wanted to read. I received a streak of gold stars, but rarely was it for my favorite kind of writing. 

    Seldom was I praised for the kind of writing that came from the soul. And seldom did I share it. What if it’s silly? What if people think it’s no good? Am I exposing too much of myself? Am I exposing enough? More terrifying yet, what if someone I know reads this? What if the people I write about know my stories are about them, and they are enraged by my portrayal of their character? Even more humiliating than that is if I share my writing with my most trusted friends and family, and they don’t read it. They say they skimmed it, never saw it, or it simply slipped their mind.

    A wise teacher once told me that you have to first learn the rules to know how to break them. I paid my dues learning them, and I do believe I have earned my right to break them as I please. 

    I created this blog to serve as a sort of professional writing portfolio. It sat stagnant and dormant for years. I had very little content that was up to par with my standard of shareable writing, and still no one read it. If I had nothing “professional” to share, and no readers to receive it, then I was writing for no one but myself. Somewhere between junior high and college, I must have forgotten this was my favorite kind of writing.

    Tim Krieder once said, “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” Another wise teacher once taught me that.

    If we want the world to love us, praise us, accept and celebrate us, then we must first bare our hearts to the world.

    And that is horrifying. It leaves our most tender parts open, available for the poking and prodding of strangers’ skepticism. It opens us up to the reality of rejection. If we reject ourselves first, then we can never say the world rejected us because we never put our true selves out there in the first place. Once we make the courageous act of loving and accepting ourselves as we are, we risk rejection of our true self, and that hurts a lot more than rejection of the false self. But if we never take the risk of true rejection, we will never experience the ecstasy of true love. 

    I must admit this blog leaves me feeling raw and exposed at times, like a piece of meat hanging above a shark tank. But that was the point. To write the way I want to write. About what I want to write, how I want to write, when I want to write about it. And it’s not for anyone else. Just me.

    All that being said, if you like my writing, your support means the world to me. I would be honored if you subscribed and shared this with anyone else you think might relate. 

    From the Work Your Light Oracle Cards