I’ve eaten so much damn chocolate in the last five days I’m surprised I’m still alive.

Or maybe I’m not.  Alive that is.

I joked last year, and this year it is even more true, that as long as I remain a elementary school teacher at a girls school, I won’t need a boyfriend on Valentine’s Day, because my students will drown me in sugar and cards.

I feel vaguely embarrassed by holidays.  Very short people walk up to me with super ernest expressions and give me gifts with misspelled cards.  I never know what to do.  I’m a pretty demanding teacher.  I have high standards and I don’t hide it so well when I’m disappointed.  (It’s a running joke among the staff at my school that I’m way too mean to teach 8 year olds.)  My students consider it a Herculean triumph if one of them makes me laugh.  So holidays, like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, are one of the few times that my students have the opportunity to show any affection for me.  And it’s because I can’t stop them.

Their sincerity just kills me.

It’s not surprising, since any sincerity kills me.  Emotions should all be cloaked in a protective layer of sarcasm with a lining of mockery.  And anyone attempting to show that they care for me in any way makes my skin itch.  I was listening to the atrocious sermon last night (7PM Mass at St. Michael’s is the punishment for putting sitting on my couch knitting and watching Dr. Who as a higher priority than God) about “love.”  It was a rambling mess of cliches and song lyrics (not joking!) so I started thinking about other stuff.  (Don’t judge, you do it too when sermons suck.)  The gospel was about Christ explaining how there is a seeming infinite regression of responsibilities within each commandment (do not kill also means don’t hold anger against others).  This makes sense to me: there is always more you can do.  No matter what, there is room for improvement.

I easily turn this on myself.  I fixate on the times that I have failed in love for others.  The times I’ve been unkind, gossip-y, vengeful, or dismissive.  Without any effort I can rattle off a list of (recent) times where I’ve failed to be charitable or understanding, when I’ve blamed others for things that couldn’t possible be their responsibility, when I have assumed that others have a person vendetta against me.  I have a disaster taking out the trash last week, complained about it on Facebook, my roommate saw my complaint, and I felt horrid, because I shouldn’t have made her feel like I was unwilling to take out the trash.  

But this so easily becomes its own kind of selfishness.  I’m not God.  My love is not a bountiful outpouring of my infinite being for which there can be no equal return.  And focusing only on how I love others is trying to pretend I am God.  I leave very little room for others to show that they love me and therefore I close the world in on myself.  I’m not good at making gestures of affection, so I don’t want other people to try to make them to me.  A student gives me a Valentine’s Day card and all I can think about is when I made her sad by correcting her posture (a million times), instead of recognizing that it’s important for her to give me the card (if only so that maybe I’ll ease up on the posture correction).

A couple weeks after I stopped drinking (or maybe a couple of days, that whole time was kind of a mess) I was talking with a friend.  He and I have always had a rather “honest” relationship, meaning that he wasn’t so concerned about bruising my delicate little feelings.

“Seriously Andrea, how did this happen?”

“Really?  Well, really, I just didn’t want anyone to miss me when I died.”

“You fucking idiot.  You’re so fucking dumb.  You don’t get to decide if we miss you or not.  It’s not up to you if we love you or not, you asshole.”

“Um, thanks.”

“And we missed you.”

*SOB*

This conversation stays with me, kind of living in the back of my mind, because it’s still not something I’m comfortable with.  Not what he said, but what it means.  I still want it to be all about me.  I want to be in control.  Because if I control how other people feel about me, I won’t disappoint them.  If my student hate me then they won’t notice how much I fail them everyday.

But for the last five days I’ve worked my way through an immense chocolate reminder that I don’t dictate what others feel.

(2 Years, 4 Months, and  27 Days Sober)

I, like most people, have a very old pair of Chuck Taylors that are falling to bits.  There are holes in the heel and ball of both soles.  The rubber along the sides has completely split.  I wouldn’t call them black so much as “formerly black.”

I love these shoes.  I’ve had them for years.  I can’t remember when I bought them, but I think I’ve had them since I lived in Texas, which was five and a half years ago.  If I’m correct (and while I can distinctly remember buying other colors of Chucks, I’m 99 precent sure I haven’t bought new black ones) then these little shoes have been through quite a time.  From Texas, to Maryland, to Oregon, (back) to Maryland.  From grad school drop out, to unemployed, to dead-end employed and finally to joyfully employed.  From backyard BBQs, to hipster dives, to seedy dive-dives, to AA meetings and Target dates.  These shoes have carried me to and from movies, museums, weddings, family vacations, holidays, hang-outs, errands, hospitals, doctor’s appointments, beaches, mountains, Stonehenge, Mount Vernon, Juneau, house parties, Church, and once, a courthouse.

But I can’t wear them anymore.

I started spiritual direction about a month ago (after the Epiphany incident).  It’s been slow going, but not in a bad way.  When I ask someone to take time out of their day to talk to me I suddenly become a total idiot who can’t sting two words together.  But Fr. seems to understand that I’m just frightened, so mostly we’re just getting in the habit of me showing up and answering a few questions about how I’m doing.  Two weeks ago (ish) he asked me to think about not holding on to my brokenness, the things that separate me from others and from God.  I immediately thought of my shoes.

I’ve known for over a year that I needed to replace my black Chucks.  I couldn’t wear them if it had rained within the last 24 hours, because there are too many holes for water to seep in.  Even if it were dry, all the holes have ruined a few pairs of socks.  Any outfit immediately went from “cutely-casual” to “wow, you gave up when you got to your feet.”  When my mother and sister visited for Thanksgiving, we went to Mount Vernon.  I accidentally stepped in a soggy patch of ground and got mud all on the inside of my shoe.  My sister was so sad that I was wearing hole-y shoes that she gave me a gift certificate for Christmas to Zappos in exactly the amount for a replacement pair.

I just couldn’t bring myself to order the replacement pair.  But when Fr. asked me to consider letting go of some of my brokenness, I knew it was time.  Not because he was in any way talking about an old pair of shoes.  He of course meant spiritual/emotional brokenness, not shoes.  But I like metaphors.  And in many ways, my outside is how I sort out my inside.  (The real broken thing on the inside isn’t something I’m ready to talk about publicly yet.)

I order new Chucks last week.  And when they arrived I put the whole box in the closet and refused to even open it.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been hounded by a parent who thinks her daughter needs more difficult math work.  Every time I try to explain that the student hasn’t mastered the assigned material, the mom tells me that her daughter doesn’t do the work correctly because it is too easy, and then we both end up semi-yelling.  Then she goes and complains to my Assistant Headmaster about me.  We’ve repeated this cycle almost weekly since mid-January.  I’m exhausted.  AHM is exhausted.  The only one with any energy left for this fight seems to be the mother.  I tried arguing my point.  I tried ignoring her.  I tried giving her what she told me she wanted.  Now we are at the point where what I gave wasn’t good enough, so she’s making new demands.  By the end of last week I had cried all my tears, had all my days of hiding in my apartment because I couldn’t face other human beings, all my hours of self-doubt and my nail were bitten down to bloody stumps.  I to AHM that I was simply going to stop checking my email.  Since he refused to accept that as a solution, he played therapist trying to figure out why this whole thing was upsetting me so much.  Finally he asked me:

“Well, how do you feel as a math teacher?”

“I’m ok.  It’s not my worst subject.  That’s religion. But math is just above that.”

“What would you say your strongest subject is?”

“Poetry.”

“Ah.  So, she’s hitting you in your weakness.”

I was so defeated by this conversation I went to sleep at 7 PM that night and woke up crying the next morning.  (Luckily it was a Saturday!)

You see, I was caught in a strange position.

I hate being weak.  I mean I hate it more than I hate almost anything.  But I’m proud of being broken.  I’m refuse to acknowledge my weaknesses until it is humiliating.  I shout my damage from the rooftops for anyone to hear.

Weakness seems to me to be the natural state I was born into; the least intelligent in my family, the most prone to emotionalism, the normal looking girls with an endless supply of very pretty friends, the one who “never lives up to her potential.”  I  react like a banshee when someone points out to me where I need to improve because I hear them piling on to a lifetime of “not good enough.”

Brokenness, on the other hand, is a perverse badge of honor.  Through choices and circumstances I’ve managed to cultivate some deep fissures in my soul, cracks that leave me alone in ways I don’t need to be.  But that brokenness is mine.  I made it.  No one gave it to me, and it’s a testament to what a good little fuck-up I can be.  I look pretty normal, and then I get to shock people by telling them secrets about just what a mess I’ve (at times) made my life, just what horrid things I’ve done to people, just what chaos I’ve left simply by being present.  And I get to do so with smile, daring them to call me out as a bad person.  It’s my favorite game in the world.  A game where I’m the only possible winner.

If I’m seeing my own situation clearly, it seems I can only have one.  I can be weak or I can be broken, but I have to choose.  If I choose to be broken I get to keep my twisted amusement, but I have to accept that my weakness will be permanent.  If I choose to be weak I have to be humble and honest, but there is the option that I can be better, with hard work and grace.

I took the new shoes out of the box and put them in the closet where the old ones were before.  I asked a few teachers around school if I can observe how they teach math and when my next paycheck comes I’m ordering a book titled “How to Be an Outstanding Math Teacher – Primary Grades.”

(2 Years, 4 Months and 23 Days Sober)