As I got home from another maddening day as an untrained, underpaid, sleep-deprived zookeeper (a.k.a, a ninth grade English teacher), I stopped to look at the itty-bitty mirror near my front door. Of course, being that it’s essentially a mirror fit for a Polly Pocket, I have to look super close to see more than just my poorly plucked eyebrow, close enough to see every single one of my cavernous pores. I decided to count them (I got tired after 37), and eventually, I let my mind wander to the question of how I found myself right here, in this moment, as a fully-grown adulty-adult counting her pores in a mirror that could pass as a frisbee for a rat. I thought of all my past selves and what I would tell them to let them know I eventually made it out of childhood discomfiture and teenage obscurity. After (finally) going to the bathroom for the first time since seven AM, I decided I would spend my afternoon doing something productive--negating my bathroom break by guzzling wine and drafting letters full of advice to my past selves to save them from (themselves? Myself? Self-adjacent? The--self of selfness past?).

Dear Kindergarten me,

When the nice boy sees that you're a friendless loser and asks if you want to play a game with him and his friends, do yourself a favor and say "yes" with your words, not "no" by kicking him in the shin. ​

If you can do that, but not man up when the teacher calls you out in front of the whole class, and instead blubber like a baby, then you are a woefully inconsistent six-year-old.

Also, please note that you're going to move school districts at least three more times, and across the state. I hate to be the one to tell you, but that means you and Brayden are never going to work out. Sorry, kid. Walk it off.​

And yes, I know that you're proud to be one of "Ms. Schneider's Spiders” (at least until you got on her shit list for assaulting a classmate); However, you will develop a crippling fear of spiders that spans well into adulthood. You become the drama when mega-spidey drops out of thin air onto your bathroom floor.​

AND YOU WILL BE ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED IN YOUR PHOBIA.

Dear middle-school me,

STOP. USING. THE WORD. “RENEGADE”. TO DESCRIBE YOURSELF. You’re on the honor roll and have never snuck out once. You know what renegade means. You’re not that.

Also, it’s super cool that you voted yourself out of your emo friend group “most likely to be the lead singer in a screamo band”. You’re now a bespeckled book loving English teacher with a collection of cardigans. Rock n’ roll!

Dear high-school-fishy me,

I know, I KNOW, you’re tired of brushing your hair. But I implore you, I beg of you- DO NOT GET THAT PIXIE CUT. I know it looks cute on female comic book characters, but please bear in mind they are cartoons intentionally drawn to be attractive, busty, powerful women--and you’re 14 and still only halfway through puberty. You will not look like a bad-ass superhero. You will just look like you’re “confused”.

Also, stay away from Jesse. I know he’s a hot Italian dude with a Spanish last name. I know he’s got pretty, shiny, swooshy hair and an inexplicable ability to grow a five o’clock shadow at the mere age of 15. I know you quite literally want to be “Jesse’s girl”. But, years later, he’ll date this really sweet girl (long after you’ve mostly accepted that he’s just not that into you) and he’ll turn into a total bum with no place or money of his own and mooch off of his girlfriend until she finally decides to dump him like the grubby little trash panda that he is. Do not try to date a moochy Italian trash-panda.

Finally--pay attention to the bathroom signs before you walk in. You’ll thank me later.

Dear junior me,

Yes, I know Veronica is annoying as hell. I know she reminds you of the pretty popular girl from every Netflix movie ever who actually doesn’t have a single thought in her head (I mean, Veronica definitely doesn’t). I know she’s a pick-me with a propensity to hog all of Cameron’s time and yet somehow still find the time to cheat on him anyway. However, it’s not worth it to be angry at him. You’ll regret it in May when he dies in a car accident in Rio Vista. You’ll go from wanting to strangle Veronica until she stops twitching to hugging her often, because she’s broken too.

Dear senior me,

No, Jesse is still not into you. On the bright side, your hair finally grew back out! Then you dyed it fire-truck red, but you looked great. Your parents had no trouble spotting you on the field at graduation. They just looked for the little mermaid after the bippity-boppity-boo and voila: your mom got a blurry, pixelated portrait of you waving at no one in particular like the princesses during the parade at Disney! Also, note that at 22 years old, you’ve still never seen those parades... because you’ve still never been to Disney.

*sigh*

Please, for the love of God- retake your SAT (and maybe crack open a book beforehand this time) so you can apply to A&M right away. Otherwise, you’re going to spend your semester off working 80-hour weeks slinging sandwiches at Chick Fil A just to go to a tiny university six months later in butt-fuck Egypt where the population is so small you’ll finish your first semester swearing you had a moderately attractive stalker. Then, you’ll transfer three times to finally get into A&M and have to pay again and again for official transcripts (which you didn’t save enough chicken slinging money to do). At the height of that absurdly complex process, you’ll have a--mostly respectful--bitch fight with the office lady at Tarleton because their SPEEDY e-transcript system as they call it is less like Speedy Gonzalez and more like Slow-Poke Paco.

Dear college me,

Stop working so damn much and enjoy the ride. Go to parties, make friends, join an organization (just not a cult), and be a real Aggie (even though it’s a cult). You’re gonna miss it one day when you’re that weird random old person at Northgate chasing every *single* vodka red bull with a *double* glass of water, or standing outside the Dixie Chicken hogging the Oxygen because your claustrophobia is *never* prepared for butt-to-back proximity.

Dear 21-year-old me,

Man up and stop worrying about throwing up. When you went to the lake for your birthday, your roommate got hammered, and you were still buzz-less and sunburnt. Pathetic.

When I finished drafting what seemed to be a sufficient number of wine-stained, amateur advice columns for an amateur(er) human being, I decided to call my high school best friend, who was still living in College Station because he was finishing his major in engineering. After informing me that time machines weren’t “actual science", he asked me how much wine I had. I lied.

I got up to look in the mirror again after tripping over an imaginary shoe. Everything that led me here kept running through my head. I may have been a shin-kicking, spider-fearing, pixie-cut wearing, chicken slinging, lightweight former Aggie- but I was proud of myself.

If you’re not familiar with the philosophical point of the “butterfly effect”, it’s the theory that the world is interconnected, so much so that one small occurrence can influence a much larger complex system. All of those little dorky (and sometimes cool) things I did when I was younger got me my career and the opportunity to shape other young lives. I may want to save them from the same goofy mistakes I made, but the truth? They’re going to make their own goofy mistakes. They’re gonna have their own Jesse’s. They’re going to get their own stupid impulse haircuts, put off school, accidentally walk into the wrong bathroom (we all have), and drunkenly call their friends asking about scientifically unsound machines. And it’s okay. They’ll end up exactly where they’re supposed to be. Just like I did.

I crumbled up the letters and threw them all away. Not because they were wine stained or because time travel is impossible. But because younger me didn’t need help.

There was no plan.

As one of the many students being pushed through the public school system in 2017, there was only graduation. Our ticket to freedom. I didn’t take my SAT. I didn’t apply to colleges. I had nothing in my head except the burnout I was feeling. High school counselors didn’t bother me with my future plans; they only made sure I was on track to earn my endorsement (to this day, I still have no clue what that even means). Talk of my plans after high school were of no interest to them and of even less interest to me.

Senior year rolled around, and my counselors finally pulled me in to let me know that I really needed to take my SAT. They told me, “It’s likely going to be too late to apply to colleges for the Fall 2018 semester”. I would’ve had to have my scores by like October or something, and at this point, it was March. I didn’t really mind, but I knew the SAT was necessary because someone, somewhere, decided it’s necessary, even though high school does not- in any way- prepare you for it. I scheduled it, paid for it, didn't study… then took it. Bombed it. 1070. Who would be impressed by that? I didn’t know. I didn’t give a shit.

Despite the indifference I felt toward the SAT and college, a personal mission of mine was to always be agreeable, mostly responsible, and on top of my work when I was in school. I never got in trouble. Never talked back to a teacher. Never disrupted a class. Never skipped. Did everything in my power to get A’s and B’s. Kept my GPA up. I made sure I was someone that the principal never had to call home about, throughout my entire grade school career.

I finally got to senior season and did all the fun stuff: senior breakfast, senior parade, graduation practice (Texas heat actually makes that not fun); all the things you do to celebrate finishing the thing the state mandates of you. I listened to all the speeches by the smart kids who already knew where they were going to college and admitted it with such pride, because they had their lives figured out (or someone else had it figured out for them).

I walked the stage. I got my diploma. I’m out.

I will admit, there was a time during my senior year where I thought, “I like art. Teaching elementary school art could be fun”. With this realization, three problems came to mind; one, I stopped taking art classes after my freshman year to do other nerdy stuff; two, you don’t exactly need to be Picasso to teach elementary babies to glue pom-poms to construction paper or trace a hand turkey; three–and perhaps the most troublesome of all–I had extremely limited experience dealing with small children, and next to no interest in developing the skills necessary to handle them. Even at twenty-four, when my sister asks, “Can you watch your niece/nephew while I shower?”, my first question is, “For how long?”. Guessing games are not my forte, so I am woefully unqualified to watch kids that cry for a multitude of reasons, ranging from hunger to being tired to being bored.

Senior year, though, I had honed a passion that I had left untouched since middle school:

I liked to write.

In eighth grade, I would dabble in storytelling, and share my works with friends and even sometimes my teachers. Of course, at the time, I unknowingly sucked at it. But I didn’t mind. I liked doing it, talented or not.

When high school hit, I paused writing stories for a while and started documenting my feelings instead. No, I didn’t keep a diary; I wrote on scratch notebook paper that I kept all together. It was the only way a dorky kid with no friends could make sense of everything she was thinking and feeling. When you don’t have friends to talk to, write it down, I always thought.

I took English Four with a teacher I wish I remembered the name of, because I enjoyed her class like no other class before. We read classic literature, like Frankenstein and Beowulf (both a little graphic), Slaughterhouse Five (aliens, really?) and Julius Caesar (that one was pretty cool- who doesn’t like occasional anarchy?). We got to explore our identities as writers by writing about those texts, writing research papers about whatever topic we wanted, or doing little random creative assignments here and there. I had always been good at English classes, but that class was where my interest really piqued.

There was one assignment that we did: a character sketch. I don’t mean drawing because, as previously mentioned, I quit art like three years prior. We were challenged to write a short, one-paragraph essay with as many details as possible trying to help the reader see the character visually. I asked–and this was the defining point that told me that I was a writer–if I could make it up. And this poor, poor teacher said yes…

unknowingly agreeing to read a four-page story.

When she wanted one paragraph.

The story was about a person I had conjured up who was at least half real (someone I knew at the time). I took this assignment, and, well, ran just seems like an understatement. I turned this assignment into my own personal getaway car. I took off with it. Writing it was one of the most fulfilling and enjoyable things I had done at the time. Looking back on the story now, there were certainly a lot of cringey things I would change. That being said, I didn’t have as much practice as I do now. But I edited and edited and edited, and finally felt–mostly–happy with my work.

You can guess what happened. As I enjoyed this assignment more than anyone else and treated it like my own personal creative writing club rather than an assignment for a checkbox grade… she read it to the class. My class, while I was present, and to her fellow English Four teachers. I did feel honored (even though she read it in the most monotone voice ever, to the bereavement of myself and my classmates).

Despite the embarrassment, I knew from that assignment that writing was a passion that I had let lie dormant for much too long. I was so focused, from the end of middle school to that point, on finding out who I was by processing my emotions as they happened, that I never stopped to recognize that my identity was in my writing. So, with that in mind, I thought, maybe I should teach writing.

That didn’t start right away. I spent about six months post-senior-year not sure where I wanted to go or absolutely sure that teaching was what I wanted to do. Eventually, I got sick of working fast food, living at home at nineteen, and slinging chicken at 7.25 an hour for sixty-plus hours a week with no goals in mind. I decided then that was the last time I would let myself land at my next-step without another next-step in mind.

I finally went to school, got my bachelor’s in English and my master’s in Education- specifically, Curriculum and Instruction (both from A&M, because gig ’em forever).

This sounds, so far, as if it will be some big success story. After all, I am the perfect archetype. The directionless good kid who kept their head down, didn’t really have future plans, and eventually went on to get their education and their dream job.

One thing that you learn from a young age, and about the only thing that really sticks with you all that time, is that age-old adage: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life”. We grow up with the unchallenged preconception that the only way to enjoy your life is by doing exactly what you dream of doing. You will only be happy if you publish that book, open your art gallery, make that professional sports team, sell out arenas with your singing voice or your comedy, become a rockstar or a five star chef, make millions of dollars, etc. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life”, right?

We continue on with these beliefs like the work seriously, truly does stop once we’ve made it, because that’s how a dream works. But do you wanna know how else a dream works?

By waking you up eventually.

Popstars spend hours upon hours writing, rehearsing, perfecting what their label tells them will sell, running themselves into the ground with exhaustion. Athletes spend hours upon hours practicing, perfecting, eating mostly what is good for them, running their bodies into the ground with exhaustion at the risk of a career-ending injury. Artists spend hours upon hours painting, sculpting, perfecting, trying to sell their work or at least get it out there, only to risk losing the interest and money of the art world to that simple painting of a green dot in the middle of an otherwise blank canvas. Teachers spend hours upon hours grading, making lesson plans, planning intervention, only to receive unlivable wages, immense student apathy, the risk of a shooting, and the occasional “Popcorn Friday” from administration as a, we see you, we appreciate you- rather than a raise.

I am, in no way, saying that pursuing your dreams never turns out to be worth it. Of course that is not true. When the results of your passion yield, of course there’s room for celebration. You made a platinum song? Celebrate. You published that book? Celebrate. Your sports team won a championship? Celebrate. You got a troubled student to trust you and do what it took to graduate? For-freaking-sure, celebrate!

This does not mean, though, that the work stops, or that every labor will bear fruit. Not everything you dream of will happen because you got your dream job.

There is still pain.

There is still sacrifice.

There is still hardship.

There is still failure.

There is still work to be done.

And that is something I wish I would have known before finding myself doing what I thought was my dream.

I have watched, over the past two-and-a-half years of my career, a truly broken system let a lot of fruit wither and rot. I have watched students spend hours glued to their phones watching these random people on social media tell them that there’s no consequences for their actions. I have watched teachers work tirelessly by the soft light of their lamp at their desk grading papers well into the night for the grading period deadline. I’ve watched kids from broken homes bring their parent-taught behavior to school by causing mayhem in the halls. I have watched teachers with daily checklists that only grow longer with every 504 meeting, assignment to grade, district-wide training, teacher feedback form, and lesson plan that needs to be done. I have watched students put hands on each other at the slightest inconvenience or misspoken word. I have watched teachers get berated by their students, told that their jobs are meaningless and their career choice is a waste because the students have been taught that they’re far superior when they made a viral TikTok. I have watched desks being thrown across the room, classrooms trashed, and items stolen by students who have no respect for others. I have listened to countless speeches about being sure to track use of accommodations in case someone’s parent decides to sue the district because you forgot to provide a blank graphic organizer for your student to take notes on during a lesson. I have witnessed not one, but two professional educators–one new to the profession, one that has been teaching for a long time–cry their eyes out within 24 hours of each other because they felt uncared for and unsupported by administration. I have watched as parents have bullied teachers and administrators alike into submission when their kid didn’t receive a “fair” grade, even though they didn’t do the work that the other kids did. I have watched pregnant teachers lose their babies because that one kid got angry over doing work and punched her in the stomach. I watched a principal lose her eyeball because an irate student turned her face into target practice.

Worst of all, I have watched countless students who shouldn’t have made it past middle school get ushered across the stage at graduation, even though they’re completely unprepared for adulthood.

And the U.S. Does. Nothing. But blame the teachers, because, “It’s a skill issue”.

You’re absolutely right. It is a skill issue. A parenting skill issue. An administrative budgeting skill issue. An educational structuring skill issue. A, “How the hell do we fix the Sephora tween?” issue.

But what do us teachers know about children, their short-sighted tendencies, and their educational deficits? After all, we only spent thousands of dollars on our content/education degree(s), hundreds more on state exams and certifications, and have years of experience in the field. Of course, none of that is enough for us to have some semblance of an idea as to what we're talking about when we say, “Something’s very wrong.”

If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

That phrase now leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth, and a hollow place in my heart. It also means nothing to the educators making a mass exodus. We all love the “aha” moment that lights up in a child’s eyes, and guiding struggling students toward success. There’s no question about that. But the damning effects of the abysmal salary, the gentle-parenters, the apathetic, undisciplined children, and the lack of support from administration have left us with an ultimatum: leave, or run our mental and physical well-being into the ground as we struggle to support ourselves and our families.

And if the situation gets any more volatile…

there won’t be much of a choice.