Reflections on the Past Five Years

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(from Harvard Class of 2007 Class Report entry)

From the chaos, I choose gratitude. I feel grateful for the ways this pandemic has affirmed the love and connections we humans share and build. Social isolation has given my husband and I so many opportunities to take joy in one another. I feel so fortunate that we have only grown deeper in love and closer in our companionship as we adventure in this wide world. The joy, humor, and trust of my students gives me so much hope for how life finds a way.

When they said "it gets better", they never explained that we were the ones who were supposed to make it "better". Three more things I learned, mostly about myself, though I claim no expertise:

  1. Teaching has been healing work for me. It feels incredibly fulfilling to share in the "aha!" moments and witness the fruits of constantly challenging students towards their greatest potential. My students' curiosity, forgiveness, and love have sustained me throughout this pandemic and made both distance teaching and masked physical classroom teaching easier to bear and full of wonder. Being in the classroom gets me a front-row seat to the questions and concerns of the next generation. How marvelous it is to be taken along with them into the future!

  2. Exercising healthy boundaries has been my key to maintaining a sustainable commitment to teaching and education. Some stubborn instinct drives me towards service, so I've been honing ways to work smarter as an educator. When the pandemic began, I was on a semester break to work on GenderInclusiveBiology.com. Much of the world was learning coping strategies and self-acceptance that I'd picked up from years of therapy after a chaotic upbringing. When I read about isolated students needing engagement in a scary pandemic I'd already taught in Physiology, I decided to return to high school teaching.

  3. Teaching has also helped me love myself more as a positive element in the universe. To my surprise, distance teaching revealed to me strengths I didn't know I had. Teachers across the US and in homes that used the curriculum I shared wrote back encouragingly. Sharing what I was doing in my own distance learning classroom also helped me feel less alone. Knowing that the students showed up every day to connect with me and each other encouraged me in the most difficult times when mortality and anxiety felt fever pitch. Even if my self-confidence flags, the call to service keeps me going.

2019 In Review: 3 Surprising Lessons It Took Time For Me To Learn

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Thank you.

 

(Estimated reading time: 2:14. Contains 448 words)

1. No alternate narrative will save us — you’re the best and only adult for this situation you face right now.

Sometimes when we procrastinate, we are really waiting for an imaginary expert “in charge” to fix it, squandering newfound authority by passing the buck, or distracting ourselves with low-hanging bad apples. Like well-trained dogs, we’re still waiting for permission that will never come, and training others to wait for permission fails to rescue our confidence. Guilt and anxiety often warn us of this familiar cycle, but we keep listening to dead peer pressure.

‘Perfect isn’t done,’ ‘set expectations’, ‘ it’s easy to win when you make the rules’, ‘perfect is the enemy of good’, ‘there is always someone better’, ‘you make your own happiness,’ ‘imposter syndrome,’ or ‘nobody is coming to help’: whatever you want to call it, no one else is looking through your exact eyes, piloting a flailing skin-bag churning with biochemistry. If the resources aren’t there, including your own abilities, you’re the only one to call for a re-try.

I’ve met many people unwilling to rearrange their priorities yet still expect change to happen, when it never comes. We’re teaching our children how we want to be treated when we’re elderly and vulnerable. We’re already the expert for our experience, and our existential power in the moment behooves us to act.

 

2. Desensitize yourself to uncertainty: better focus your fear to avoid worrying distractions.

Listen to your body’s warning flags of anxiety, fear, and panic; they might be trying to protect something you love but aren’t fully recognizing. Check your body’s not overprotecting you from a zombie memory. Is that fear a useful reminder or its own problem?

Law school gave me practice reducing a byzantine complex of inconsistent narratives into a sparse set of objective descriptions, but life experience gave me an album of examples for applying the issue to get what I want, and accurately focusing on what I love recharges my motivation.

Dissociation skills might help me calmly organize chaos, but stripping bare the “window dressing” reminds me to ask:

  1. what part of this eventually contributes to what I love?

  2. is this a savior complex trash-fire for my time, energy, & resources?

  3. what parts of this will I care about this years from now?

 

3. Life is simpler and happier after I accept that most of my gender transition is my own recovery from the long-term trauma of my body betraying me.

Like many immigrants, I learned to survive so I could one day live. At age 3, I first became aware of my gender sorting error and instinctively suffocated it to survive.

I even desperately underwent the extreme denial phase some transgender people experience, of “performing” my assigned gender in hopes of finally feeling in congruence, a multi-year project a close friend later typified “always felt like you were in drag.”

Eventually, it wasn’t only social acceptance or only medical intervention, but rather eventually learning that my gender was no longer a painful thing to hide, that fueled the big positive changes in my world. Things are less scary now that I’m no longer fighting the truth. I’m happier and more loved than I’ve ever been.