Coffee Time Challenge

I want to be a better me in 2022 — or do I?

“That which does not kill us makes us strong.” After 70 years of experiences like 3 failed marriages, lost jobs, being talked down to because I’m a woman, facing students with chips on their shoulders the size of Mt. Rushmore, more recently losing everything I owned, getting my car totaled by a woman on her cell phone, losing a dog to cancer and having my life threatened by a pandemic, I don’t think I want to be a better person in 2022.

I think I want to be a stronger person.

For 30 years of my life, the only place where I felt I could really be myself was in my college classrooms. (I taught 4 years in high schools, where I certainly could not be myself. I had to baby-sit, not teach.)

My classroom was my stage, and I could do my stand-up routine that included teaching grammar and literature. I loved teaching grammar because it’s essential to good writing. I loved teaching literature, because it was history, psychology, poetry, and life lessons. At the end of each short story, each play, each poem was the question: What is the author telling you? What’s the lesson to be learned from this? How can this knowledge improve your life?

But outside of the classroom, I always worried I was going to do something wrong, something that would upset someone, hurt someone’s feelings, get me in trouble, cost me something — a friend, my job, my marriage. And often I did. No matter how hard I tried, I screwed things up. I ended up losing, and it must have been my fault.

Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me.

In 2022, at the age of 70, I want to finally shed that feeling that everything that goes wrong is my fault. I want to acknowledge once and for all that I do not control everything.

I have never once in my life woken up in the morning and said to myself, “How can I screw up someone’s life today, including my own?”

I have never intentionally tried to hurt someone’s feelings, except husbands’ during fights, but I don’t think that counts. And all I ever said to them was the truth, truth that I would have withheld if we hadn’t been fighting.

I have always tried to be kind and supportive, withholding my opinion if I thought it would hurt.

It may be time to give that opinion, as kindly as possible, but just maybe it will be of some help.

So I guess in 2022, I want to more me and less what I think other people expect me to be. For years, I had my parents telling me who I should be. Now my grown children have started telling me who I should be.

In 2022, I want to be who I am. Finally.

Giving Shoutout to Misty Rae