Enough Said

I've been living the New Year for just shy of two weeks now.  New resolutions can be found in every print and social media source around.  I'm just not that into it.  I'm just not.  I'm naturally self-reflective every damn day and honestly, it gets even more exhausting at the starting line of a new year when everything I'm not but want to be is thrust into life's social spotlight for the world to see.

As an educator, I evaluate my performance day to day and sometimes even period to period.  I'm forever and always trying to do it - this entrusted teaching of children - better, faster, stronger, smarter.  The combination of my perfectionist personality and today's diverse and often expressed opinions about the state of learning in our country has me like a frustrated dog chasing its own tail.  I feel flustered, confused, and overall underachieving ... which bewilders and saddens me given how hard I work.

The buzz words are many.  Engagement.  Assessment.  Technology.  Common Core.  Testing.  Testing.  And more testing.  And on and on and on.  My students aren't reading enough ... or they're not reading slowly enough, or deeply enough, or reading text of sufficient complexity.  They're not writing enough or in the most important formats.  I'm not integrating technology to the level I should so my students are producers rather than consumers.  We don't have a blog - yet - and so our opportunities for authentic audience are few.

And on and on and on.

And that's just my professional self.

The me of me isn't thin enough, healthy enough, and my face wears too many wrinkles.  I need to do more.  I need to do less.  I need to do more with less.  I need to save more, plan more, and stay active.  By anyone's standards, I'm not organized enough, and many's the night the dinner dishes stay in the sink until morning.  My best conversations with my young adult sons are by text, so clearly I'm a face-to-face parenting failure.

I never feel I am enough.  In any aspect of my life.

So I say enough is enough. 

I want to pay more attention to how I feel rather than what I do - or don't do.  I'm done with multi-tasking, to-do lists, and trying to do more in less time.  I want to guide my life by my own internal compass, and quiet the incessant background chatter long enough to hear myself think.  Because I'm smart, strong, capable, sensitive, sincere, and hard-working.  I believe in me.

And I'm enough.

Barbara