Things I Wish I Had Known #13: You Can and You Will

From my experiences, three things in life are guaranteed: taxes, death, and people telling you what you are or aren’t capable of doing. I remember feeling robbed the first time I received a paycheck at how much money went to taxes. I didn’t like it, but I got over it. Likewise, I’ve accepted that I will die one day; I’m hoping that Paul Rudd or Jennifer Lopez lead me to the fountain of youth before then, but it seems very unlikely to me at this point. With those things said, I refuse to accept listening to people put limits on my capabilities.

Between kindergarten and third grade, I had a teacher who told me I couldn’t go to the next grade and should stay behind because I cried a lot. If we went by how much I cried as a child, it would have taken me a solid five years to get past kindergarten and first grade. Because I attended a private school, my parents just overruled that decision. I don’t think any core teacher I have ever had would list me anywhere near the bottom in terms of my capabilities. If I think about the comments and grades I got from art teachers and gym teachers in elementary school, they would suggest that they agreed that I had limited capabilities in those areas. To an extent, I would agree with them. I could not make a layup when I was seven, and I couldn’t draw a fruit bowl just by looking at one at eight years old. That’s one of the problems with the word “can’t.” It suggests finality. By the time I was in high school, I could make a layup and draw a fruit bowl. Even now, I wouldn’t say I make either of those tasks look easy, but I never had any ambitions about playing basketball or drawing as a career or even hobby. It’s normal and perfectly acceptable to not be great at everything. None of these experiences were particularly scarring, but as someone who teaches now, I am a little surprised at how easily some of my first teachers tossed around the word “can’t.” In over a decade of teaching, I don’t think I have ever told students that they couldn’t do something academically. I’ve told some of them that it seemed fairly obvious that they didn’t want to do it or hadn’t done it yet, but I have never declared a student incapable of accomplishing something.

As a junior in high school, I switched schools. In the summer before I started at my new high school, I met with my guidance counselor to pick classes and whatnot. I don’t know if I caught that woman on a bad day or if she was just counting down days until retirement, but she should have never been allowed to give advice to anyone ever. Whenever I went to add the next logical class to my schedule based on what I had taken as a freshman and a sophomore, she informed me that it would be too hard for me and suggested I take something simpler. Every single class. After we finished the battle over my schedule where she pointedly told me that she expected me to be back in her office crying to change it after the first week, she then went on to describe how mean the kids at the high school could be and how I would most likely struggle to make friends within the cliques. I walked out of the meeting a little stunned at her frank anticipation of my failure on all levels. I went to that high school for two years. In those two years, I never had a problem making friends or fitting in with my peers. I am still good friends with a few of them, and I don’t really have anything negative to say about any former classmates. I could and did make friends. Likewise, the amount of work was pretty on par with my previous high school. I had to spend a lot more time studying for AP US History, but I got that time back in the very little amount of work I had to do for AP Lang as a junior. Again, I could and did do well in school academically and socially.

I entered grad school to become a teacher like most of my peers: naive and well-rested. Sometimes, I look back at graduate school and wonder if they had partnered with the psychology department to test out how little sleep humans could get and still survive. In the fall of that year, I had to put down my three year old dog. Within five hours, she went from running around like normal to being paralyzed from the front paws back. My parents took her to three different vets to see if surgery was a possibility, and all of them said they couldn’t do anything. We didn’t know she had come from a puppy mill, and her spinal cord had always been a step away from fusing together. If I was a little more selfish, I would have kept her alive and she would have been miserable. My speed demon of a three year old dog couldn’t walk or control most of her faculties, and she didn’t want to eat or drink. Even writing about this event, I feel my eyes tearing up, and it has been close to 15 years since it happened. I held it together teaching students. I held it together during my night classes. During a break of one of my night classes, I started to tear up, and a professor called me into her office to scream at me about how I couldn’t be a teacher if I was already crying in October. She really should have asked why I was crying before the screaming, but in general, as a professor, she took pleasure in berating anyone she thought she could get a reaction from in our class. I never got yelled at again because I genuinely loathed her too much to react to anything she said after that point, but I felt for the classmates she did go after on a routine basis. Most of my class collectively decided we would not answer her questions asking us to critique other classmates by January of that year because it was the same handful of people who got singled out every time. Two years into my teaching career, I ran into the professor at a Starbucks on my way to work. She made some comment about how glad she was that graduate school prepared us so well for teaching. I was so close to just nodding my head in agreement to get out of there, but then, I remembered the events of that year in grad school and how very little I owed her. Instead of just walking out politely, I turned around and called her a troll and told her that while I did think many of the professors were great and the program helped prepare me, all she had done was remind me that I didn’t want to be a miserable excuse of a human being or teacher. I told her that belittling people wasn’t a teaching strategy, and I would walk away from the career before I let myself become that person. I’m still not sorry. It has been twelve years since I saw her and I am still teaching, so apparently, the one day of crying during a class break did not determine my ability to teach. Are there things I need to still work on as a teacher? Absolutely. Do I think I’m a better teacher than that professor? I think I win that battle simply by not bullying students. She didn’t set the bar incredibly high.

Likewise, after I finished my first book, I realized I would need to ask permission from the administration if I wanted to publish it. Though teachers aren’t paid well, our personal lives are basically open for target practice to the general public. I don’t write sex scenes. I don’t even use the higher tier swear words in my writing, but I felt compelled to check nonetheless because the Cardinal Clause at parochial schools should be called “We Can Fire You For Anything Clause.” I sent the book in for someone with more of a say than me to review, and the response I received was along the lines of, “I didn’t finish reading it, but you can do what you want because you aren’t going to get it published anyway.” Up until that point, I too thought I would never get it picked up by a traditional publisher, but seeing it in writing from someone else certainly motivated me. Within a year, I managed to publish my book through a traditional publisher. Again, I can and I did succeed in having a book published. By then, I didn’t feel compelled to say anything mean to the administrator because I had noticed a pattern amongst all of the people who so easily commented on my lack of capabilities. I realized that every single person who told me I couldn’t do something seemed fairly miserable all of the time. That’s more of a punishment than anything I will ever say.

This theme continued through my career with people asking me if I was qualified for different positions. To be honest, I probably wasn’t qualified to teach when I started. I definitely wasn’t qualified to coach Forensics when I took that over or added any new class or programs to my schedule. The reality is nobody is entirely qualified until they successfully do the task, and even then, there is a difference between qualifying and mastering. Mastering something is a lifelong task. If I had only stuck to the things that my educational and professional background qualified me to do, I would have a far shorter list of abilities and accomplishments. Likewise, if I had stopped every time someone put a roadblock in front of me, I wouldn’t be where I am now.

Friends and family will say I’m competitive, and I don’t disagree. I am competitive. I have had to be competitive and stubborn. Those traits carried me through the obstacles. They helped pushed me through the tunnels of echoing voices saying, “you can’t.” Most importantly, those traits gave me the courage to bet on myself. In a few days, I will announce a new adventure. Am I qualified? That’s iffy at best. Am I terrified? Absolutely. Am I going to do it anyway? Obviously.

Be competitive. Be stubborn. It’s okay if your path doesn’t look like the one someone else took; there is more than one route to both success and happiness. Above all else, please know that you can and you will find your way.