There are words spoken that even with all discourse being exchanged around us per day, particular ones uttered would be the message remembered.
I recall a colleague making a suggestion that regardless of how set you are in your ways, you should push through discomfort for betterment of the team.
He had been referring to showing up to gatherings even if it wasn’t something you normally did.
I took this in, as I do many other parts of things thrown my way perhaps not meant to be so deep, but I still find a way to immerse myself into for greater reflection anyway.
I reflected that this was something I had learned to do so early in life and hearing him say those words helped me to expand my mind to ask of myself what more I could do, such as showing up to gatherings, not for me, but for others.
I thought I was over this pushing through discomfort thing. Up until just a short time ago, I hadn’t realized it wasn’t that I was over pushing through discomfort.
I had long found comfort in discomfort.
There is this power given when having moved a lot.
You make any room into a home.
You deem home in memory as places where you received at home feelings.
With nothing ever feeling like something you could call your own, you did your best to find comfort in yet another new surrounding.
When discomfort became familiar, as a middle school teacher now, I remind myself of this training.
There was a time young, whether sincerely or insincerely, when everyone seemed to have looked for friendships for some sense of belonging.
Friendships and gatherings seemed important if not key to social interactions.
I see this in the hallways everyday and am reminded of my times their age where every given moment seemed to work itself to the next.
There was hardly any thinking of tomorrow unless it made some impact of today.
Now were my moments. Tomorrow, no clarity of guarantees.
With six different elementary schools, two junior high schools, and four years completed in one high school, says nothing of how just even in those last four years, I had lived in three different locations.
It should be with understanding then, that even in my primary years, before I could invest in any friendship, it seemed already time to go and move on.
To my benefit, realized and reflected now, I couldn’t truly conform to anything that had any power of influence with my becoming- there was simply no time to stick around and find out.
Inadvertently, my only ubiquitous influence was me.
Fortunately, I wasn’t such a bad choice.
Merely, focusing on me was all the option given aside from being around my siblings. My siblings, on the other hand, all seemed preoccupied with themselves.
When siblings begin to give you troubles, the aching need to confine oneself becomes sole desire.
In looking back, it wasn’t that I shielded away from others; I was always wanting to benefit from a conversation or discussion whenever given a chance.
It was more that I actually learned to find greatest comfort in being alone with my own mind, body, heart, and spirit.
I learned to turn to people only when and if I truly needed them.
Others could let you down, put you down, or simply, push you away.
I was familiar with that training.
There was me, the one whom I knew and trusted amongst all.
I took what I could from the world and listened in. Deep within.
The one that spoke inside was the one most familiar to me.
Selectivity mixed with selfish motives, you could say.
In needing to make sense of what I felt were endless thoughts talking to me from within, I had to gather from the world whatever I could, whenever given.
People have always fascinated me whenever I could learn something from them. Think positively enough, even learning how to better put on stockings as my older cousin taught me or that a big house does not mean a happy family as I learned from a classmate, how her parents had poured paint over each other while just trying to paint a room, there is always much to learn from others to help one reflect of oneself.
In some environments, I knew that my race held people back from affiliating with me. This was something I understood with acceptance, but not discouragement.
I recall always trying to hang out with Stephanie, one whose kindness and wit I took to as magnetically similar to my inner spirit. However, just like some parts of where I had lived, while we had good conversations alone, her friends were of another status, not that of my own found neighborhood.
While similar classes found Stephanie and I together, outside of classes brought us back to our kind.
It was in high school where such push for being with those sharing commonality with the real you found consistency and thus, home.
When given an opportunity to choose the classes I’d want, I was given the freedom to place myself in programs where I could be in by choice, not placement.
I still had to go through an interview and selection process for certain classes, but once proven to be in, I found myself in a new world.
Before I knew it, I was completing classes with those I wouldn’t necessarily find walking with me amongst my neighborhood surroundings, but this was okay.
Our commonalities were the topic of discussions we delved into.
Noting that I presently most often blurt out thoughts or input when feeling the urgency, it dawned to me that this part in me, accustomed to not raise my hand at meetings or group discussions, had been inspirited in me.
I had been in Socratic seminars all my years in high school and in such classes, you spoke when a thought came to mind, always open and ready for debate and discussion.
There was rarely any holding back.
Oh, how I grew and developed into something so fierce just by being in such an open-concept, somewhat utopic educational environment!
I’m not sure if others around me were the same in thinking and feeling, but I can only recall always asking, always questioning, always conversing with others when a discussion drew me to want more.
Fortunately, with Mock Trial and Academy of Finance commingled with the same students as my Humanities class, I felt an endless sense of comfort in pushing through any discomfort for my mind, my body, my heart, and my spirit to feel safe.
Outside of class, I could laugh with others around my neighborhood who only truly understood the ways of such life. Feeling where to walk and when- that sixth sense embedded in you.
In class, I found myself in a safe-haven. I was truly free. No matter what was happening just an hour ago at home to what would be happening an hour after I got home from work, in class… I was me.
I get this now for my students.
I still think to myself how fortunate all my five children are to live such a suburban life.
To have invested in friendships for years of stability and growth given to them with my husband’s hard work and determination to give them such and my happiness to finally find a time in life to sense settlement was an accomplishment to this day, felt, over and over again, with endless gratitude.
How can you explain or even begin to describe your own upbringing when so many parts of it you were just so happy to have overcome?
I smile to think I gave my children the life Stephanie had all hers- stability, safety, and security, as I saw it to be.
That stability and security, that’s within to find amongst the calamity from what can be found around.
For those students of mine and all those eyes that look at me, who greet me by name even if they were never my own students to have crossed my way, they are safe with me.
My heart, my mind, my body, and my spirit, trained (to remind me) to understand.
Hand raised or not, speak.
Words not spoken cannot be heard.
As for that discomfort? I can only suggest that seeds who never push through their shells ever become what they were meant to be.
