Because this year of such intense change and upheaval is coming to a close, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on my new identity. I left my teaching job in June and I seem to have effortlessly transitioned to my new focus as a full-time writer. (Note: This doesn’t mean that I’m effortlessly writing! Just that I’ve embraced the identity of full-time writer again.)
I have been a historian and a writer since receiving my PhD in 2001. (Yikes, almost 20 years!) Between 2001 and 2013 I was an independent writer and editor working from home, so one would think that, after a brief 7-year detour into teaching high school, I am now simply returning to my full-time writing career. But those years were different than what I want to do now, starting with how many years I spent constantly hustling for paid work. In addition to writing, editing, and adjunct college teaching - some of which paid very well and some not - I also applied for DOZENS of full-time jobs over a ten-year period between 2003 and 2013. I applied for tenure-track college faculty jobs, publishing jobs, curriculum development jobs, and education think-tank research jobs. At one time I also considered law school, but as I still had student loans from graduate school, and we wanted to pay for private school and college for our children, I decided that was not a great financial decision.For all of my seeking, I never considered or planned to be a high school teacher, but in 2013 I was offered and grew into a job teaching high school history & government at the private school my children attended and it turned out to be one of the best surprises of my life. In my early days at the school, I remember telling a colleague that I considered myself a historian and a writer who just happened to teach. But as each year passed, teaching took over not only more months of my year and ALL of the hours of my day, but completely consumed my intellectual, social, and emotional energy. The demands of spending all-day, every day, engaging with young people meant that I very quickly moved from feeling like I was just hanging out, sharing my love of history, to actually embracing the new pedagogical responsibilities and joys of the job, reading articles and attending workshops and meetings on topics such as grading, assessments, curriculum mapping, and meeting students’ different learning needs. I learned so much from students’ curiosity and questions, reading new books and learning new subjects I might never have read or learned on my own, and researching curriculum materials and pedagogical resources to try to understand how people learn best. I did so many new things I never would have done or known about, such as becoming a Model UN leader, developing LGBQT resources and curriculum, mentoring students about college and career plans, and participating on administrative committees, learning how school communities work and function.
In addition to the steady paycheck that eluded me as a freelancer, teaching brought immediate gratification in a way that YEARS of working on a book never could. I might write a book that people, including future students, might read and maybe even find important, but there was no questioning the sense of purpose and immediacy in teaching. Right there in the classroom, at that moment, whatever was said / discussed / communicated / felt between myself and the students made an enormous and lasting impact. There was also immediate gratification in the feedback received from students in our hundreds of tiny interactions over the course of a day or year or multiple years of high school. Whether I felt inspired or not on any particular day didn’t matter, as EVERY day there were students waiting for me to open the door on a chilly morning and fire up the heater and say or do something, and that something could have ripple effects for years. There was also gratification in collaborating with colleagues and in receiving appreciation and trust from parents, in being part of a team committed to launching young people into the world.
Was I building, then, a new career? Was I first-and-foremost a teacher now, more than a historian and writer? What about the books I still yearned to research and knew I could still write? Even if I never wrote another academic book, what about the stories I wanted to tell and the novels I wanted to write? Even in the midst of loving what I was doing as a teacher, I could not fully see a way to combine my different goals and identities. I could see no way forward - no end goal. I realized that I did not see myself as a career teacher.
I saw that I would either have to pull back and give less to my students and school community, or accept that this is where I would give all of my time and energy, giving up other pursuits and life goals (such as writing books). And I couldn’t really accept either of those options. I began to contemplate that perhaps I had given all I could give to teaching. I had not built a career out of it, but I had a 7-year run in a unique and privileged position and I learned so much.
Still, I don’t see myself “returning” to the same writing life I had before I taught high school. For starters, I don’t want to hustle. Unless it becomes financially necessary, I'm not looking for freelance jobs and I don’t want to work too hard for too little money (including in teaching). I published 8 non-fiction books between 2003 and 2020. (https://www.womanwriting.com/published-works) I truly enjoy the research and writing, but I don’t actually want to write those kinds of reference books anymore. I do want to write and publish both nonfiction history and historical novels, and I hope to get an agent in 2021 to help make that happen! I've been focusing these past 5-6 months on learning the craft of storytelling, sharing my work and accepting feedback on my creative writing for the first time, thinking about ways to develop my identity as an artist and think outside the box as a historian.
So maybe instead of seeing my path as one of uncertainty and hustling and detours, I actually HAVE been building something all along. I am entering a new phase as a historian and writer and I do believe that everything I’ve done to this point - including every day I spent teaching high school kids - will somehow inform and enrich whatever my next steps will be.
