Dream Come True
The draft for this post took up the last three pages of the almost unbelievably durable Moleskine notebook that someone gave me for my 25th birthday. This notebook has followed me through 7 job changes, one degree, and across two continents. It's a jumble of verses and poems and short stories that I started and abandoned in coffee shops. Quotes pop up throughout from the dozens of books that I've read in the past 2 1/2 years. Taken as a whole, it's a strangely accurate reflection of who I have been, who I'm becoming, and the longing I continue to feel to live a life that is meaningful.
The Summer of 2015 version of me that started writing in this book had just finished the first year of a Masters program and was determined to work hard and become a school librarian. After a year of trying to find myself in Americorps, and a few more months finding the rest of me in Zambia, I had landed on a career path that made sense of my passion for teaching, my love of books, and my complete inability to spend more than an hour at a time in front of a computer. And I pursued my dream of becoming a school librarian with the focus of someone who had never known what she wanted this clearly before.
It was hard and frustrating at times. I am thankful for parents who let me stick around home as I struggled to pull together the money and time for grad school, but I grew resentful of my status as perpetual student, perpetually stuck in one place with the life I wanted just out of reach.
The two dreams that kept me going as I waded through information theory and the mental obstacle course required to become a certified teacher in New York State were:
1. The dream of becoming a librarian and finding a job in a place where I could put down roots and make a real difference in kids' lives.
and 2. The dream of having a little apartment all to myself.
Well, it's 2018 now and I'm writing this from the kitchen of my little apartment that I came home to after a long day spent teaching library in an elementary school in the district where I grew up. My life right now is in may ways even better than I could have pictured as I was deep in theory and deadlines and very strong tea.
But the funny thing about having your dreams come true is that there is always something that gets lost in the process of bringing a dream down out of the clouds and walking into it. It gets a little less shiny, a little grittier and grimier. In my dreams I forgot that sometimes kids would be rude to me and get into fights over books and tell me I'm mean when I don't let them do what they want to do. I forgot that bills exist and that sometimes my apartment would feel just a little too quiet. I didn't factor in that sometimes teaching is still wrapped up in bureaucracy and sometimes the politics of it all would make me wonder why I didn't just try to make it work with marketing.
But there are also moments of unanticipated joy that I didn't know were possible to hope for. When the boy who shouted at me to leave him alone in October found me in January to ask if he could ever come help me in the library. Or when a student repeats back to me, word for word, what I told them last week and I realize that some of them really are listening. Or when I saw one of my students in Walmart and his face lit up as he explained to his family that I was his librarian. Or any of the other times I've run into a student outside of school and they react like they've spotted a celebrity. Or when one student excitedly asked me to help him find the Arabic dictionary so that he could talk to his classmate who speaks Arabic.
Dreams are fragments. Blunt, sanitized fragments of something that may never really exist. And they're nice, but they are nothing compared to the messy, frustrating, joyful, exhilarating, complicated now. And right now is infinitely more than I could have dreamed.
So I'm trying to inhabit right now and trust that whatever comes next will not be easy, but it will be better than what I can hope for or imagine. Because the God who has brought me safely to this beautiful now will be with me for all the unexpected moments still to come.
