If I had experienced different things, I would have different things to say. – Mark Nepo

Rather than write from a particular wound, I want to write from a particular scar. This scar was an open wound for many years. It burned with the fire of hot coals that kept their heat, over time, each ember signaling shooting pain. Failure of a dream. Letting people down. Working my tail off and having it not be good enough. Leaving instead of fighting. Seeking a geographic fix from total sadness and anger. These were all embers in the fire of my wound. Overtime, through the piling on of more successes and failures, through learning that all dreams evolve and change (and that even death can mean growth), and through the wisdom that simply comes from showing up to life, the wound has become a scar. I have written about this scar many times in many ways. I have written about it in my dissertation. I have written about it in a chapter in my memoir. I have blogged about it.

The Stage is On Fire

Being a high school theatre teacher was my dream, and I got that opportunity at a young age. I taught high school theatre for a year and a half in 2007 and 2008. I was the theatre teacher at the high school where I completed my student teaching. After being her student teacher, I took over the theatre teacher who had built an amazing program. I took on a lot. I asked for relief. It did not come. I left.

Near the end of my first year, during a school-day production of Homer’s Odyssey (adapted for the stage), a fire retardant curtain started to smolder when a light shown too closely on it. Fire trucks were called. The school was evacuated. The gym teacher ran in with buckets of water. (I could not make this up.) This happened as the show was ending. I opted to let the show end, having turned off the stage lights, before bringing down the smoldering curtain. From that point on, I was the teacher who almost burned down the school.

I could do nothing right.

My fire drill sign pointed the wrong direction. An Assistant Principal stood outside my door every morning before 7:00 “Success Period” to make sure I was at my desk on time. The community engagement I guided (plays that I produced, mentorship opportunities for my advanced students with elementary students, tours of student-authored scripts to local nursing homes, and student leadership in casts and clubs) was not noticed. I went from having an excellent evaluation my first year to not meeting any expectations my second. Devastation does not begin to describe the emotional state I was in. I had never failed on such a grand scale. Not even being cut from freshman cheerleading in high school stung this bad, and that hurt an enormous amount.

How did I clean out the wound of that experience?

I cleaned out the wound of that experience in several ways. I moved. I went to graduate school and studied arts education. I wrote my dissertation on two wonderful theatre teachers. I worked in arts education policy. Even after all that, the embers sometimes smolder when I think about my students’ lives that I do not share. (Though brief, my experience with them was meaningful.) When I feel truly wronged, the anger that I felt so deeply during that time bubbles up. When a fight or flight situation arises, there is always a piece of me that thinks about what would have happened had I chosen to stay and fight even a little more. Today, the scar looks more like the realization that our dreams change. The scar includes the question, “In what ways am I using what I learned from that situation to make the world a better place?” The scar also reminds me to be gentle with myself and others.

https://kitt.global/february-21-cleaning-out-the-wound-mark-nepo-the-book-of-awakening/