I am on my way to start a new life: On my search for steel and delight

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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I am on my way to start a new life: On my search for steel and delight

I am on my way to start a new life.

It is January of what I have declared “CLEAN SLATE ’98!” I am 27. I had quit my dream job — teaching high school Drama — after failing “to work smarter, not harder” and setting the stage on fire during a performance of a stage adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. (There is a longer story about lights too close to an old fire-retardant curtain, Juno’s final speech, and a gym teacher who lost his mind, but I digress.)

Shattered, I moved from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Bellingham, Washington, to start graduate school at the farthest point in the contiguous United States from where my dream had died.

The journey to Bellingham took the better part of a week. We drove through January snow and ice, spending 4 nights in Bismarck, North Dakota, living between a Holiday Inn, Kmart, and a Perkin’s.

I arrived in Bellingham. In the first 8 weeks, two-thirds of my stuff never arrived, my car was totaled, my teaching license did not transfer, I got fired from my job scheduling appointments at a Pediatrics practice, and my cats got fleas. Watching Titanic in the theatre at the mall was my only release.

Do you ever think of yourself as absolutely f*cked? What was I thinking? Moving across the country, in the worst weather, without a job or support system within 2300 miles. I often ask myself, “What is mine to learn from this experience?” That experience taught me the value of being all in. I had no choice but to be steel and delight. By steel and delight, I mean I had to create the experience I sought. To find delight especially when my back is against a wall. To spend more time getting on with it than asking myself how I got here. To kick life’s tires and take what I was being given for a test drive. I had to embrace change, in all its chaos and possibility and delight.

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