On mattering

I've been ruminating a bit more about these trade-offs, the sacrificing of one thing for another - the paradoxical, oppositional conundrums of teaching.

Over spring break I had a really great, validating discussion with my sister about the nature of my work. She reminded me how lucky am, at the tender age of 25, to be doing something that more or less matters in the day-to-day. If I don't show up to work, it matters. People miss me. When I funnel my energy and brain power into endless hours of crafting my Smartboard lessons; when I strategize with Corky and Rosie about the best way to get a particular point across, I get to see the results, the fruits of my labor. The kids end up knowing things they didn't know before... When I go to work, I spend the day with eager livers of life, who are excited about all the possibilities the world can offer them.

Compared to so many of my contemporaries, this is a relatively useful and fulfilling way of spending my working life. So many people of my generation are no less capable, hard-working motivated, or ideal-driven than me and my colleagues. And yet, due to the cruel reality of being a new admit to the working world, their time and talents are funneled into filling up the entry-level chairs of cubicle-world: filing insurance claims; "researching" fruitless fundraising possibilities for poorly managed non-profits; administratively assisting various law firms and financial institutions; entering data for contractors and corporations. Gaining that frustratingly intangible "experience" you need to do something more like you wanted to do when you were in the fifth grade.

I know I am tremendously lucky to have been afforded the opportunity to do a job that doesn't entail me staring into a computer and checking Facebook half the day - that is its own brand of 21st century torture.

But the upshot of all this mattering, all this meaningfulness at my job?

It's exhausting. Like, deflated balloon, boneless puddle, brain-mush exhausting. In teaching, there is no day when you get to "phone it in," there is no way to work from home, there is no way to just lay low and check your email or surf the web for a minute or two when you get tired. There is no way to take a coffee break or eat a snack or even pee unless it falls into your previously arranged schedule.

Some weekend days, like yesterday, my body just rebels, and my mind, too, I guess. Even after a short work week, I slept and slept and couldn't stop sleeping. I was hard-pressed to leave my bed, much less my apartment. This happens to me from time to time, and when it does, I feel frustratingly, frighteningly powerless. My body just shuts down and refuses to be anything but horizontal, and my brain feels fuzzy and dull. I'm not sure if I can blame it all on my work - some of it could just be my own psychic idiosyncracy - but I know it's related. When you spend most days on all eight cylinders, every now and then the engine just gives out.

All told, I suppose I would million times rather be an exhausted lifeless school teacher on weekends than an energized but underutilized office worker. But I guess this is all to say, what I do matters... But mattering ain't easy, and meaningfulness has its price.