My Realms of Reality

Five years ago, I sat in my bed and bawled because I missed high school more than anything in the world. "Life was so easy! I miss my family!" I would think while I downed a tub of Nutella and watched Mean Girls for the 1000th time- which ironically portrays high school as a really horrible thing, which I didn't seem to notice. I hated university, as in really hated it. No one cared about me at university. "Where's the individuality!?" I would wail as Asians and hipsters passed me on the sidewalk. Alas, my first year at school was not good. But you know, it all changed. Eventually, year by year, I fell more in love with school. By the end of it I couldn't get enough. I would spend hours on campus, when I really didn't need to, just because I loved the feeling of being at school. I made friends, like, real friends. And suddenly I was so interesting! And did you wanna hear about my cool facts I learned in my class?

But, as all things do, it ended. My last day of university I held back tears as I wandered around the campus soaking everything in. That school was my school, and I was not ready to be done with it. Then everything changed really quickly. First, I had a job interview, then I had a job, and suddenly I had left my school for a new one. I was heading back to high school. The one place I missed the most five years before and now I was back at it.

I'm not going to give an account of what I've been up to. It's probably what you can imagine any first-year teacher doing. What I've really been thinking about lately is realms of reality. See, the way I imagine life is that as you go about things you are only within a certain reality. As a teenager, I was in a reality that was centered on friends, The O.C. reruns, and school. I didn't have to worry about a job or making my own food; my reality of life was very limited. When I graduated, and moved away from home to attend school, my reality changed. Suddenly I had to think about paying bills (Okay, my mom helped me write every cheque for about two years...). As the next five years passed, my reality at times seemed to explode, rather than nicely transition, with massive life changes.  Marriage, for example. I don't want to pretend here like marriage is not a massive life change, because it is. Let's all stop pretending like marriage is instantly easy. I've learned the delicate science of living with a man, and that in and of itself has expanded my reality to multiple new levels. ;)

I think everyone has those experiences, whether it's from traveling, or marriage, or children. You're sitting there one minute, and then in the next you realize that your life, along with yourself, has completely changed. Everything you thought was important has shifted, and you need to make room for an entirely new situation. I love that feeling. Isn't it wonderful to think: Wow, I can handle more now than I could yesterday. That's how I'm feeling right now. I have had to become what some people might call an adult, and it's entirely new to me.

I go to school everyday worried that I will do what's best for 100 different kids, and although I don't always succeed, I am constantly being amazed at how much my reality is expanding. My idea about life -and its purpose- about kids, about ideas, about whatever, is constantly shifting. As much as I would somedays love to go back to high school where my realm was tiny and comfortable, I realize that there is so much understanding that I would miss. There is so much more to life, and I'm only starting to get at it. There is so much more expansion for me.