Divided No More

 Here we go again.

I've tried blogging before.  Many times.  I always seem to drop the ball sooner or later.  Perhaps this time will be different.  Perhaps it won't.  Time will tell.

What is different this time, though, is me.  The title of this blog is inspired by The Courage to Teach by Parker J. Palmer.  There is so much to love about this book, and I hope to return to it from time to time on these pages.  As an educator, though, it spoke to me at the deepest levels of my being.  

One of Palmer's central tenets is that teaching should be neither teacher-centered nor student-centered but, rather teaching should be subject-centered.  In this scheme, teachers and students form a community of scholars, coming together to plumb the depths of the central topic of interest.  But true community requires authenticity and vulnerability.  No longer can we treat teaching like performance, carefully curating one image for students and another for colleagues, neither of which may be our true selves. Or, as Palmer puts it:

In the undivided self, every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connections on which good teaching depends. 

As I've reflected on this book since reading it in May, I've come to appreciate that this applies not just to my teaching, but to my writing as well.  Teaching is central to my identity, but so is writing.  However, I haven't honored the writer within.  

Yes, I teach writing for a living, work that I am honored to perform, and that provides me with a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment.   But I don't do much writing.  It's time to change that.

So what has derailed me in the past in honoring my inner writer? Quite a few things.  I am, after all, full of excuses.  However, there are two things that have stood out to me since reading The Courage to Teach.

First, I love writing.  However, I hate the business of writing.  Nothing depresses me more than the thought of searching for agents, querying editors, analyzing market trends to write timely pieces that have the greatest chance of being sold, etc.  I'm not opposed to getting paid to write, of course, but any thought of writing as a business is stultifying for me.

Second, for most of my days, I've lived a highly compartmentalized, highly divided life.  Classroom.  Faculty meeting.  Family.  These friends.  Those friends.  To every group I presented a different, carefully curated me.  This has affected my writing in a couple of ways.  

It has made momentum difficult to keep up. The different versions of me have widely disparate interests.  Setting up a blog dedicated to any one of those interests quickly bored me.

A highly divided life also makes writing a dangerous affair.  Writing to honor all aspects of your life risks having all your different worlds collide and those worlds may not like one another.  Rejection is always just around the corner when you wear so many different faces.

And so, I'm beginning this blog as a catch-all, with no concern about whether it's coherent or whether it makes sense to anyone, with a brazen disregard of how my thoughts in one domain of my life may affect how people who know me in other contexts regard me.

It may work.  It may not.

Time will tell.