I am not here to make your dreams come true!

This journey is not about complaining about what is but deciding to reach for what I would like to be. I have decided that this will not be a forum to complain till exhaustion about the things I dislike about my job and present situation. Everyone has complaints and things they wish they could change about where they are. Bitching and moaning is too easy and in all honesty an insult to you as readers, my profession, other educators and myself. It would be easy to sit and recite to myself all of the pitfalls that could be lurking in the wings of my plan. Shit like that can keep you up at night, I mean it did keep me up at night, o.k., last night. Instead, I will take some of the offbeat things that I find myself saying to my own students and apply it to myself.

Yeah, I did it. I told my class that I was not here to make all their dreams come true. Well, I am not. I am here merely as a person who can tell them where to find the resources to do that for themselves. At the time I blurted it out may have been a statement I uttered to get them to be less needy and to stop pulling me in a million directions at once but it became much more in conversation. They must take on the responsabilety and develope that hunger for something they love on their own despite what others may say,even what I may say unless someone is being maimed. At times I feel that my real job is to just expose them to as much as I can, to step back and then see what sticks. I have finally found what sticks for me.

Just as my students must learn that they are the only person who can in all actuality move, motivate, convince and accept what gets them going, I am the sole provider of doing that same thing for myself. I feel like a madwoman now that I have finally gotten this very simple idea. I can both generate and distroy this whole journey all by myself by listening to nay sayers who often say "nays" out of love and true concern and my own negative head.

So, here we go, my mom wants me to be a psychologist, not the worst thing to want for your kid but I will make simulated bullet holes and zombies instead. Dad, he would like me to tutor kids, it is good work and meaningful too but so is making a bride feel like her most beautiful self on her day. The two Grannies, they want me to cook and clean and be a good Italian wife, I will be, first, let me make you both up to look like the most fantastic of Drag Queens. I have been let loose. Join the journey.