August 8, 2018
Update
My name is Heather, and I am a human mama and dog mama in Maine. I recently left a successful career teaching English in public high school, and am teaching part-time at a local university and exploring careers in health care. I love Cardi B. and Ani DiFranco with equal ferocity. Also unscented candles, dry red wine, and good simple food. I have one son, a handful of bonus kids, two dogs, and 8 million fucking chickens. It’s complicated. I have significant clinical depression and general anxiety, and am fighting this more often than not. My family is complicated, my friends are a blessing, my hair is a real problem.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
I started this blog many, many years ago at the prompting of my mentor. It made all the difference for me, knowing that someone thought that I had something of value to say. This continues to be a challenge for me – the thought that what I have to say can be helpful or insightful or entertaining to anyone – but I also know that I believe fully in my writer friends and students, and encourage them to do the exact same thing: write, share, be heard, help. My favorite blog posts are those of people just like me doing their every day lives in glory, shame, or blissful ordinariness. I need to listen to myself.
So, to those of you who are my readers, your presence here is beyond important to me. Thank you for coming back, for following me, for finding something in what is here, for hanging around my sporadic posting. My life has changed so dramatically in these last few years, and I’ve been in a unique situation where I can’t really share all of the things I want to share because my stories are inextricably linked with others and I can’t quite figure out how to parse out the threads of mine without invading theirs.
I’ve been fretting about creating a new space to represent this new place in my life, but have settled to leave it all here for now. I wanted to separate everything, make it neat and organized but that is not a fair representation of my life. A fair representation of my life would be the storm system from Twister. Not organized.
Scrolling deep you’ll find typos and sentimental rants and uncomfortable family oversharing; teacher stories, student whining, parental angst; incredible joy, some swear words, and a fair accounting of where I’ve been. When shit gets heavy I always want out: new car, different house, rearrange the furniture, cut my hair. I’m trying to not do that anymore (except for the job quitting, that is a different story), so leaving it all on this very digital page is my exercise in just that – staying put. For now.
Big Love,
Heather
from midnight oil 