My Time

Not a traditional story... but I'm going to tell it.

My Time

I’m a high school English teacher, and I love everything about what I do.

It’ll never make me a millionaire, and I’ll likely spend the next thirty-plus years living paycheck to paycheck, carrying debt, dodging calls from Aunt Sallie, and struggling to ensure my bills are being paid.

But I only work 180 days a year. I get personal time off, sick leave and benefits, and I’m never more than a month or so from my next lengthy vacation. On the nicest days of the year, when it’s eighty-six degrees in the middle of July, and the worst, when it’s teeth-chattering cold and eleven inches of snow blankets the streets, I don’t have to go. I love my students, and it’s mind-boggling to me that I actually get paid to talk to them about two of the things I’m most passionate about in life, reading and writing, all day.

Yet, as much as I love it, I’m going to confess something here that I have not uttered to another soul, and please know that I do it with some level of guilt, given the challenges so many are facing.

This is my time.

I didn’t see it that way immediately. Like most, I was terrified by the uncertainty of it all. Through the end of March and much of April, I slept about two to four hours a night. I wasn’t eating. I found my waking hours consumed with scrolling through news articles, fearfully enraptured by everything going on in the world, and the communities around me. I lost a sense of myself.

It’s always been a dream of mine to write a novel, so I turned to writing as my outlet and escape. It filled the void in the sleepless hours, and gave me something fulfilling, constructive and productive to do during the time that I wasn’t teaching through distance learning. There were days when I did nothing but write, ten, twelve, as much as eighteen hours a day sometimes, churning out thousands upon thousands of words. Writing was my salvation, a consistent source of positivity, and my shining light through the darkest times.

I marveled as I watched the seed I first planted on March 8, 2020, when I decided to begin working on the novel that would become How I Met the Love of My Life Online… after failing fifty times, sprout, and blossom into a creation I was proud to say was mine.

I wrote it in under two months, illustrated it myself, created a website for it, fulfilled my lifelong dream, and now people are reading it… and I’m already planting the seed for the next project.

It’s May 15, 2020. I won’t be back in school until the end of August (at the earliest). There’s uncertainty with budgets, and this being my first year at my current school, there’s a chance I won’t have my contract renewed. I should be nervous, but I’m not because as much as I love my job, what I’ve learned about myself during COVID-19 is that writing is truly what I want and need to do with the rest of my life.

And this is my time to make that dream a reality.

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

I know this kind of passion, though I've not personally experienced it in a while. While you have the time, by all means, let the fire in your gut drive you on, accomplishing all that you can. I'm impressed that you also illustrated your book. Being a bit of an artist, I've toyed with the idea, but never have had the gumption to try it.