Amy, a fellow blogger over at “It’s Amy, I said,” was talking about this prompt yesterday on her blog. She explained that just by the wording of this prompt, it automatically assumes that humans don’t keep promises to themselves. She has a unique gift where she’s able to not only look at the blogs for a different perspective, but she’s also able to micro-dissect them in a manner that I simply don’t possess. She may have been saying that in jest, or maybe not. But what I love about her is that she always looks at stuff figuratively, whereas I always take things very literally. She makes jokes about stuff and it’s funny, but that’s who she is—and I always love the idea of shouting out fellow bloggers whenever I get a chance.
There are lots of promises we make to ourselves that we don’t necessarily keep, and in my opinion, that isn’t necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. Things happen, life changes, our interests and priorities shift.
Look at New Year’s resolutions, for instance. I don’t know anybody who actually takes New Year’s resolutions too seriously. But I think it’s one of those promises that we make to ourselves because it’s the start of a new year, and the idea is that at the beginning of a new year, we can start fresh and do things differently than we used to.
One promise I made to myself—and actually kept—was becoming a teacher. I know that it’s not the most glamorous position in the world, but I love it. I complain about it all the time, but I complain about it because I love it.
I bring up teaching because this is really the one thing that I said I wanted to do when I went to college. I went to college with the intention of becoming a teacher, and I became a teacher. In essence, it is one promise to myself that I actually followed through with.
Let me clarify for a moment: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with going to school for one thing and going into another profession. One of my longtime friends, who I will call Sid, went to school to be a music major. He ended up getting a job crafting lenses for eyeglasses roughly 25 years ago, and has done it to this day. The cooperating teacher I worked with while student teaching went to school to go into advertising before becoming a school teacher herself.
It happens all the time, and we know plenty of people who have done this. And that’s okay. But I think there’s something to be said about having a goal and ultimately achieving it as well. I wanted to be a teacher, and a teacher I am.
God knows I have tons of promises I make to myself and ultimately don’t follow through with: I’ll eat better, I’ll lose more weight, I’ll exercise more, I’ll read more. But the truth is, life gets in the way sometimes. As humans, we have to give ourselves some grace. Yes, the idea that “my word is my bond” and keeping strict honor is very noble, but it’s not realistic. We are flawed and imperfect electrochemical machines.
But when I look back at teaching, the reality is a lot heavier than just a straight line from college to career.
Down in South Carolina, my provisional certificate expired, I couldn’t get it renewed without a successful school evaluation, and my district couldn’t keep me. I was devastated. I bounced around, took part-time jobs, and ended up underemployed and working in customer service at a call center. And looking back, losing that teaching job wasn’t just a career hiccup—it was the beginning of the end of my marriage. It sent me spiraling into a deep depression, and the rock bottom of that entire era was my divorce. In a lot of ways, that fallout is the very genesis of everything I’ve built since.
It took me years to untangle myself from that wreckage, move back to Michigan, and start over. But somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the failure, something else was driving me.
I’ve realized something today that I don’t think I’ve ever consciously thought in the nearly two decades since: I didn’t just claw my way back into a classroom because I needed a job. I had to get recertified because I needed to prove something to myself. Even if I got back in and decided I hated it, I needed to know that I still had some fight and some tenacity left in my bones. I needed to know I could bust my ass and take my life back.
It’s not just that I went to school for it and became a teacher. It’s the fact that I lost it all, and I got it back.
The rebuild never ends.
Related: We spend so much time figuring out how to survive the wreckage that it feels surreal when we finally get to live a normal, good night. Before looking ahead to the theater tonight, read the earlier piece on The Math of the Last Six Years
Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.
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- The Math of the Last Six Years
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The article “Keeping the Promise When You Lose It All” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.
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