Like a Diamond In the Rough

I called in sick to work today. It was hard and I felt guilty. I worried about what my supervisors would think if I didn’t show up. I worried about how my not being there would affect the student population I work with. I felt bad that others would need to do more to pull the weight of my absence.

I deliberated about taking a personal day for weeks. I weighed the pros and cons. I wanted to think of the perfect reason or excuse that validated my need to take some time for me. My inner voice told me I had plenty of time on the weekends to chillax and made me feel selfish and weak for thinking I needed an extra day to be doing something other than working at my job.

I had an accrual of sick and personal days from 3 years at this job. I have rarely taken a day unless it was for an appointment or a sick child and then I would sometimes even just take a half-day or an hour off in the afternoon to make sure it was convenient for everyone else.

But today that ended. I realized that if I don’t advocate for my own well-being and mental health no one else will. No one at work is going to hunt me down and tell me that I have been giving too much and that I should take a day at home to rest and rejuvenate. To be honest we are all burning that wick at both ends and our emotional health is being jeopardized by our livelihoods. We must work to pay our bills, but by the end, we may be too tired and worn down to take care of our families and we usually come last on that proverbial totem pole.

Today was the day that through the guilt and worry I said no more. I am going to take a day for myself. No, I am not sick. No, I feel fine. I don’t have a lie made up about why I am not coming in. I don’t want others to worry about me, but I need to know I can take a day without beating myself up with guilt about it. I need to take a day before I do eventually get sick because the pressure I have put upon myself is too great.

I know many of us feel like if we weren’t at our jobs everything would crumble. If we didn’t show up every day no one would know what to do and the whole place might just fall apart, but have you ever missed a day and when you get back everyone is still standing. Maybe you were missed, but the world itself has not collapsed and everyone is just glad to see you again.

Many times lately I have felt expendable. We are in Covid times and I work in a school. We are being exposed to Covid many times a week, but keep showing up. There is a fear in the air. A very real feeling of being vulnerable and in a sense in danger. We love our jobs and students, but at the same time are thinking, dang these kids are breathing and sneezing all over me daily. I am on the literal firing line and no one cares. Not to say I am a nurse or doctor, but these kids are messy and have some real germs, no lie.

It’s hard not to feel paranoid on a daily basis about a tickly throat or the semblance of a headache coming on. Can I still taste my food? Will I spread it to my family? Will we survive? Will we be okay?

I recently published a memoir. This was my lifes work. I talked about how I was going to write this book for over a decade. I wrote and wrote and refined my writing for years. The subject matter was intense. It was about my life. The problem was that I had a lot of material but it had not come full circle. I was writing about the struggle but was still in the struggle so to speak. I needed my life and in turn, my story to come full circle so I could “finish my book.”

Covid came and my time freed up. I was working more from home and not so emotionally drained by my day job. I felt like I had more resources and hired an editor to look at the 60,000 written words I had scribed over the last decade. I was banking on this memoir to change my life. I dreamed about the day I would sit across from Oprah on Super Soul Sunday and share my story with millions, how they would make my book and life story into a movie and how Reese Witherspoon would play me as well as she played Cheryl Strayed in Wild.

I sent over all of my writing that in my mind would transform magically into a book that would line the shelves at Barnes and Noble and Target. I knew my story and life experiences were riveting enough and I likened them to Tara Westover of Educated and Jeanette Walls of The Glass Castle. I thought for sure Glennon Doyle would be my best friend and maybe I could even high-five Mel Robbins.

When I re-looked at the material I had sent over to the editor it looked like years worth of journal entries. I thought my writing lacked depth and in my mind, it was worse than I remembered. I felt embarrassed that I had submitted this “junk” to her and asked her if we could start again. I knew the premise of my life story, but I thought my writing had improved and I thought I could write it better. She agreed. We created an outline of the key aspects of my memoir and started over.

Was it hard to trash those 60,000 words?

Not as hard as one would think. I knew my book needed to be refined. Like a jewel. Like something you find that is just not quite where it needs to be, but over time and with care and it can materialize into the glimmering stone we knew it could be.

A year has passed since that beginning writing process and I have a published book in my hands.

Has the experience been everything I could have dreamed of and more? Yes and no. I am proud to have finished my memoir, but guess what? I still have that doubting voice telling me I could have done better. I could have taken more time and made it even better.

I haven’t gotten the call from Oprah or Paramount Studios yet and I am still fangirling over my favorite authors while I live in my townhouse in the Midwest with a day job that I feel too guilty to call in sick to. I still can’t pay all of my bills and I worry about my financial future. I still live paycheck to paycheck and just want to try to focus on being content in any situation. I want to be happy without money so that when it comes, I can use it wisely. I want to appreciate my life now so that when success arrives I will know that I wasn’t waiting for my life to change, that I found happiness within and not because of fame or fortune. That may sound cheesy, but I have an addiction background and want to stay humble. I don’t want to get a ton of money and think that drugs and alcohol sound good and lose everything I have. I want to remain grounded like that diamond in the rough. I want to remember my priorities and not get swept up in likes and followers. I want to remember what is important to me and why I wanted to share my story in the first place.

The truth is I wanted people to feel less alone. I wanted to show them that it was possible to beat addiction and break a cycle. I wanted to show them that even when the odds are against us we can rise above. I wanted to prove that Fatih over Fear is real and that one step at a time we can put ourselves ahead, we can let go of the guilt and shame of our past and move forward.

I had a grandmother who recently asked me why I would want to "air my dirty laundry.” The truth is I want to share my story so that I don’t have to carry it alone. It’s a shameful place to be walking alone, but as soon as we let out our secrets we find we are not the only ones. There are others like us that have been too ashamed to speak up, but because of our strength, they have a safe place to share as well. If we are all hiding our truth so that people will think we are okay and we fit the mold then we really never get to the root of our own issues. We hide behind who we think people want us to be. We cover ourselves in the latest fashions and put out best foot forward. We overthink about what people’s perceptions of us might be and we get stuck in a cycle of going through life, but not fully living.

The truth in sharing our stories is not to make others look bad. It is not their story we are sharing. It is ours. We find that when we start talking about those things that we were too scared to tell anyone they shrink in size. The things we were too scared to try. The things we wondered if we could really accomplish, the what if’s we had in our minds, the dreams we thought might die inside of us because we were too afraid of what others might think of us. The imposter syndrome that asks us who we think we are. Those are very things we must share and be open about. When we start to share ours we give others permission to do the same. What an awesome life this could be if we were all on a mission following our dreams and passions and not just another cog in the ship of life, clocking in and clocking out.

I will tell you right now I have 4 dollars in my bank account. I get scared. I feel defeated sometimes. I think everyone else has it together and I am the only one who doesn’t carry the playbook for life, but I am doing it anyway. I am doing it with doubts and fears. I am doing it scared. I am doing it when I feel small. I am doing it when my mind asks me who I think I am. I am doing it when people aren’t always receptive.

I am walking this authenticity deal. I am working towards being my true self. Not the one who hides behind fancy purses and high heels. I am not where I work; my identity is not in my career. My identity is not in the car I drive. My identity is not in the house I live in. My identity is my inner core, my truth. Who I am, not what I do.

I no longer want to be expendable. I want to make a difference. I have a strong desire to share my words and the more I do, the more I find my core; what makes me tick and come alive and in turn, others around me do the same. It’s contagious. The humdrum of life is also contagious. We may find ourselves stuck in that trap, but learning that no one else will come to rescue us or tell us that we could be using our gifts in a new and exciting way is key. We have to be our own cheerleaders. We can’t wait for them to roll out the red carpet. We’ve got the golden ticket. We just have to start using it. We just have to dig ourselves up from the rubble that we have been buried under by believing that we weren’t worth following our passions or that we could never achieve our wildest dreams. We don’t have to give up now. We just have to rise above the voices in our heads.

We were born to shine.