The life of a Catholic school teacher

My brain has stopped growing. It really has. My psychiatrist confirmed this fact. Apparently, I have reached the age that this happens. As a result of my brain reaching full maturity, I have become a very introspective person. I find myself reflecting on my own life suprisingly often. I'm on the verge of many big life changes. Marriage, motherhood, home ownership. I don't k now when these changes will happen, I'm 27 now, but oddly, I am not at a point where those things are possible. Marriage? Yes. Motherhood and my first house? Not yet. In fact, I'm finding it hard to even think of myself as an adult. Could it really be time for my 10 year high school reunion? I marvel over the passage of time. What do you mean they have a 10 year anniversary dvd edition of Titanic? It was just recenlty that my temporary best friend in high school and I were swooning over that movie in the theater. I'm confused that nobody checks my i.d. anymore. I should still look 18.

My favorite kind of music is the music from the 90s that made an impression on me during the years that would help shape my adult persona. I always turned a deaf ear to the 'weird' music my mom made me listen to growing up. It's only now, as an adult, that I can appreciate my mom's love of oldies. The music that was popular in her 'day'.

Nostalgia strikes my heart very easily. The smell when the furnace first kicks on brings the feeling of being at home with my parents during the Christmas season. Warm rays of sun through a window on a cool day flashes me back to waking up on Thanksgiving morning and feeling the warmth of being at home with my family. So many other examples come to mind. Music is a huge trigger of nostalgia for me. So much so, that I have burned several compilation c.d.s that I have dubbed "Sarah's Nostalgia Series". These are full of songs that take me back to different times and places. These places aren't necessarily worth revisiting, but, for the duration of the songs, I can truly feel that I am back...then. Whenever or wherever 'then' may be.

I don't know that my future husband, J.P., understands this desire of mine to look back and meditate on time gone by. I worry that my need to journal through these reflections will be misinterpreted. After all, shouldn't I be able to tell him anything and everything?

I wonder if this fascination with my past will fade away. I can only imagine what raising my own children will do for my desire. After all, time will always move forward, new things will happen all the time, and I will be here to process it all through a brain that has stopped growing.

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I suck at writing. I really do. When I was a kid in elementary school, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. For several years I was convinced that I could be a writer when I grew up. I wrote stories in school and even won a prize in the English fair a couple of times. In middle school, my English teacher even picked me to be the one to write an article in the local paper about school uniforms and my opinion against them. However, I continually labored under the illusion that I was good and that I could really and truly write a book when I grew up.
High school began to change my mind about that. I served as co-editor of my school’s literary magazine during my eleventh grade year. Being behind the scenes of the magazine, meant that I also coordinated the English fair entries for my school. As a result, I entered a ton of my own writing, simply because I didn’t have to have it pre-selected by a teacher. I could fill out the entry form myself, throw it out there and see what happened. Well, what happened was that I won 4 awards that year. Two of which were the 1st and 2nd place of the Personal Narrative category. So you might say that I should have a high opinion of my writing skill. However, during my creative writing class, which served as the pre-requisite for the literary magazine, I was given the assignment of writing a fiction story. My fiction story ended up being a ten-page expose of how I lost my virginity to the school’s widely popular burn-out. I was suffering from teen angst and couldn’t see past my own life to write about anything fictional. My flaky teacher at the time returned my public diary to me in a brown envelope with a note on the outside. She had written that I should hang on to the story and then open it in ten years because it would make a great beginning to a novel. Oddly enough, that was almost ten years ago, and here I am writing, not a novel, but a blog. However, it is not a fictional account of anything.
I also discovered that year that I could indeed write good fiction, in fact I won 1st place in the fiction category of the English fair. However, the story that won was written for my grandpa who had asked me to write a story for him about miniature people living in his Christmas village. So I can’t even write a fiction story on my own with my own ideas. My last and final attempt to do so was in a college creative writing class in which I tried to re-count the story of my life through fictional characters. After the disaster that story turned out to be, I realized, I suck at this. Fiction writing will never be my thing.
Instead, I’m going to say screw it. I’m not going to even try to write something fictional. I want to write about my own life. It’s what I’m good at. Besides, isn’t it a well known fact that you have to write what you know in order to write well? My life is all that I know. It’s all that I will ever know. My purpose for writing this blog is to not only make true the compromise I made to myself when I decided not to pursue a writing career. I decided that I was going to be a teacher. That evolved into my first choice. So to make amends with the fact that I was going to disappoint my grandpa and not become a writer, I decided I was going to be a teacher with a writing career on the side. The thing is though, I don’t care if this blog leads into a career or not. I've certainly not heard of many blogs that do. I just want to write this blog and tell my story. I’m not in college anymore; I don’t get opportunities very often, if at all, to write papers, so this is my final paper.
This is my life, or at least significant moments, memories, and thoughts of a person who can have many labels: teacher, Catholic, mentally ill, animal lover, future wife and mother, estranged daughter. As of July 11th of this year, I added another label, 27 year old.

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