How is it SUPPOSED to work?

[grebjack]

Wow, thank you for that rich, thoughtful answer.

I will openly admit that what I post may or may not be helpful. I certainly hope that you can find your meaning in it that will help you.

Thanks. I promise to take what I can from your writing without assuming that it is the infallible wisdom for my situation. I am grateful that you take the time to respond.

I didn't really expect the M to last. I had misgivings from day one. I knew my W wasn't really "into it"...

That's intriguing. My husband also says that he didn't really expect the marriage to last. That he was always "waiting for the other shoe to drop." I have no idea why, though. I'm sure he would NOT say that I wasn't "into it."

Who are you? Right now, what do you believe your purpose is? If your world / environment consisted of JUST YOU, what would you be doing? How would you do it?

My purpose is obvious to me. I'm a teacher. I teach math to low-income urban kids who don't think they're good at this and know that the society around them is ready to give up on them, too. The more wounded and angry the better. My job is to pull them back from the brink and convince them that they have more in them than they know. I can't catch them all, but amazingly, at my school, we reach them more often than not. Everything I value about myself, everything I value about humanity, is about how we are in community. If the world consisted of just me - no students, no friends, no hugs, no compatriots - I'd be swallowing a bottle of tylenol. Although given that I don't know how to synthesize tylenol, I don't even know how I'd do that. I don't know what it means to be human without being part of society.

What are your fears?

I fear Alzheimers. I fear violence. I have those sort of normal self-preservationist instincts, I think. I have a deep-seated fear of incompetence and of being found out as an incompetent. I fear having a coaching meeting in which I am not able to give my colleague useful advice. I read a recommendation a colleague wrote for me a couple weeks ago and couldn't help thinking, "oh, no, what is he going to think of me when he figures out I'm not actually this good?" I kinda like that fear - I think it drives me to keep getting better. And since experiencing the pain of a failed marriage, I fear that this pain will never go away, almost as much as on good days I fear that once the pain is fully gone there will nothing left where my marriage once was.

What do I do with that?