What Moves Me?

Now that I have some time off, my mind has some time to simmer on certain subjects. One being, how in the sweet hell, do I manage to teach and have Severe Depressive Disorder and Anxiety? I would love to extol the efforts of modern day pharmaceuticals, but I have only been on medication since 2014. Also, I have only been in consistent talk therapy for the past two years. I have been teaching, since 2011. On my days off, sometimes my body refuses to function, and all I want is to bounce back and forward between sleeping and weeping. And sometimes medications are not enough to tempt me to even consider doing anything else that day. What is it about my teaching days that defeats my symptoms? I wake up with no body aches, and I don't feel like I am wading in emotionally toxic glue. There is a need to go to work that trumps everything. I wish I could tell you that it is a strictly monetary drive, but I am adjunct professor, which means my pay check does not always go the distance.

This leads me to believe that there is something else coaxing me into the car on those days. I believe it is my students. If they can try, so can I. Their want to learn to grapple with arguments, evidence, organizational devices, and even basic MLA formatting, actually makes me, the person who once hid in a closet at my graduate school for an hour crying over the fact I dropped all my papers in front of a flock of potential thesis board members, HAPPY. And when I am teaching creative writing the will to get up is stronger. I want them to learn tenacity and be at home in the slush piles, until they see their shot, take it, and blast the balls off every rejection letter that filled their souls with dark spam. This...is what moves me.