I seriously wonder how much people want to hear about the dreams I've had in the night. I've been dreaming about failing jobs and classes.
Last night, I dreamed that I went to my job every endless day and worked there for years without accomplishing a thing. Though I've never done that at a job, it feels like a recurring dream, one in which I worked for the best company with a great boss who never seemed to notice that I had no idea what my project was and that I produced nothing. Sometimes I dream that I’m at work, wondering what I’m supposed to do and why I’m in my underwear. Why doesn’t anyone in my dream notice that I’m in my underwear?
Last night, it was a variable of that dream only someone who had been a coworker in real life reappeared and instead of being an engineer, she was an accomplished artist and had been hired for her artistic skills. She'd always been more beautiful, acted as if she was smarter and more creative, and at the end of our relationship, she even made a play for Mike. And in my dream, I still sat there, across from her yet again, and dawdled, with a distinct unease and not knowing what I should do now that someone beautiful and accomplished sat across from me and watched what I was not doing and had no interesting in figuring out.
In my dream, I honestly didn't know what I was supposed to be working on and every single person around me was busy working on something I didn't understand and hated learning about.
I'm sweating. Is it the toast I just ate? Carbohydrates warm me up and sometimes make me hot. Or am I sweating because of the pressure of a dream about being inept and lazy.
When I was a kid, my mother used to call me a lazy bum. Oh, there wasn't any verve to it, not like some of the other things she said, just a casually repeated phrase that still catches in the back of my neck whenever I hear the word 'lazy.' Whenever I used to hear any of my old coworker-tutors at a staff meeting say that a kid was lazy, I corrected them even before I was lead tutor. Disinterested, disengaged, resistive, yes, but don’t call them lazy.
It does a lot of damage to call a child lazy. I can attest. I'm nearly sixty and I still have dreams about it.
No, I don't want to write this here for you. Why should I write about a recurring dream and my insecurities?
My recurring dreams are always about being in school and not doing very well or having a job that I had no interest in doing and couldn't understand anyway. Insecurities and anxiety, huh?
Am I doing a job I have no interest in or ability to do?
No. I'm worried about these students that I'm probably going to lose today. I just never got traction with them. They never showed any interest and sometimes they dug in their heels and didn’t do what I asked them to do. Plus, their mom kept asking how I was preparing them for the test so I kept doing SSAT work that none of us liked. Instead of doing my weird free-flowing method of reading and writing, I stuck to the workbooks that said Comprehension across the top. Ugh.
And here I am, about to lose them, and I should just let them go. Instead, I'm sitting here not knowing if I'll even be allowed to work with them today and dreading the phone call their mother promised me.
My two mistakes, I want to tell her, were that I didn't talk to her when they continued to resist what I brought for them to do and that I didn't take my more casual and creative approach to reading and writing. I feel it may be too late for that. It's possible that I just wasn't a good fit for this family.
My eye stings. Am I reading too much? Do I need to rest it or put in saline or go back to the doctor?
Ah, I just put a saline capsule in my pocket for later and I'm working here with that one eye closed as I type. It feels better now and I like typing with my eyes closed.
I just cannot find my creative flow today. I feel like I'm a bore. I feel like I should be cleaning my house. I feel like I should I should I should I should. It's an endless record of things I should be doing. If I finish one thing, something else flows right into its place without any breaks.
Today:
Walk Teddy.
Shop for groceries.
Clean the house, vacuum, dust, put away junk, donate more stuff.
Write Mike's annual calendar full of useless facts.
Scan my grandma's old photos and make a book out of them. Do I even need to write the words underneath, especially since I don't know who everyone is in the photos?
Plan a dinner.
Prepare for tomorrow's students.
Edit my next book.
Edit Rachel's chapter.
Maybe I could simplify editing my whole book to giving Rachel another chapter on Thursday. Could I do that? Could I make progress little bit by little bit?
Yes, I could make progress that way. I could.
But do you see how that list is too big to get done in one morning? Do you see how facing a rotating list similar to this could become boring and daunting at the same time?
...a little like a dream of trying to do that job I didn't understand and didn't want to do. Yes, my recurring dream is fashioned from the real thing, except if that particular coworker walks into my house, I'm leaving. Seriously. I did not get along with that woman.
Thank you for listening, jules