Tag Archives: Writing

New York

An Open Letter to New York City

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Dear New York City,

Most days, I hate you.

I spend a great deal of time startled by your noise, crammed into your trains, waiting in your lines, trying to get around leisurely walkers on your streets and sidewalks, and stunned at your prices. Most days, frankly, you are anything but serene with your noise pollution, skyscrapers, and frenetic pace of existence. Stop and smell the roses doesn’t exist here, so much so that there aren’t even any roses.

But when I stop to think for a moment, you do continue to leave me in awe. How have you built skyscrapers so tall and so wedged together that they often eliminate the need for sunglasses? How have you constructed a mass transit system that allows me to go anywhere (except, regrettably, work) without the need of a vehicle? How have you managed to welcome people from all corners of the sky and unite them in the common desire of finding the best bagel or slice of pizza?

Your shops, subway notices, and countless agencies and organizations operate in languages I’ve never heard of and can’t recognize. You have a sense of style and flavor influenced by all those who dream of you, flock to you, gaze around in anticipation.

You have an energy that is unmatched. You are always ready for the next innovation, and not just because you’ve anticipated what it is. People write songs, poems, and stories about you. You are the cool kid on the playground, the teacher’s pet, the current big thing and the next big thing. You are, by millions, loved.

And like anything loved, you are often trying. You are an exhausting place to be at the end of the day when all I want is a carton of milk at the grocery store. You make it hard to manage a budget – so much to do and it all costs so much money! But you give a little, too. You build parks, organize parades, and sponsor cultural events. You know you’re expensive, and sometimes you apologize and provide a free night at a museum, knowing you’ll be forgiven.

As hard as I try to understand you, you remain a mystery. Your abundance of options and activities has me perpetually concerned that I’m missing something. As I cope with feeling left behind, I gravitate towards the places I’ve come to feel comfortable and at home. They know me at a coffee shop now. Isn’t that enough? Must I continue to seek out yet another? Goodness knows you have them! And that’s precisely the problem – you have everything and it’s left up to your residents to find it.

In a lot of ways, you’re a playground bully. You taunt and yell, urging more and faster. And then when someone looks up, you are contrite. You open a door to somewhere quiet. You wink and slip away for a while.

It’s been an adventure getting to know you. You’re like a best friend – present, patient,  accepting, full of adventure and excitement – and also like a worst enemy – loud, invasive, taunting, difficult to shake. Some days we get along pretty well. Other days, I want nothing to do with you and it seems like you want nothing to do with me. We have a love-hate relationship, you might say. Or, more accurately, a like-hate relationship.

Getting to know me as I relate to you has been a different adventure entirely, one that is very much a work in progress. You’ve brought out things in me I don’t like – a tendency to walk with my head down, a reluctance to speak to strangers, a sense of urgency even when I’m not going anywhere, a feeling of hopelessness, anxiety, isolation, and frustration at the poverty you’ve permitted, the children you’ve let down, and the inequality that you allow to persist.

But I have to thank you, too. You constantly remind me that there’s work to be done to improve the world. You force me out of my comfort zone every minute of every day. You’ve emboldened me to read, write, and think about the choices I’ve made and the choices I will make in the future. Whatever doesn’t kill me will, in the end, make me stronger.

You’re unlike any other, New York. And though there are many, many days when I want to give it all up, throw in the towel, and call it quits . . . I’m not quite through with you.

Love always,

Rebecca Michelle

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On My Mind

New Name

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I’ve been thinking about changing the URL for this blog for a long time and I finally did it! You can now find my blog at byrebeccamichelle.wordpress.com. If you’d like to keep following my photos, travels, and thoughts on education (and I sincerely hope you do!) please, please, please update to this new address in your reader and/or in your follow settings. I don’t want to lose you! After all, what is this blog without you?

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As always, thanks for reading.

On My Mind

LeftRightLeftRight

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When I was in college, I went to a Coldplay concert with a group of friends. I can still feel the electricity of that night, and I still get chills when I hear certain songs. At the end of the night, after releasing a cloud of butterflies, Coldplay passed out CDs with the title LeftRightLeftRight. I didn’t understand the title at the time; after all, the album was a recording of one evening on the Viva La Vida Tour, which is what I had just paid to see. Over the past week, however, I started to wonder if the title could be a nod to creativity, and to the importance of stepping out of the boxes in which we put ourselves, in order to look for something more.

I have to give my friend Mary credit for providing the impetus for me to explore creativity this week. I don’t consider myself a creative personal at all. I’ve always wanted to be, but I am (regrettably) a perfectionist in much of what I do. In terms of the IB Learner Profile, I am not much of a risk taker. Call it a personality flaw.

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Source: http://blogs.osc-ib.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/IB-Learner-profile-diagram.jpg

School on the brain at all times, right?

Anyway, I reached out to Mary and another friend, Ally, earlier this week to share with them how alone and afraid I’ve been feeling. I’ve written about it before – the difficulty of finding a new job, the challenges of moving, and just trying to do as much as I can before I leave here. I’ve been feeling quite lost in the choices that I’ve made and continue to make, both in terms of employment and my personal life. Like many women in doubt, especially across oceans, I reached out to my girlfriends. I’ve known Ally since the first day of high school, which is still one of the most frightening experiences I’ve had. I went from a K-8 school of 120 kids in one town to a high school with 1,000 kids in another town. A couple weeks late, I met Mary and she introduced me to rest of the people who became my core group for the duration of my high school career. The rest, as they say, is history.

In their remarkably quick replies to a very long, rambling, I-am-crying-out-for-help-please-help-me email, both women were thoughtful, caring, supportive, and compassionate in everything they wrote and in the subsequent actions that they took. It is no surprise that I was sleeping better towards the end of this week than I have in the past month.

In the course of her response, Mary shared an interesting activity that she came across, presumably online. To paraphrase, Mary told me to ask myself an open-ended question and write the answer with my dominant hand and then my other hand. She had used ,”What animal best describes me?” in her example (quite possibly from this blog) and the two animals that she came up with beautifully capture two very different aspects of her personality. Seeing this, I gave it a try with the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My dominant hand told me teacher, which I expected. As I picked up the pen in my other hand, I felt a huge smile on my face because I knew exactly what I was going to write. In the awkward letters of one who is not ambidextrous but trying to be, the word writer appeared.

And I knew it would.

The second my pen left my dominant hand, which is really the only place it ever spends any time (and quite a lot of time as I work on grading the 51 grade nine essays I got on Wednesday), I literally felt a different part of my brain activate. As a teacher of psychology, I was not entirely that this happened but I was fascinated. I found this interview with a researcher also mentioned in this article to simply explain how to activate cognitive processing in a different hemisphere than normal. Have a quick read if you’re interested, or ask the different hemispheres of your brain a question.

So I wonder if that’s what Coldplay meant with that album title. I wonder if they were reflecting on their own creativity or encouraging others to literally try another hand.

I generally have a lot of questions and, “Now what?” is a question that I ask myself every time I send out another cover letter or resume or file another “thank you for your submission” email. It’s a question I ask myself whenever I read position descriptions for jobs I should be qualified for when, in the back of my mind, I know I’m not who schools want (to be explored in another blog post at a later date). It’s something I wonder when people ask me if I’m excited to move to NYC or if I’m sorry to leave Singapore.

The difficulty is that I am not patient, I am not comfortable with uncertainty, and I am trying very hard to be both. My dominant hand says “keep trying” and I am afraid to ask my other hand.