Tag: identity

13 Jan 21 – Once a runner

This is the longest I’ve gone without running since I started running 18 years ago. I’ve taken breaks. The couple of times I did two marathons within a couple weeks of each other I was off my feet for a few months. It worked out okay because that was a stupid thing to do (twice) and my brain would have no more of that nonsense.

Not running wasn’t a thing I’d registered I’d be giving up on the road to single parenthood. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. But, both kids are too young for me to head out for any decent distance. We all get anxious when I tell them I’m taking one of the dogs on a walk around the block. We’ve tried going on a run together – one on a bike, the other running with me. We made it a mile in about 20 minutes. I wouldn’t say it was running so much as moving quickly in short bursts with bickering in between. So, not exactly what I was looking for.

Plus, there’s a pandemic on. Combine that with my first full year of parenting and I’m always exhausted. I’m not, it turns out, too exhausted to snack. The steps and stamina required to snack are well within my much diminished capabilites.

What I also knew clearly but hadn’t registered was the break that running gives me. I’m not an athlete. I have no interest in lifting heavy things. I cannot dribble anything other than hot soup. I was on the losingest t-ball team in our league the year I played.

When I found running, something worked. It was time to myself. I couldn’t do anything else. In the last 18 years, when I had something I needed to process, I went for a run.

I’ve needed running this year, and it’s been just out of reach.

Tomorrow, at lunch time, I’m going for a run. It won’t be long. It’ll kick my ass. Two days from now, I’ll curse myself. For two miles tomorrow, though, I’ll be a runner again. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve Been My Own Identify Thief (1/365)

blurred image of a figure in outlineI’ve been thinking about the things I tell people about myself. I tell them I’m an educator, I tell them I’m a writer, I tell them I’m a vegetarian. I’m imagining, you do something similar. There are labels you carry with you and offer up to new people when you meet them. They might also be labels you count on as the fascia that binds you to your network of friends and colleagues. I wonder, though, if your labels are anything like mine.

When I say I’m an educator, I hope no one notices it’s been a while since I’ve had to write up unit plans, counsel a student through a tough decision, or any of the day-to-day I remember so well. And, it if’s down to memory, that’s telling.

When I tell them I’m a writer, I hope they don’t notice my contributions have largely been twitter-related in the past few months (and many of them retweets) and that this is the first post up on the blog in nearly half a year.

When I identify as a vegetarian, I hope no one’s around who saw the last time I ordered a tuna salad sandwich for lunch.

Those are the big labels. To open up the smaller assumed characteristics and claimed habits would be a longer conversation than I’ve time for.

In short, I’ve stolen my own identity from a past version of me who got much more use out of it and who might have been a more authentic version of me. It reminds me of when I would call my students “writers” or “readers”. The difference is, they would then read and write.

While this isn’t really a resolution, I recognize and am taking advantage of the spirit of new beginnings that springs forth from this side of New Year’s Eves. I’ll be writing here daily. Hold me to that. I’ll be working on reclaiming some of the other pieces of who I’ve been telling myself and others I am for longer than I can remember.

What about you? Who might you reclaim from the labels you’ve been using, but not necessarily living?

Queer Teacher

I never felt comfortable being queer and a teacher. From student teaching in Illinois to my first years in Florida to working at SLA – while vastly different in their levels of acceptance, none of them felt completely safe. None of them got to see all of who I was.

As much as I’m sure this was informed by growing up in a largely intolerant small, rural school, it wasn’t all that. It wasn’t all baggage. It was also knowing I needed to check when moving from one place to another to find out if I was part of a protected class in my new location. When I first got hired to work in Sarasota, my mom wrote an email with many exclamation marks saying she’d checked and that the county had banned discriminatory employment practices based on sexual orientation.

While I’d had no intention of walking into my principal’s office to say, “Here are the scope and sequence guidelines you asked for, and I’m gay,” it was good to know I couldn’t be summarily dismissed if she found out I’d been dating a guy.

Pause and think about that. By writing this post and outing myself here, I am eliminating the possibility of teaching in 28 states should some industrious principal start to google. Can you say the same about talking publicly about whom you date or marry? If so and you live on the LGBTQ spectrum, it’s not likely we will ever talk about it online. My sexual orientation isn’t listed in my Twitter profile or a part of my about.me listing. It’s not there because I don’t want possible intolerance to get in the way of a free exchange of ideas in the spaces I love. The thing is, though, if you’re straight, it’s only a free exchange of ideas for you, because I give up a part of who I am to connect with you.

I resent that in the same way I resent having to out myself to people when they assume I’m straight and ask if I have a girlfriend. Sometimes, the answer is simply “no” and I let the pitch fly by because I don’t want to have the conversation that starts with, “Oh, you don’t seem gay.” I reply “no” in those moments when my response would be, “You don’t seem like a heteronormative cliché, so we’ve both learned something today.”

In the vein of learning, I would love to have learned who among my teachers growing up identified as LGBTQ. More than that, it would have meant the world to me to hear a teacher say aloud that he or she was an ally, was accepting, wanted to be there for me if I needed to talk. Your safe space stickers on your doors or ally triangles were nice, and I needed to hear you say it out loud. I needed to hear you say something positive about people who were gay so that I, at the very least, knew you knew we existed.

I tried to do this in my classrooms. From talking about Ryan White so that kids knew HIV/AIDS weren’t synonymous with being queer, to choosing books that had gay characters who weren’t merely tokens or getting their heads bashed in for coming out – I tried to build an inclusive space.

I didn’t come out, though. I’m sorry for that. To any former students who could have benefited from me saying it explicitly, I am sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I let my resentment toward other people’s assumptions and my fear of repercussions keep me from being the role model I wanted to be. Hopefully, this post can still be some small help.

That’s why I’m writing this now, because straight people need help. So, let’s review some things straight people can do to be better people (cause most of you sure have the straight thing down).

Assume someone in the room is LGBTQ. This is different than assuming not everyone is straight.

Use inclusive language. Instead of asking a student if they are going to a social function with what someone of what you perceive to be of the opposite gender, ask if they’re planning on going with anyone or going at all.

Mention LGBTQ people in positive ways. Part of what took me so long to get right with being queer was having Matthew Shepherd as my main touchstone of what it meant to be gay. Think about the lesson implicit in a story about a person whose life came to mean something to people only after he’d been tied to a fence post, beaten, and left to freeze to death.

Call on your unions to champion equity. As I said, 28 states still allow for the dismissal of teachers based on sexuality. If their membership called for it, the teachers unions could at least make this part of the conversation in election cycles.

Out yourself. Give yourself a week of outing yourself as straight when you meet new people or in conversations with people you’ve known for a while but haven’t told you’re straight. If we have to do it, you should at least learn how awkward and annoying it feels.

Know that knowing one LGBTQ person isn’t knowing all or even many. I write this as one queer man, not on behalf of all. In the same way I don’t make assumptions about all members of group X when I meet them, don’t take meeting me or anyone else as having learned what there is to know about someone different from you.

Some people who have known me for a while might have read this post and be surprised or even hurt that we haven’t had this conversation before or that I didn’t explicitly come out to you. I suppose you’re going to have to work through that.

What Kind of Man am I.

Smash Binary Gender

Sometimes, in my day job, I have meetings with a lot of men in suits.

Yesterday afternoon was one such time. Seated around a rectangular configuration of tables were about 25 people, mostly men. Each of those men was in a suit. I was as well. While their suits were almost uniformly black, with a few charcoal greys thrown in for good measure, mine was just a shade lighter than navy blue.

My shirt was pink. My socks were lime green. My tie was a bow and had little British bulldogs on it. My hair was more unkempt than kempt, and mine was the only eyebrow ring in the room. All of this was a departure from the other men in the room.

When it was my turn to present to the group, I started with a warm hello and smiled quickly at everyone around the rectangle. I smiled more in that meeting than any other room. When I had something to say, I raised my hand and asked if it was okay if I added a few points. As I added a few points, I connected them to the things the other people in the room had already shared.

The other men in the room didn’t greet one another beyond initial 1-on-1 greetings before we’d taken our seats, and smiles were infrequent occurrences. When the other men wanted to speak, they did. No one else raised their hands, and none of them asked if it was okay to add on.

Being a professional man is boring, and it’s serious work, and it’s uncomfortable clothes. I express my gender by playing and pushing at the ends of that tedious monologue of manhood. When it comes to speaking in a group, I don’t assume people want to hear what I have to say, and I try to make sure my words honor those ideas that have been expressed before me.

I get that this doesn’t pin down my gender expression. I don’t know that I can (or that I’m interested in pinning such a thing). I do hope it points out that in putting on my clothes and interacting with other people, I am aware of the otherness I’m feeling in a room. I’m similar, but not the same.

While I don’t identify as genderqueer, I recognize that smiling more than most, asking how people are feeling, and other small acts might have the impact of queering my gender role. That’s fine by me. Looking around the table yesterday and so many others I’ve sat at, I couldn’t help but think it looked like a lot of work to be that kind of man.

My Most Valuable Chair-less Lesson

Overturned chair

The most valuable learning away from a chair and desk? Running – particularly my first marathon – has been the most valuable learning I’ve experienced. I might include whatever learning has happened at a chair/desk.

I wasn’t a runner when I started. I wasn’t anything that included physical activity, really. Whatever intrinsic joy I might have found in sports and other elements of P.E. in school were subsumed by the social pressures–real and imagined–I felt to know how to do things like layups, bunting, etc. I decided early on that excercise and sports weren’t for me. And that was how things were until I turned 21 and decided I didn’t want the most momentous thing that happened in my life that year to be the ability to legally consume alcohol.

My first steps as a runner were June 1. Two miles. I wanted to die. Oct. 12 of that year, I completed the Chicago marathon.

Running that race, I realized the marathon wasn’t going to be the event that made me a runner. It would make me a marathoner, sure, but I was a runner as soon as I made the commitment to take those first steps in June, as soon as I’d said, “This is a thing I’m going to do.”

Up to that point, I’d seen sports as things you had to have pre-provided knowledge and experience with in order to understand and participate. I’d missed the athletic boat early on, and figured that was my chance. I’d have to be happy with other things I had learned.

While I shy away from an absolute such as, “It’s never to late to become X,” one of the best lessons I’ve learned from running is the importance the decision to do or be a thing in helping you to become that thing. I wasn’t a runner because I’d decided I wasn’t or couldn’t be.

Now, when I let life dictate the terms of how I spend my time and find myself at the far end of a run-less stretch of weeks, I don’t start to doubt my identity as a runner. I’ve been a runner since an exhausting midwestern June 2-miler, and most of the time, that’s enough to get me out the door.

This post is part of a daily conversation between Ben Wilkoff and me. Each day Ben and I post a question to each other and then respond to one another. You can follow the questions and respond via Twitter at #LifeWideLearning16.