Strip the carrying away and what is left.
That is the question I have been sitting with since the last box went into the car and the keys went back and the lanyard with the photo that made me look like I had not slept, which was accurate, went into the donation bin because who would want it and what would they do with a laminated image of a woman in a role that no longer exists.
I carried so many things.
I carried courses and grade books and the particular weight of a student who is struggling and does not want you to know. I carried other people’s deadlines and my own, always my own, always the next one, always the preparation for the class that was three days away or three hours away or thirty minutes away and there was always something to be done to be ready, there was always a way to be more ready than you currently were.
I carried the performance of it. That is what no one talks about. The carrying of appearing to carry it well. The years of walking into rooms and setting your face into something competent and calm because the students needed that, because the department needed that, because you had decided long ago that your uncertainty was not the institution’s problem and so you held it yourself, quietly, in the place between your shoulder blades where the tension lived.
And now I am standing in my own kitchen on a Tuesday with nowhere to be and nothing due and nothing waiting for my name on it and the question is not whether I can rest.
The question is whether I know who I am when I am not the one doing the carrying.
I am finding out.
Some mornings I walk to the water and I carry nothing except my own body and the habit of noticing, which was always mine before it was the institution’s, the noticing was always mine, and I think: there you are. There is the part of you that was there before the carrying began. The part that watched the light move across the floor as a child and thought, without any words for it yet, that this was enough. That this was the whole thing.
I am learning to live in the empty hands.
I am learning that empty is not the same as lacking.
