Since 2002, A Math Teacher was who I was, and any other applicable definition was secondary, if not imaginary. Since graduating college, the whole of my energies was focused on shaping minds, giving students tools for life, changing lives hopefully for the better. But in early December, my career was temporarily excised from my life, so that I could focus on “me” and get my Self in shape, so I could return better, stronger, faster… but I discovered that I had worked hard to ignore that Self. Who I was in Real Life had atrophied and I had to rebuild it. I had the technology. And I found the willpower. Unfortunately, I could not procure bionic parts. But I’m strengthening what I can, and I am reminding myself of all those subdefinitions:

I am:

• a full-fledged adult
• a daughter, sister, aunt, and not-too-in-law
• a wife who is learning to be a partner
• a cat-mommy of two Siamese, one of whom is “on the spectrum” (kitty version)
• a homeowner and neighbor
• a person who has to solve the puzzle
• a perfectionist who uses micro-planning and procrastination to disguise insecurity over not being perfect
• a person with very defined morals and personal rules
• a person who rarely judges others and finds them lacking
• a naive fool who, regardless of experience, is constantly surprised by others’ rule-breaking
• an American that, nevertheless, isn’t from around here (no matter where ”here” is), and never was
• a regular person (my dream since childhood) who has had the luxury of extraordinary experiences
• a psychiatric patient who took her life back and will accept the glitches that come my way as a result
• a person who lives with fibromyalgia and its ups, its downs, and its limitations
• a woman resculpting her curves to find her body once again (there was a reason I didn’t diet before my wedding: I wanted to look the way I looked 4 years later and 4 years earlier, which I did and I will again)
• a musician rediscovering her instruments and her love for music in all its forms (well, most of them)
• a collector of stories and a story-teller
• a student who will never learn enough
• a math/science geek
• a traveller
• a people-watcher
• a total klutz
• a silly, giggly, goof-ball
• a princess
• an actor in life’s play
• an altruist
• a person who lives for the sake of others when she cannot live for herself
• a person who does for others before she does for herself
• an advocate for people with disabilities
• a person that almost has never felt anger
• an educator (honestly, I randomly start teaching people about thread count in Bed, Bath, and Beyond when at loose ends like this)

I’m sure there are other things people can add to this. But these are the few things I have thought of, mostly in the order they occurred to me, as I sat here over the course of an hour. I miss teaching, and I will either return to the classroom part-time or, more likely, tutor as close to full-time as I reasonably can. But it feels good to be rediscovering who I am and who I can be when I’m not crippled by pain caused by constant overexertion.

Eleven years ago, in January of 1999, I was in a car accident. It happened just before spring semester of my freshman year of college, and I wound up having to take the semester off. However, I was alive and relatively well despite the mangled wreckage of the little red Mazda coupe I walked away from, and I was fervently grateful (compared to two years earlier, when I was deeply depressed and actually cursed having lived to see my 17th birthday).

This was the beginning of a great deal of introspection. Although I didn’t rediscover religion and (my version of) God until taking Chaos Theory two years later, I did begin to truly etch into being my understanding of my reason for being. I was no longer just living because my death would hurt others, but deciding what my life is. Then again, this is what all college students do after their first semester, when a teenager realizes she is now an adult and is living and learning toward the molding of her own future. In any event, that semester off is when I etched into the stoniest part of my mind my reason for living:

I am here to enrich the lives of others.

In other words, I’m not out to change the world, but if I can make the lives of those whose paths I cross a little bit sunnier, or at least suck a little less… well, that is what I’m here for.

So I became less interested in the diagnosis as in the prognosis. I became less overwhelmed by trying to solve my own problems as I became obsessed with trying to find solutions so other people I meet with similar problems might not have to flounder, or at least not feel alone. I became the person you know now. I became a math teacher for special needs students. I became a disability rights advocate. I became a better daughter and sister and friend. 

Fast-forward to a year ago. I was in severe pain constantly. I was struggling with attendance and performance at my cubicle-based curriculum job but could no longer be a classroom teacher. Just knowing me and my situation made friends and family sad. But worse was my home life: because of me, both my husband and my cat were losing hair and I had completely derailed the future we had set out for ourselves. By May, I had worked in physical therapy for over 6 months with little-to-no progress and all my prescriptions were refilled simultaneously. I recognized I was depressed but I was out of new medications to try. I had determined that everyone’s  life would be better if I was just removed from the equation, and that could only be done by a horrible accident. I stopped wearing my seatbelt, started driving less safely, and had started to research dosages each of my medications that would be safe if taken alone, but fatal in combination.

So I checked myself into Sheppard-Pratt, got 10 sessions of uni-lateral ECT (electro-convulsive therapy of a single hemisphere), and now find myself in the same place with a completely different mindset.

I have come to realize that it wasn’t my physical situation that made me a drain on people’s lives a year ago, it was my absolute, soul-deep despair.

Right now, I see options. I see being on disability an opportunity to be a better me, to better fulfill my other roles in life, as well as a chance to feel better. I have accepted the fact that I can’t be everything I want to be and that trying to just hurts the students I want to help and keeps me from being a good wife or being there for friends and family.

So once again, I look at why I was put on this Earth and remind myself that I am here to make others’ lives sunnier, happier, easier, or at least less sucky. I am here to be a good wife, cat-mommy, sister, daughter, aunt, friend, and more… and if I have to put the role of educator on the back-burner and put off the role of mother, well, I should focus on what I can do with the energy I have and be happy that I can afford to be so many things to so many wonderful people, and I will cherish and enjoy the time I can spend with them.

I’m a 29-year-old woman. I was born in Westchester County, NY (an hour north of NYC, on the border of Greenwich, CT), went to college in central NY state and settled in Rochester, NY. I have been married for nearly 6 years to a wonderful, supportive man, whom I met at college 10 years ago. We are the slaves of two 7-year-old siamese cats, Stewie and Leela.

I love to read (mostly romance novels, but also mysteries, classics, and anything else I get my hands on), I love to learn, I adore languages,and I can be a little silly.

I have wanted to be a math teacher since I was 2. And, as the daughter of two neuropsychologists and the sister of a third, I am also special-education-certified with coursework in neuropsychology. I began teaching at the age of 24, after getting a double M.S. in mathematics education and teaching students with disabilities from middle childhood through adolescence (4 NYS certifications). Until now, I’ve worked exclusively at semi-private schools for students with learning-disabilities-plus. Now, I work at a public school, teaching applied algebra to students who have barely passed Algebra 1 and Geometry, which feels very similar to my previous work except that my class size sextupled.

Unfortunately, I also have fibromyalgia, which has interfered with my home and work life significantly over the past 4 years. This is a Add to that a clinical diagnosis of “Major Depressive Disorder” with a side of mild anxiety, which I have had as long as I can remember. In the spring, I was hospitalized and (since no cocktail of meds we’ve tried for the past 13 years had been effective for me) received ECT treatments. As a result, I have barely any memory of Spring 2008-Spring 2009. This affects my daily life as much as the fibromyalgia pain. It was like I woke up and someone else had been using my body… poorly. Although my fibromyalgia was in remission (what stress can there be, when you have no daily memory for a month?), I was over 50 lbs heavier than I remembered being.

So, I felt better and decided to return to the classroom, hopefully in a public school, teaching what I love. That happened, but at first my body ached from the increased muscle use, and then with increased stress, my fibromyalgia began to flare.