u/GGAllinPartridge

I'm in my fourth year of high school teaching. The first few years are always crunch time, but I'm gradually getting some balance back, so now I can finally get back to my hobbies!

Go for a run? No thanks.
Got to the gym? Hmm.
Play guitar? Sing? Nah I sound terrible.
Get back to drawing? Wow that looks bad.
Play video games? I guess that'll pass the time.
Pick up something new? Like what?

I know, I know, "A ladder climbed once can be climbed twice." I probably just need time and a bit of effort to feel good again. It's just hard to go back to the things you once loved and struggle to find what you loved about them. It's hard to be bad at something you used to be good at, or start from scratch with something new when you're not even sure what you enjoy any more.

How do you fill your cup when you get the chance to be something other than a teacher?

I recently read Faces in the Water, by Janet Frame, and every other page had some beautiful heartbreaking passage I wanted to underline and come back to later. It was a library book, so I didn't, but I'm considering getting my own copy to re-read and annotate. It's a fictionalised account of Frame's real-life experiences in Seacliff Lunatic Asylum during the 1940s. The whole book is swept along in a feeling of helplessness and loss in captivating language. Here are a couple that really stuck with me:

"I did not know my own identity. I was burgled of body and hung in the sky like a woman of straw."

"There is no past or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water."

"And the days passed, packing and piling themselves together like sheets of absorbent material, deadening the sound of our lives, even to ourselves, so that perhaps if a tomorrow ever came it would not hear us; its new days would bury us, in its own name; we would be like people entombed when the rescuers, walking about in the dark waving lanterns and calling to us, eventually give up because no one answers them; sometimes they dig and find the victims dead."

What book had you scribbling in the margins and underlining passages and copying out quotes to come back to later?