The real thing to do is simply to write. Write each day. Even if the words are incoherent and strung together illogically. Write even though you have nothing to say, write even when you draw a blank. Put the words down, see how they weave themselves, and wonder at the product. I think many people have the same thoughts, but those who are most successful have a natural inclination for where certain words should be placed. Place them here, replace one word with another, and an entire phrase can take on a different meaning. One word can have a clear, specific connotation that can be changed by the placement of a specific word in front or behind. Write simply because you can and it is evidence that you are here in this day, thinking and breathing, perhaps happy or sad, but here nonetheless.
I often wonder what I would be without the words written here. Would I be the same person, with the same complexity, views, and depth? I think about my students and who they are without an advanced skill for any language. They cannot write their own feelings much better than they can spell their own names in cursive. What do they do with the toil of thoughts spinning in their minds? How do they express their desire to escape the reservation, to run with all their might from a life into which they were born? Without the correct words to say, how can one know to any extent one's deepest desires? Or is my language a crutch? Because I know the words perhaps I inhibit my own emotion, cutting the depth of it with the shallow words we have used to label emotion?
I have had such a difficult time writing about my experience and I keep writing that again and again as though it will change the fact that I have ignored this journal for the last few months. But the honest truth is that I do not know what to say. To some extent, I think a part of you has to shut down to do the job I am doing. How could I over analyze what I see out there without going slightly insane? If I didn't remove myself from it, if I faced it with full force like I did my college experience, could I bare to wake each morning? And so I do not write and I do not play the piano and I stare night after night at a movie and wake the next morning praying that I am doing some good in the middle of nowhere in a place I do not know, understand, and cannot pinpoint on any map that currently exists. It is a vacuum of thought because it can be nothing else. If I were to truly face the circumstance, I would be overwhelmed with something--loneliness perhaps--and utterly unable to tolerate my new reality.
Life is too quick. It is already November AFTER I graduated and I am in a whirlwind of "saving the world" through teaching. I am doing something through teaching. I am experiencing a part of the world I did not know existed nor could I imagine existing.
It is difficult to put into words the isolation of the place I live. Imagine driving for one hundred miles (two hours) from the biggest city you know and ten minutes outside of it, the landscape turning dry and brown, the dust collecting under your wipers as you drive, and the only thing in sight being a field of dry, brown tumbleweed. Imagine driving mile after mile without seeing a person, without passing a car, turning on streets without names that do not appear on maps and are often unpaved and quickly destroy any motor vehicle. Imagine being two hours from a grocery store, from a hospital, from "civilization." In so many ways, it offers respite from city bothers, but also teaches a lesson in the necessity of others. Even in a city, you are not entirely alone. In a city you can sit in a coffee shop of bustling people and feel their humanness. Out there you are crushed by the big blue sky, alone with the exception of one sane roommate who is equally stifled by the openness and insurmountable problems faced by the students in that area.
It is one thing to put it into words, to paint the brown landscape, and another thing to live. It is trying and tiring and terrifying and it is something I never imagined myself doing. There are so many words to describe it and none at all because no one who hasn't lived that far from other people can imagine it. A school that sits on a hill, not surrounded by a town, but isolated from everything and everyone. And I cannot understand how any school district or person in the world could be happy in that environment.
People need people to find contentment and there are none in Pueblo Pintado.
It is another country, one that is indescribable because it has no name and no one is from the place. The people are Americans but not treated as such. There is no town, no typical American activities. There is only a school and about a hundred lost children. And a school district and state that neglects the fact it exists. Even Teach for America, to an extent, has forgotten those of us placed there. We are and we are not. We exist and we do not. We are, essentially, forgotten.
