More Than My Condition

I wrote this piece on Thursday, but I couldn't post it because there wasn't Internet. Well played, Hyatt.

Yesterday I came back to Louisville with my fiancé for the Kentucky Music Educators Association (KMEA) Conference. This is a conference I know very well; I attended workshop sessions for five years in a row during my undergrad and presented research posters at the university research sessions during my last two years of school.

This year, I am not a music education student anymore, so I can’t attend the conference as a student; nor am I an educator, so I cannot attend as a professional. A lot of my peers are attending this year as professionals and there are a few of my undergrad friends who are still in school, so they’re attending as students. I am here, but I can’t attend. Weirdest feeling ever.

Last night I was looking at the KMEA schedule of events and there are so many workshops that look fascinating or are led by an educator I know. It’s kind of heartbreaking to see what I am missing in my potential career of choice; the one that I’d been planning on going into for five years before fibromyalgia reared its ugly head.

I went to the University of Louisville alumni breakfast this morning. I got to see a bunch of my former professors and friends! It was so good to see them again, but the hardest thing was that all of them were asking, “What are you doing?” When I told them that I was applying for jobs, starting an Etsy shop, blogging, and writing a book, their faces just showed confusion: “So you’re not going to be teaching?” I hate that! I hate that fibro has taken away that identity that I so carefully, painstakingly worked on for five years!

After my fiancé left to go to his first workshop, I came back to our hotel room. The conference center has two hotels adjoining it, so we can just use skywalks to go back and forth. I pouted for a while. I texted a few of my friends in school who aren’t music education majors, but they can’t hang out today, it being a Thursday. My family is working today, and the rest of my friends are here at this conference in the workshops. So, I was pretty bummed out.

But then I thought: They’re right, what I’m doing isn’t teaching, something I had so much potential to be great at doing. But I have the freedom to do something so different than running a band rehearsal or singing with kids. I have this opportunity as a young woman who has had her career at her fingertips, only to have it slip away one semester before graduation, to write a book about how to find value in other things and still make your dreams come true.

If I look at the main reason I want to be a teacher (other than the fact that I had a full scholarship!) it’s that I want to help people. I want to help people see what they can do even when they don’t believe they can. I want to help young, bright, uptight women like me get what they want out of life even if it’s not in the way they ever could have expected it to be. I want to help people understand that success comes in such a large variety of packages that they don’t have to feel bad about themselves or their circumstance when their college mentors look confused and say, “But why aren’t you doing what I know you’re good at and what I value?”

I am more than my condition. And I want to show other women who are struggling with this same thing that they are more than their conditions, too. We are more than our conditions.

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” --Gandhi