Fall Forward

I quit teaching four years ago, but the green teacher’s edition of our county’s adopted textbook remains on my shelf at home. You know, the one with the answer key to all the quizzes in the back and the spots for lesson plans. Of all the books I’ve collected, it’s probably my favorite.

See, I had painfully labeled out all of the nuances of language in Romeo and Juliet and I couldn’t bear to part with it. I was an English Literature major in college, enchanted with the romance of the written word. At times I thought I wanted to write but was perpetually thwarted by my own imposter syndrome, I stayed mostly an admirer from the front row of British Lit of the 1800s. Now, the post-it notes in my old teacher edition remain as a tribute to the dissertation I never wrote.

And you know what they say about “those that can’t do” right? They teach. So I did. I taught the language I loved so much. But the tricky part is when you’re stuck like a cog in the machine you’re forced to teach the same text over and over again ad nauseum.

I taught 9th grade English in a variety of classrooms for nearly 8 years. I often taught 7 classes a day, mostly the same prep. That means that not only have I just read, but I also taught the same passage from many of the 9th grade classics over 56 times. I can still recite portions of To Kill a Mockingbird by heart. But the pivotal moment for any 9th grader in the Great State of Florida? Romeo and Juliet.

In college, I had taken a few Shakespeare courses. I scrutinized the different plays and compared them. I looked for similar characters and plots across his works. I even low-key created an entire personality around being “mostly a comedy girl actually” because I found the weddings fun and the banter quick. The “Shakespearean dramas or bust” kids were all melodramatic and consumed with something so serious all the time. Something something, “life’s central themes” or something.

So you can imagine my dismay when I had to read the literal lamest play of his year after year. Two dumb teenagers falling in love and ruining everything. Ever the optimist, I did my best to find some interest in it. There was one year, driven by an insatiable desire to find meaning while stuck in a hell hole of a career, I spent a week analyzing one of the most irrelevant monologues of Shakespearean history. Maybe I could crack the code! (Spoiler: I couldn’t. Queen Mab is just about dreaming and it’s kinda bland.)

There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet where the Nurse, Juliet’s crude caretaker, laughs about Juliet “Falling Forward” and Juliet, then a child, saying “Aye”. It’s a joke about Juliet not understanding sex yet and getting herself in a “kids say the darndest things moment”. Like any self-respecting “comedy girl” I shared this with my students every time we read as an attempt to both understand the text and garner any interest in literature that was in an entirely different language.

Falling forward. While I’m not the first to find this joke not just hilarious but also a powerful life parable, I am the one who’s writing this today. (Hey there, imposter syndrome, settle down now)

Falling forward resonates with me.

While I couldn’t see it from the cement walls of my classroom, I’ve been falling forward since I was born. Sometimes it feels like free-fallin’, other times coasting in a luxury jet. Sometimes I soar, sometimes I trip. Sometimes I show up as myself, come out of the closet at 32, and run a business. Other days I cry in bed for hours and wish someone would just tell me what’s the fucking point of doing literally anything besides eating Taco Bell and watching reruns of Survivor.

I’m endlessly human. And humans are endlessly falling forward. We’re all on one giant perpetual wild ride with no signs of getting off, headed in a direction that not one person knows. (Show me one person who knows everything about the world in front of them and I’ll show you a liar.)

“Safety” is not a reachable destination. There’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to do, there’s just falling from moment to moment and hoping it ends up looking more like you’re skipping and less like you’re tumbling.

I don’t have much more to share than that. I don’t have any more Truths with a capital T that I know. But from one free-falling psychopath who keeps ancient textbooks of Shakespeare classics for sentimental value to another similarly chaotic piece of this place, best of luck on your journey. You’re loved and probably doing something really great for the world…maybe. Or maybe you’re not. “Hey” either way.