M. Suzanne Terry

I have mused often about what I want to be when I grow up. The answers I come up with are usually pretty vague – “a writer” or “someone who feeds people” or “professional student.” On the one hand, I know what I love. On the other hand, I don’t always know how to turn desired work into desired pay. There are a lot of jobs that involve a great deal of my desired activities, but I view most of them with a general attitude of “meh.”

The Friday before Spring Break, however, I got a taste of what it would be like for my loves to come together.

Part of the resident assistant job in Housing is to put on programs to foster hall community. One of the RAs wanted to have a cooking program, and she invited me to be a part of it. We decided that I would teach people to make a basic risotto. I took them through the process, showing them what it was supposed to look like at every step and giving them options they could add along the way. Then I gave them a one-page handout with the recipe and a summary of what they had learned at the end. It was a great afternoon.

The experience of actually enjoying these hours at work helped clarify some things for me.

1. I like teaching. I often get bogged down in the issues that plague our educational system, such as the red tape and the funding issues and the general lack of public understanding about what education is, but I like teaching. I like guiding people into learning something that they are interested in learning.

2. I like public speaking. I like finding ways to connect to an audience. Positive audience response is gratifying, and negative audience response is informative. When the audience doesn’t see the value in what they’re learning, though, it’s a rough day for both of us.

3. I like helping people discover what they have to say.  Whether it’s in writing or in speaking, I love that moment when people hear how their voice sounds for the first time – not the snarky defense mechanism that often makes up a big part of their social selves and thus their first attempts at expressing a viewpoint – but their real voice. I like teaching them how to turn that voice into a force to be reckoned with.

4. I like writing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t like writing. Usually when that happens, though, it’s because I’m trying to make what works for other people (Write every day! Have ten minutes – do some writing! Always, always be thinking about it!) work for me. I am an efficient writer, but I am not a multitasker. If I can do one thing at a time, I can get a lot done, but trying to juggle multiple things tends to derail all of them. My most productive writing structure requires me to set aside specific writing time. Handouts, blog posts, short essays – give me an hour or two, and I can sit down and churn one of those bad boys out, all the way from conception to a second or third draft (which is what you get from most of my blog posts). I can do that almost daily, but I need to find a space for it on the calendar. Longer works, like novels or longer essays/essay collections, don’t just take longer to write but also require longer stretches of time for me to make progress. There’s no sitting down to write for an hour on Fishbowl. All that’s going to do is give me just enough time to get a good writing pace going, and then I have to interrupt it to do the next thing in my schedule. Very frustrating. Small pockets of time are better used brainstorming writing ideas or art journaling. I need writing blocks, not writing moments. And as I am single with zero children, I have the ability to schedule them with relative ease.

None of this is brand-new information, but it helps with my weekly goal-setting. It reminds me what the good life looks like for me and how easy it would probably be for me to make it a habit.