nearsighted

I am nearsighted, which means I can't see things that are far away very well. I mean, I can't see anything far away. Without corrective lenses, the 20-pt font on the cover of a book on my desk, maybe sixteen inches from my face, is blurry. The large E on the eye charts--I know it's an E, because it always is--usually looks as if it's stapled to the bottom of a pool floor.

It is a good thing that I don't live in the Middle Ages, because a horse would have run me over long ago.

I've had glasses since second grade, so I usually don't spend a lot of time thinking about how terrible my vision is. But this morning, I had to sort a stack of grading. The last week of classes begins on Monday, and this is the last push of the semester. Things start to taper off right before they get really busy for a last time, and I usually have a few days in which I grow nostalgic for my soon-to-be-former classes. I forget about the dark weeks of January and February and all the grading clusterfucks; I look at my students and am genuinely proud of the work they're have done in the last fifteen weeks, the kinds of students they have become. And the time grows shorter, and bittersweet.

Usually. Mostly.

Instead, this morning, I sorted through a pile of three assignments from a class and discovered that most of my students hadn't followed directions. Some hadn't turned in the assignment; most had done it hastily and not bothered to staple their documents. I sort of wanted to scream, except it shouldn't have surprised me.

This is ... a tough class. They have been since the first day, and it's never really relented. Even on our good days, our victories are small. And so when my vision started to blur, I reached for the Excedrin and thought, Why on earth is this even coming as a surprise to you?

Here's the thing: I'm not good at taking the long view. I'm not good at rolling with the punches, or taking a chill pill and figuring that things will work themselves out, or feeling confident that things will sort of find their own way. I'm also not very good at determining all by myself if I am doing good work. I AM TERRIBLE AT THIS SHIT. I rely on external validation, and I am a control freak of the most violent variety. When things are stressful, I clean my house. The rugs, as it turns out, cannot be vacuumed any more. They are clean. Really, really clean.

And when a class flops the way this particular class has flopped--and I mean flopped, like climbing out of a pool with a bright pink belly and sort of wanting to curl up in a beach towel and just puke a little bit flopped, and sometimes, after standing in front of this group for two hours twice a week, that's exactly what I feel like doing--it's fairly easy to think that I am a failure. At, you know, life.

It has occurred to me on more than occasion that this is a young person's problem, an academic's problem, a fortunate person's problem. That one day I'll have real problems and suddenly the universe will smack me in the face and shout, LOOK! NOW YOU HAVE REAL WORRIES. AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU SPENT SO MUCH OF YOUR TWENTIES WORRIED ABOUT STUPID SHIT? And I try to remember this, and I have my coping strategies (in case you're wondering, this is one of them, as is taking a walk to the library to look at magazines, or purchasing and eating expensive cheese), but to a big extent, this is kind of who I am. It's the way I am wired.

There is a pile of papers on my floor. I need to put a grade on them and move on. Put a grade on the top, mark the grade in my book, calculate the final grade, put them in the system. This semester will end, and then there will be another, and another. The fact that this semester was difficult does not mean that I need to find another career; it just means that I've encountered a particularly challenging group. I will learn from the experience, but right now, the most important thing is that I keep moving.

And I need to remember that I'm not good at seeing the things that are far away. I never have been. But somewhere at the end of that blurry tunnel is a large letter E. If I squint, I can see it. And so I trust that the rest of the image will come into focus eventually. And so I keep swimming.