Slowly, it accumulates. Even though I slept for ten hours on Friday night, I feel as if I have been running and running. Ironically, the feeling makes me want to go running, because that has been my primary method of tackling all mental blocks: frustration, depression, loneliness, apathy. I run, and run, and run. It’s a ncie feeling, to jog down old Arkansas high ways, next to cotton fields and railroad tracks, but it’s starting to wear me out.

I love my kids. It is undeniable. I love them so much that sometimes I hate everything I’m doing, everything, because it’s not good enough. Because they deserve so much better than this. Because I haven’t been able to give them or teach them or convince them of everything I want to, everything they deserve. My knowledge is so limited. I am trying to learn as much as I can at the same time as them, learning types of sentences and how to identify them and how to figure them out. But I keep getting distracted– by relationships from home that have so much hope but repeatedly tear me down, by relationships here that I feel I try and try to build but still have a hard time finding solace in, by the huge, aching hole where I want so badly for my mother to be back inside of.

I am struggling to balance again, and it is particularly hard today. There is a soccer game at five an hour away that I want to go to, but it means I have to stop having a pity party and prepare for my students tomorrow. Ms. L, get your act together.

I am going to put all my emotional mess aside, and work. It’s for the kids. It’s for my own sanity. It’s because that’s what I am supposed to, and need to, and am doing right now, in my life, in Dumas AR. Thank you for your time, internets, consider the pity party over.