Wrangler Dani

I feel like I’m fighting defeat. It’s oozing around my ankles, sickening me with a nasty black stench. It makes me want to run to high ground and give up on whatever I was working on in the valley, to forget the days of sunshine and birdsong and leave it all behind. It makes me stop working towards all the good and beautiful things and get stomach ulcers from the ugly parts, making the sticky puddle of black goo into an impassable lake in my imagination.

I pour my heart and soul into everything… I’ve never been good at going halfway. That’s what makes these feelings of defeat so much stronger. For when I’ve striven and hoped and loved my way through the valley, to find this gross blackness trickling around me, to be still fighting defeat, is so disheartening. I want to shake my feet free and run from it, to begin something totally new in order to be unable to say that I’ve worked so hard for so long and this is all I have to show, but so I can hide behind new choices, new opportunities, new faces.

But I know that I can’t. I know that defeat will follow, that the only way through it is to keep walking through it. (Novel idea, I know.) Sometimes it’s hard to write my heart out for all to see and wonder if anyone really wants to read it. It’s hard to give my all and battle for the best experience for my students, only to be criticized and informed that I’m not doing good enough, that despite all of my striving, I’ve let them down.

There are so many things I wish for our lives, so many dreams, in happy days my heart expands with hope and ideas. But some days, like today, I am just putting one foot before the other. I’ve done some crying and some praying and some worrying. Now I’m just walking, knowing that sooner or later my feet will free themselves of defeat, the sucking, sloppy noise and stench will recede, and I’ll be on dry ground again.