Updates about life

Oh yeah..  new job..  since May.

Working on writing lesson plans for writing classes.  (Funny since I think I completely suck at writing, but here I am learning as I go.)  I really have learned a lot.  I'm currently editing first and second grade lesson plans, but I'm learning about narrative, persuasive, and informative writing.  I'm even learning how to structure paragraphs.  It's really amazing how all of this is new to me, and yet elementary schoolers are learning it.  I've consistently failed at nearly all of my English classes since I entered high school.  I realized that it's because I've never really learned how to write.  I remember my 8th grade English class.  I don't think I wrote a single essay in that class.  I'm pretty sure I started writing essays in 9th grade.  All of my knowledge on how to write was just from context, and now I'm actually learning the foundations of writing.  It's pretty neat.  All my years as a teacher has given me the skill to verbalize my thought process, and now I'm learning the correct structure of how to put that down on a page.  Yay.

I'm also working on a middle school math curriculum.  Yay!!  It's not official but I'm more or less in charge of it.  Pretty much everyone in the office has accepted it.  In fact in the first two weeks of launching the project we made so much progress on it that they had to pause it.  Mostly because there's a bigger priority (writing lessons).  But once all of the edits for the writing lessons are in, the math curriculum project is back on.

New motivational tool!!  It's called Habitica.  It's pretty much a to-do list, but slightly different.  You have an avatar you control (with pets!) and every time you complete something you gain experience and coins.  You can level up, join a party, go on quests, defeat monsters, etc.  It's a real-life rpg.  So awesome.  There's even a daily section, where you put things you want to finish daily.  Some of the things I include are flossing, praying, reading the Bible, exercising.  You can even change the difficulties so that some give you more experience and others give you less.  If you miss the daily for the day you take damage, and if you die...  well your character dies.  It's really motivating for me personally because I've always been into rpg's and now I'm an rpg character myself.  I'm on level 4.  Yay~

Dear Sister

Dear youngest sister,

It's been nearly a week since I talked to you last.  You're off on a mission trip, and I'm hoping you're having a really great time.  I've been super proud of everything you're doing and where your heart is right now.  You've grown so much in just a year, and I'm amazed every time I see you.  Last we talked, we talked about how to love people.  I admitted to you that I'm scared of what responsibilities loving people accompanies.  You said that you prayed for the heart to pray for loving people at first.  I couldn't even muster up that courage.  But I'm not sure if it's because you prayed for me, but I've been able to pray for the courage and energy that it takes to love people.  I've realized that I've been lacking the courage and the energy it requires to love people.  The courage to face complete rejection and isolation from those people I love, and the energy and perseverance it takes to continue loving them and giving my all.  So pray for me for this.  Maybe I can grow as much as you have in the next year.

Love,

Jeen

It Comes and Goes

How can I explain depression?  I feel like no one really understands unless they've had depression themselves.

Let me try:

There's a sad, depressed Jeen, and then there's me.  Normal, usually happy Jeen.  Sad Jeen is always lonely.  She needs company, and because happy Jeen is right there, she takes up happy Jeen's attention, so that happy Jeen doesn't have time to be happy.  Happy Jeen watches a lot of shows and stuff when I'm alone because it keeps sad Jeen distracted making me overall less sad.  But when the show ends, sad Jeen is back in full swing.  When I'm about to sleep, sad Jeen is urging me go to the kitchen and take a knife and stab myself.  If happy Jeen were completely unconscious, I might have done just that.  But happy Jeen is aware of what is going on, and uses up all her energy fighting sad Jeen just to keep me in bed and not bleeding all over the floor.  This is a constant daily struggle for me.  So much so that I don't have enough energy to do anything else.  I'm spending all my energy keeping sad Jeen still, spending all my attention entertaining sad Jeen.  So much energy and attention that I don't have time to eat, time to exercise, time to work on any of my hobbies.

Exercising helps release dopamine into your system so that you feel better.  But have you every tried exercising when you just want to pass out because of how tired you are?  It's impossible.  Parents with newborns or young toddlers may understand.  You're spending all of your free time and energy focused on your kids you forget about proper diets and exercise.  Keeping a blog or any other thing to keep you happy?  Forget all of that.  It's not that I don't want to.  I just don't have the resources to do so.

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This was written around two months ago.

It's been about two weeks since sad Jeen went on a vacation.  She'll be back someday, probably, since she always comes back.  But in the meantime I'm exercising, enjoying myself, staying relaxed and happy.  I've been able to read the Bible more, pray more, actually cook, etc.  Yay...  Not really looking forward to sad Jeen coming back, but it's not like I can do anything about it.  I've actually been considering antidepressants for when she does come back.  I'm worried though that I'll get hooked on it or that it will change me in a way I don't like.  Hmmm...  thoughts to think about.

Story Night

So there's a story night things with friends coming up.  Maybe I'll go, and if I do this will be the story that I tell:

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There's this little girl I know.  She's about 9 or 10.  She comes from a perfect little Christian family...  or so people think.  She knows that she's a little different from everybody else.  She doesn't know how, but she knows that people treat her differently.  Her teachers neglect her, her friends, if you can call them that, tease her, her dad abuses her, and her mom ignores her.  Even her church friends bully and make fun of her.  She thought church was supposed to be better.  She was even raped there once.  Of course she never told anybody.  But everything else she told her dad, and he said, 'That's just what friends do to each other.  Just go along with it and laugh.'  But she never did laugh.  It never felt right to laugh.  She didn't know what to do or how to get help.  Once she tried to ask her school teacher for help.  As a class assignment, she wrote about what happened over the weekend at her house.  She wrote about how her dad beat her mom and landed in jail overnight.  But without even reading it, her teacher said that if she didn't want to share this to the class, she shouldn't write about it.  So she erased everything and made up a silly story about being happy at a park.  One day she just couldn't take anymore of this pain and hurt so she got a pencil and paper and started a letter to her friends.

'Dear Cathy and Rita,
I'm going to go away forever.  Please don't come looking for me.  I leave you with my favorite teddy bear and erasers.'

She took the paper, folded it, and put it in an envelope.  She didn't know her friends' addresses, so she just wrote their names on the envelope and left it on her desk, where anyone could easily see it.  Then she went to the kitchen and looked at the knives.

She didn't actually leave though.  She felt like she didn't have enough courage.

She's much older now, and living happily.  All the pain and suffering is gone, and she's living a wonderfully new life now.  Just kidding.  There's no such thing as happy ever after.  That's just the face she puts on for others to see.

She's much older now, but she still bears all the scars of her childhood.  They say that time heals all wounds.  She's not so sure about that.  Wounds leave scars, and she has a lot of those.  Both emotional and physical. There are days when she can't help but relive those nightmares over and over.  Some days are good.  Some days are bad.  But time might heal all wounds, you never know.  So she waits.

Math Curriculum Pt. 3

So I sent the final drafts in.  The point of having the rough drafts published to this blog is so that just in case I don't get hired by Axiom Learning, my work and ideas are copyrighted so that Axiom can't profit off of my ideas without hiring me.