Because nothing
can stop me, except maybe my soul-crushing mental illness, I have started a new
blog! Yay!!!
For those of you
who don’t know me, I will spare you my whole life story. That is only appropriate when writing a
recipe. Amirite?
My name is
Heddie, and I crochet and draw and garden and bake and play the banjo and I’m
obsessed with my cat and bats and opossums and blah blah blah. You’ll hear about all of those things in due
time. But first, I’m going to share a
little bit about why I want to start a blog in the first place.
Thousands of
years ago… Or back in like 2013, I was living in rural Appalachia and working
as a math and science tutor at the local college, where I was also a student. Most of my students were in developmental
math and introductory biology and were pursuing many different majors. I basically was helping adults learn things
they should have learned in middle school or high school at the latest, but I
don’t want to get into a whole thing about the dreadful state of public
education in this country. Suffice to
say it was a frustrating yet mildly rewarding job.
One student in
particular had a profound effect on me.
We’ll call her Lisa. Lisa was
bright, effervescent, outgoing, and funny.
She was a theater major and had big dreams to become an actress in New
York City. However, somehow she got put
into the more difficult biology class that was designed for science majors
instead of the easier one that was for everyone else. She was not a science-minded person, and needless
to say, she struggled. I have never seen
anyone work so hard at understanding something and still not be able to get
it. It just didn’t click for her. And I tried so hard to help her. Eventually her grades started slipping in her
other classes in which she should have been excelling. The breaking point came when she failed the
biology midterm exam.
I walked into
the tutoring room for our session and instead of her usual bubbly self, she looked
like she hadn’t slept in days and as soon as she saw me she burst into
tears. She was utterly defeated. She had failed the biology midterm and the
professor had told her there was no way she could salvage her grade before
finals, and it was too late to drop the class without it hurting her GPA. She was almost failing her other classes and
felt lost and stuck and hopeless. She
felt like a complete failure and disappointment and embarrassment to her
family. I tried to console her but to no
avail, so I just let her cry for a little while. Then something struck me, and I got mad and
told her something I wished someone had told me. Ever.
Even once.
What
I told her was this: You are not your GPA.
You are more valuable than your grades.
She
stopped sobbing and just stared at me.
No one had ever told her that either.
I went on to tell her that even if she flunked out of college and never
looked back that she still was a valuable person who could contribute something
great to the world. I was telling myself
this as much as I was telling Lisa.
I
told her to go home and burn all of her biology homework and notes, but not her
textbook because she could still sell it back.
I told her to never go back to that class or think about it again. She never came back to the tutoring center.
A
few months later I received an email from Lisa.
She had taken my advice! She
literally had a bonfire of her biology papers!!! She passed the rest of her classes, came back
in the summer and took the easy biology class, passed with flying colors, and
got her degree! She was triumphantly pursuing
her dreams, and she told me I had changed her life.
I
just wanted her to stop crying and torturing herself.
I was happy when
she stopped crying. I was happy that she
dropped the class and was succeeding at what she wanted to do. I was also happy that there had been a
bonfire involved. But I mostly felt
grateful.
I had spent most
of my life before this point being kind of a misanthrope. I totally cared more for plants and animals
than I did for most people. I’ve been
through and overcome a lot of shit and it made me stronger and more badass but
also more closed off. Seriously, my best
friend in high school told me I was like Fort Knox, which I took as a
compliment at the time. But I digress. This situation with Lisa was the first time I
had used my actual real life experiences to help another person and prevent
them from going down a road I was all too familiar with, and knowing that it
truly helped her also helped me. In
fact, it changed my life.
So my goal with
this blog is just to write about my life and things that have happened to me or
that I have experienced. If even one
person gets something out of it, I will consider myself a success. There will also be crochet patterns, recipes,
crafts, self-care, waste reduction, gardening tips, pictures of my cat, and
more, because those things are my jam!
Thanks for
reading.
~Heddie
