D Explains It All

Summer died like all things beautiful

Unexpectedly

Painfully

Mystically

A wilted flower

Like the sun bleeding out

It is red

Tantalizing

Oh so nostalgic!

Slender fingers reaching out

Grasping for air

Pale body falling

In the sea of failed opportunities

Something howls in the distance

There’s no answer

Just the promise of the cozy warmth

Of the gold and the orange hues

And that old adage

Whispered in the shadows

With which Summer seals her fate

And the way you drown drown drown

In your lies

In the disaster of your life

Without a sense of recovery

It is reaching a new low

A new despair

And it is only when you blackout

When all air leaves your lungs

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ― Maya Angelou

It is September 1st. It is the start of a new month, and some would even say it is the start of the end of the year. It has started getting chilly. Soon, the leaves will begin to fall. Some people get nostalgic. Others prepare for the rest of the months left of the year. To me, it is the perfect time to reflect about the events that have transpired for the past year of my life.

It was June, 2016, and the world was in the palms of my hands. I had finally graduated from College, after four long years of studying. Imagine my surprise when it was announced I had the best grades of the 2012-2016 Class. I had worked day and night for that moment. I had rejected invitations to go out to several places. I had stopped traveling and spending time with love ones to study. I had woken up at night with answers or ideas for my different projects. I had even stopped doing what I love most for months ─writing. It hadn’t been for nothing. I had done something I had wanted to from the moment I stepped foot into my first class. I had done it. I had made my family proud. Most importantly, I had made myself proud. It was a historic event. The first time in my life I had done something worthwhile. I hadn’t come second or third, I had been first. Now, writing this, the memories of that time flood me. I feel the adrenaline rushing to my veins. I feel the joy of that moment. It was like being on top of the world.

That elation, like all things, soon came to an end. A month had passed by since graduation day, and I was still unable to get a job. That did not worry me that much. My plan was not jumping into the work wagon immediately after College. I wanted to write a portfolio for the MFA I wanted to get into. I wanted enough time to get all my documents in order, and write the best poetry pieces I had ever written thus far. The due date was April 15th, and I felt the clock ticking. My family, however, didn’t have the same idea. Ever the pragmatics, it was unthinkable for me to not be actively looking for a job (even though I was). How did the student with the best grades still unemployed? They wanted me to go out, knocking on every school in the estate, asking for a job. Obviously, things do not work in this way, not anymore at least. The pressure was such that I gave in, and started looking more into it. As was expected, jobs for an English major were scarce. Experience was a main problem. Most places looked for people with more than three years of experience. In practice, I had one. This complicated things. I sent my résumé first to a translation company. I went to all the interviews, and I passed their exam. However, they had people with more experience, and thus I wasn’t hired. I kept looking for anything that I could do. In my desperation, I sent my résumé to the school I had studied in as a child. They sent me an email back, saying there was a position for an English teacher available… in preschool. Do not get me wrong, I do like kids. As a child, one of my dreams was to be a teacher. I imagined myself teaching little kids. However, I did not study to teach preschool. Elementary school, yes. But not preschool. Although I didn’t feel like I had the abilities, I succumbed to my mother’s and grandmother’s pressure to get a job.

You have to understand something about me. I was always a good girl. I was always a smart girl. The girl who always got the best grades, and when she got less than ideal marks, she would get depressed. The girl who had anxiety when she was nine years old because she couldn’t get the grades she wanted. The girl who felt frightened about the possibility of being a failure in life when she was just a child. Growing up, I thought that I would have my life put together by age twenty two. Yet, the reality showed that I even couldn’t get a job. I took it. I went to the interviews. I wasted precious hours of my life getting interviewed, answering exams, feeling anxious about the result. I got the job. I was warned that it was going to be difficult, but I quickly forgot about it when I saw my family’s happy faces. That was a grave mistake.

What you do not realize about teachers until you become a teacher yourself is the amount of time you spend on your job. Most people go in, work for eight hours, and go home, having time to rest. Teachers work eight hours at school, and then go home to work more. During this time, I spent a lot of my time lesson planning and preparing material at home. While in school, I of course had to teach, and be with the kids. It was exhausting. Coordinators and the principal expect you to have three year olds seating and behaving. It seemed almost impossible when all the boys liked to run around the classroom, or hit each other. The girls were calmer, but they too had their moments of misbehaving. The parents, though, were worse than their children. They wanted all teachers to focus entirely on their own child, when there were other twelve to look for. They complained every week about me or another poor teacher. The coordinator and the principal, of course, always took the parents’ side. It was a nightmare. I came home exhausted from dealing with bratty kids and their bratty parents. I had to keep working at home, lesson planning, preparing material for my classes, and, on top, making gifts for the kids for the school’s many events. I was asked to stay an hour after I should have gone home to attend meetings. I was forced to stay one day a whole evening “playing” with children. I never got paid extra for doing overtime. The other teachers also complained about this. The older ones said that things had always been like this. I felt bad. I thought about my previous teachers, the ones I had had in this school, and wondered if they had ever gotten shit because of me.

The treatment was unfair, and the job underpaid. But I kept working. In all honesty, I wanted to quit after the first week. I endured, though. I endured because my mother always told me I was a quitter, and that I had to stick with my decision. So, I did. I kept working because I was getting paid more than all my old College classmates. I kept working because I told myself I needed the money. I worked because I didn’t want to be a quitter. I missed events with my friends because I had to work or was too exhausted to go out. I started getting sick every two weeks due to stress. I felt gloomy all the time. Soon, I noticed the obvious signs of depression looming their way into my life. I came home crying every day. I began tearing up while giving classes. I felt like shit. What was worse was that I had stopped writing altogether. I had lost my will to write. Meanwhile, April 15th continued ticking inside my mind like a time bomb. I was wasting precious time doing something I hated that should have been spent writing.

I went to a therapy session with my psychiatrist. He told me that the best thing I could was to quit. My friends, who had noticed me slowly losing my mind, told me that I should do it. In the long run, I was going to be seriously depressed, and I could hurt myself. I was also losing time not writing. I decided to do it. As expected my family got angry, and told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life. That I was a failure. The pain I felt at their words and constant reminders that I was not going to find another job were nothing like the freedom I felt when I stopped going to my job. The principal got very upset too, and swore I was never going to get hired at another school. I didn’t care. I decided not to work at another school with little kids, definitely not in preschool again.

During the next few weeks, I found my writing voice again. I started writing the poetry pieces I was missing for my portfolio. I felt genuinely happy for a change. I finally had time to do what I love most. I wrote with everything I got. I started looking for a job again, and by the beginning of December I got a new job as a part-time English teacher at a local English Center. During the beginning of the New Year, I worked on the mornings, and came home to write. I put all of my documents in order. I had my friends check my portfolio and my statement of purpose. When I wasn’t doing these things, I edited two plays, and started translating various documents. In short, I was going all of the things I had learned in College. I felt useful. I felt happy.

When April 15th came around, I submitted all of my documents and waited.

During the next month, I kept working, now as a translation teacher too for the same school. I had the time to meet new people. My coworkers were all interesting people, having interesting experiences. My students were too. They needed to learn English, and later translation, to keep their jobs. I learned about their families, the kind of work they do, their aspirations. I loved seeing their faces light up when they finally understood something, or when I praised their efforts. I always told them they could do better, and I was pleasantly surprised when they took my words at heart and did it. Things had fallen into place for me, and now all I had to do was wait to see if I had made it into the MFA.

They say that with May comes new opportunities. However, in May my hopes and dreams were crushed. It is funny how they reject you nowadays. You log into your account, and there, waiting for you, is a message which says in bold letters “REJECTED.” Next, the words “We regret to inform you that…” but you don’t care. You already know what happened. You have been rejected. The words big and clear. I felt like I had been pierced through my soul with those letters. I hated them. I got depressed again. My dream, the one I had worked on for so long, seemed so far away. Worst of all, I felt like a failure. Feeling a bit hopeful, I sent three poems to a magazine which had opened a contest to publish fifteen poems. I got rejected there as well. After this last rejection, I had to face the facts. I was a failure in many ways.  I had a minimum wage job, I had been rejected from my dream MFA, my poetry had been once again rejected by a magazine, and lastly my love life was inexistent. I had failed in every possible aspect of my life.

When I was a child, and later a teenager, I had dreaded not having my shit together by the age of twenty three. I had planned to be successful. To have a high paying job, to have published something, and to have had found the love of my life already. At twenty three, I hadn’t achieved any of these things, while I had to watch my high school classmates all traveling the world, getting married, getting amazing jobs, getting into master’s degrees in important universities worldwide. What had I done? Nothing. I was my worst nightmare. When I looked into the mirror that is all I saw: a nightmare.

Recently, I found out all about Book Advent Calendars, which consist on reading one Christmas book per day until Christmas. Normally, they are picture books that are read to children. But I thought that it would be a good idea to create my own list using Christmas short stories and novellas instead of picture books.

1. The Chimes by Charles Dickens

The second of Dicken’s five Christmas books, which have strong social and moral messages. Published in 1844, The Chimes tells the story of Toby “Trotty” Veck and how he loses his faith in humanity, and how he gets it back. Certainly, a novella which reminds us of how good humans actually are. A fitting story for the troubled times we are living in right now.

2. The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen

One of Andersen’s most famous short stories. It is famous because it does not come from folklore, but from his own imagination. It is as heartwarming as it is bittersweet.

3. The Elves and the Shoemaker by Brothers Grimm

A fairytale by the Brothers Grimm, whose main topic is that of the elusive elves, also known as fairies. Let us remember that in European folklore, the fae were mischivious creatures, which often caused trouble to humans. Not at all like the sweet elves which help Santa make toys for the children in the nice list.

4. A Letter From Santa Claus by Mark Twain

Speaking of Santa, here is Twain’s famous letter for his daughter Suzy, written as if it were from the red man himself. Even if it is not a short story, it is a heartwarming read.

5. The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

This is a famous Christmas story, possibly only behind Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which has had many adaptations, including one made by Disney starring Mickey and Minnie Mouse. This short story, a personal favorite of mine, reminds us of the true meaning of Christmas and makes us question if we have been more worried about presents than on the actual company of the people we love.

Literature is everywhere, and has been around for a long time, but the truth is, when asked, few people know what Literature actually is. There are several misconceptions about it that I wish to address.

So let us start with saying what Literature is not:

Every book that has ever been written, including motivational books.

A science.

Just canonical books.

Just fiction.

So, what is Literature then?

First and furthermost, it is an art.

Its objective of study is the written and spoken word.

Fiction is just one of the genres that form part of literature.

Poems, songs, plays, novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, and so on are all literature.

For something to be considered Literature, we have to take into account the way it was written. The style is sometimes more important than the content. This is way non fiction is also part of Literature.

Why Is It important?

My first lit. teacher used to say that Literature exists because “man is enminently social.” Human beings need to communicate with other humans to feel gratification. Communicating helps understanding. Writing and speaken were first created to communicate, but the first human beings realized that there were more things that could be communicated than normal things, such as asking where water is, or planning hunting strategies. All humans are granted with the ability to create, and in the same way we create tools and techology, food, paintings, clothes and many more things, we created languages, and then we created different ways to use the language. People started telling stories, and thus the first folktales were born. When writting was invented, then we had a way to make our stories immortal. People that have something to say, write. This is how we know many things about ancient civilizations, because they wrote what was going on in their lives.

Literature is important because it unifies and helps understand other people. In the end, we are all human, and we all experience the same emotions: love, hate, anger, sadness, pain, and happiness. However, we all experience different circumstances depending on where and when we were born. Time and place are determining factors in our lives, but that does not mean that we cannot understand each other, ever. Timeless books are those who trascend these barriers. Because we are all human, we can still understand each other if we learn from our differences. This is why a Mexican person can read and understand Shakespeare, and a British person can read Kahlin Gibran, and a Nigerian person can be reading  Navajo legends, and all of these people can understand what they read and realize they agree with the authors. Also, we can read stories from many years ago, such as “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, which dates circa 2100 BC, and still understand them.

Literature tells us we are not alone, that what we feel and think right in this moment can be shared by people who live in different places, who have long since been dead. Literature reminds us that we are all humans. That we all matter.

So, if you have something you want to share with the world, write it. You never know who might your books help in time.

I found this article on writing, and translating, genderless characters in novels. I thought it was interesting, and gave me much to think about the importance of gender in the characters I am working on currently. Is it really that important?

As you will find in the article, for English, it is easier to write genderless characters because most words do not have gender. However, it gets trickier in other languages, like French and Spanish. I have observed that using “x” in Spanish to avoid using either “o” for male and “a” for female can get tricky, and might not be taken well by all readers.

How would you guys avoid using gender? Do you think it is possible in Spanish?

Feel free to voice your opinion.