nostalgia

 It is probably impossible to spend every single day at a High School and not occasionally slip into bouts of nostalgia so strong that you find yourself lying on the floor of your room listening to Dashboard Confessional & being emotional about the future.

I love being an adult, but I think I've forgotten the coping strategies that helped me make it through high school, the hardest of hard times. I have deemed myself too old for such activities as blogging and binging on music and feelings. I've drifted into a space where feelings are like rolling hills, but I want mountains of emotions!!! And I want to write them down!!!

I think I've decided that the adult way to deal with life is to shut up and do it, forging forward without stopping to look around. I must be afraid that if I slow down & think about it, I will become overwhelmed by the ridiculous amounts of responsibilities I've dumped on myself.

The reason I strayed from blogging as a form of life-processing is that I thought I needed to strip all bits of my real self from being discovered by my students. I needed to keep a facade of anonymity so that students would respect me. Well, spoiler alert, that's not my teaching style. My real self is so wrapped up in my teaching, I'm sure the content of my blog would not surprise any of my students.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've gotten it in my head that there are different facets of myself that I can focus on & present to various audiences. There's the Young Life leader Refvemma who is cR@Zii!!!, the Riverside Teacher Ms. Refvem who is silly, non-traditional & obsessed with cats, the hipster Cocoa Cinnamon- & Geer St-obsessed, 26-yr-old Durhamite Emma... and somehow the Emmas cannot know each other or communicate or blend in any way. I think that maybe I've been wrong. I think I need to get back to being just plain old Emma Refvem, who is all of those things at once.

And so, in an effort to Unite The Emmas, at the beginning (-ish) of one of the busiest years of teaching ever, in which I will attempt to obtain my National Board Certification, I have decided to resurrect the ol' blog. (for real this time?!)

Woohoo!!