Stalking the wild medicinal called adulthood

I spend a lot of time thinking about protracted adolescence, about adulthood, and about the shifting sands of maturity and stability that have been my 20s and the 20s of so many of my friends. 

I am a teacher of high school kids now, not the boundaries-confused 20-year-old I was when I started working with a teenage youth group. I feel further away from the experience of teenage intensity that I remember, and have a hard time understanding it somethings. I've got a decade on most of these kids. 

When I introduced myself as "Angelina, the teacher" several times to surprised looks on our recent school service trip, it touched  a nerve I didn't know I had: I no longer want to be mistaken for being younger than I am, let alone for a high schooler or college kid. I respect those age groups, but that's not where I'm at.  "Do I need a haircut?" I wondered. "Is it that I'm short?" "What about my doesn't say 'grown up'"? (One friend claims it's because I dress "cool" - by which she means "not conservative." Casual might be the most accurate.) 

And I've found myself oddly perturbed by the number of early 20 somethings I work with. They outnumber us older folk (I am marginally one of the older folk), and though I like them all individually, en masse they freak me out a little. It's totally an irrational response - but I think some part of me was ready to leave that energy behind. 

So I wonder what the state of adulthood is - what is it that I'm wanting to move towards? Is it a steady well-paying job? A car? A home you own, or pay regular rent on? Is adulthood having a partner? Babies? It's hard to sort out the messages I get from society, from the media. 

Or maybe it's not the state of "having" anything at all, not a constellation of responsibility or ownership.  I know I perceive and respect connections between people better now, can hold and appreciate complex human relationships - step families, ex-partners, adopted grandmothers - as the nuance in people's lives. I'm fairly certain I'm a better friend than I've ever been before. I know to pace myself; I have a better sense of my energy. I'm better at trusting, generally need less control, am not determined to have a plan than I was only a year or two ago. I have a sense of vocation - a new concept when I applied to seminary - which is enough of a sense that I leave room for change, have not applied the reigns too tight. 

Still, adulthood feels elusive - sought after, healing, quenching - but elusive. 

It's times like this I think I should have been an English major

Excited to be teaching one of my favorite books, Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, I had to admit to my students I didn't know what the deal was with this mythological, fantastical book being called a memoir. 

What was even more curious was that my 1977 edition had "Autobiography" as the subject on the back, while their 1989 editions said "Nonfiction/Literature" and also "Fiction/Literature." It made me think of all the bruhaha around A Million Little Pieces and Rigoberta Manchu Tum's work - the seeming rage that comes from autobiographies that have supposedly been faked. 

But I guess with Woman Warrior, it's obvious that some part of it isn't "true" in the legal or journalistic sense - I mean there are hairy boulder ghosts, older-than-time men and women who train mythical warriors, and other fantastical events. Maxine Hong Kingston is being pretty open with us that something else is going on here. 

So I tried to tell my students about the Hero(ine) Cycle, emphasized the idea of "talk story" that occurs throughout the book, and suggested that maybe things that aren't factually true can still be emotionally true, or possess some inner truth. That fiction and traditional storytelling can tell truth too. 

I hope it sticks. And maybe they'll encounter the book again - after all, if Wikipedia is telling the truth, it is one of the most widely taught books on college campuses in the United States.

 I wonder if it is often used as an opportunity to have conversations about the power of storytelling? Or if the engagement is generally more superficial? 

Woolman queries

 “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

–      Lilla Watson, (Australian aboriginal educator, artist, and activist) 

“No one is free when others are oppressed” – Author unknown

“Work is love made visible.” – Khalil Gibran

Query

1. When you see oppression and inequality, what do you feel? How do you respond? We all respond in different ways, and though our actions may seem large are small, they are often powerful.