I live in a beautiful place. On the days I wake up after the sun comes out, I can't help but marvel at the beauty of this place that I live. I am sitting in my favorite chair in the living room, looking out at snow falling through branches. I look up and there is a mountain close enough to touch. Pines all the way up. On Saturdays, I often wish I was a runner and join all those people with the spandex pants and bright green fleece jackets because they look so happy in the sun.

I wondered when I first moved here, changed my entire life around, said goodbye to close friends in familiar places, agreed to take a risk on rent and people I hardly knew, if this was the biggest mistake I'd ever made. I wonder still, sometimes, if I am making a mistake, taking all of these risks, wondering what will happen when I need people to bail me out. But most of the time, it just feels like home. Lucky, yes. Home, nonetheless.

Sometimes I forget. I forget about the notoriety, the reputation that this place carries with it. People ask, "now where do you live?" And I answer truthfully, coming from a variety of feelings, ideas, doubts, about it. Some say, "wow, that is far way to drive for your placement." Some say, "wow, that is a political statement," some say "wow, that is expensive," some say, "wow, you live in the 'cool' place." And a lot of people simply say, "why?" And there are a lot of days that I say all of those same things and most days I too am asking "why?"

Nevertheless, I am happy here. Yes, there are days that I long for how things were before. I miss our wonderful little house and, more than anything, I miss the garage and the freedom of a yard and the freedom of a house. I miss how life was then, but in all the times I've been back to Fort Collins, I cannot truly identify a time that I entertained the desire to be back there now.

Starting over. A few weeks ago, or maybe it was just last weekend, I found myself praying for a cease in change. The part of me that strives to be realistic keeps sending little memos about the fact that tomorrow could hold any number of things. My realistic self keeps telling my tired-of-change-self, that this still could only be temporary. My realistic self keeps trying to keep the rest of myself from getting its hopes up. Money might run out soon. The matter of employment is quickly approaching. And all of me simply wants to sleep.

As most likely evidenced by the activity in this writing space in the last few months, student teaching has a tendency to help student teachers forget that there are other areas to their lives. When you find yourself taking on a title that involves two full-time jobs upon which the rest of your life appears to rest, it is difficult to find yourself in the mess. Who is this person that is buried under all of this mess of change anyway? Some other weekend in the not-so-distant past also found me with this realization: there really is more to me than just the "student teacher."

This semester has been a struggle, to say the least. A good friend who has walked this road before told me that her student teaching experience was the most insecure time of her life. I think about that revelation daily, I think, and it brings me a lot of assurance. I like to have explanations and reasons for things. I like to get a prognosis on why things are going to poorly, why things don't feel right-- I like to get a handle on things through definitions and names. And my friend's small bit of experiential insight has helped me a lot to remember that this lack of self isn't a condition to be blamed or remedied, but simply an realistic expectation.

I've been through a lot of emotions. A lot of anger and frustration, mostly. There are a lot of days that I feel I've lost my ability to be a humble and gracious student and I've become haughty and prideful in my anger and frustration. I am distrustful of the system these days, do not see the benefit my "supervisors" state that they are present to provide. I fear I will never find a way out and the only answer available to me at the end of this long road will be that I am simply not cut out for this work. There is something that I've missed and I might as well stop here.

Now perhaps such a fear is over-fraught with emotion, that I am speaking out of exhaustion, I am speaking from the middle of the road when all I need is perspective. in fact, I think I believe these things more than anything else. But gazing down the road at the end has become difficult. I am starting over again at my elementary plaement, and, truth be told, I find myself quite apathetic. I am ready to be finished and eight weeks feels awfully long to go through motions. Eight weeks feels like a long time to turn in obligatory paperwork of incredible length. Eight weeks feels like a long time to sit through evaluations nodding and smiling at an evaluator who doesn't seem to hear a word I say. And, simultaneously, eight weeks feels like a short time to figure out what I am going to do next when laying in bed for a month doesn't seem like a feasable option.