Living Uncertainly

I'll be brief with this introduction. My 10th grade English students are currently in the process of writing essays based on the "This I Believe" segment that airs on NPR. To help them understand HOW they can go about revising their essays, I wrote my own, which I thought I'd share. This is not the first (or "snot" draft), so it is a little more polished although not perfect. Anyway, without further ado, here it is:

"I know nothing. Or perhaps only a very few things. I know my husband and family love me, which is enough to keep me grounded. I can also say with assurance that I am extremely lucky to be an artist and a teacher. But outside of that, my knowledge amounts to one flake in the winter snowstorms from my childhood growing up in Utah.

All this uncertainty can be uncomfortable. It can be tense. The muscles in my chest still constrict when I remember standing in front of my graduate committee to defend my artwork. What if I couldn’t remember what I had written? My palms were so sweaty, and I could barely breathe. What if my work was not good enough? And with my personality, the questioning does not end with high stress situations. It happens every day that I put on shoes. I am a daily doubter. For instance, what if my students ask me a question I don’t know the answer to?

At the heart of each of these what if’s is a doubt that can lead to so many things. Doubt gets a bad rap sometimes. Truly it can paralyze and destroy when focused on the past and the uncontrollable. But if it weren’t for that persistent question, for the wonder of what more is out there, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

As an artist, I learned to doubt all my assumptions about my work. My undergraduate ceramics professor, a wonderful lady with hair like her sheep dog’s fur, encouraged us to play the what if game with our ideas. What if I turned it upside down? What if I made it the size of a truck? What if instead of glazing my piece, I covered it with spray rubber? There is a fire engine red rubber-covered woman in the back of my closet because of this question. What if I don’t fire it? You have my graduate work. What if I risk my ego and a few dollars to enter my art into a show? I just might get in, or I might learn that I need to keep asking myself questions and learning.

And it is not just in my art that doubt can be a driving force. I mentioned that I know my husband loves me. What if I question that, too? This uncertainty creeps in at inopportune moments when media images don’t reinforce my worth. So I probe, and the details sharpen. My phone beeps with a text seeing how my morning went. His posture softens, and he lets me bear some of his troubles. He knows my favorite color is green. The dishes on the high shelves are mine for the asking. And he makes the bed! For having doubted, my knowledge grew.

I’ve seen it so many times in my life. When I doubted, I went to grad school. When I doubted, I found my own strength. When I doubted, I learned more about the world and God than I ever thought possible. Maybe I do know something. But I doubt it."