Nearly three and a half years ago I wrote a rather lengthy apologia, or explanation for why I am the person that I am. It is more or less my “Idiot’s Guide to Jakob Duehr”. When people want to know more of me, I link them to that post (which you can find right here), and they come away with a greater understanding of who I am. Sure, sometimes they may run away screaming, but that’s alright. However, after sending that post to a new friend recently, I realized there is a lot missing from that story, namely everything that happened after I wrote that post. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that as much (if not more) has happened in the past 3+ years to shape the man I am today as the first 24+ years of my life. With that in mind, here is the second installment of my apologia, a detailed account of the people and events that have shaped me into the Jakob you know and tolerate. Again, it is a rather lengthy read, so I have broken it into sections in case it is too much for one sitting.
Facing Failure
I wrote at great length in the first apologia about the effects that losing weight had on my life. For the first time, I had confidence. I was free to be the person I always wanted to be because I finally looked like he person I always wanted to be. However, as time wore on, I faced many failures in my life. I was unable to procure a full time teaching position. A couple summers went by without me even receiving a single interview for a job. Friends were no longer around. Things with the one I cared about most had cooled significantly. Failure in those areas led me to lose motivation in all other areas of my life. I stayed up until 3 AM on a nightly basis. If I didn’t have to work the next morning, I would sleep until 11:30. If I did have to work, I would generally operate on less than four hours of sleep. I stopped going to the gym. I think I went three months between workouts in the summer of 2011. At that point in time, I didn’t hate my life, but I saw no chance that things would get any better.
Something changed my life. Rather, someone changed my life. In August 2011, I met one of my Stickam friends for lunch. To say that our relationship was acrimonious before that point would have been an understatement. We were both very much set in our ways to the point that we would grate on one another. At the time, I don’t think she thought very much of me, and to be fair, I never gave her a reason to think much of me. She changed that summer. She got her life together. When we met for lunch, I saw an entirely different person. Even though a lot of unexpected curves had just been thrown her way, I saw strength and determination to make it through to the other side. Seeing her made me realize that I could do the same in my life. We were able build a strong friendship after that day, and I can never thank her enough for the impact she made on my life. Once again, thank you Staci.
Even though I realized I could change, it took over a month for me to start the changing process. I gradually noticed that all of my skinny clothes no longer fit as well. I could see the muffin top that was forming, and I didn’t like it. For a few weeks, I was afraid to face the scale because of what I knew I would see. Finally, I came to the point where I understood that I needed to take ownership of where I was at that point if I was ever going to get back to where I wanted to be. I stepped on the scale and discovered that I had gained over half the weight back. I was mad at myself, but it didn’t get me discouraged. Having lost weight before, I knew what I had to do in order to succeed.
I got back to the gym. My gym moved locations around the same time as I started this second weight loss process. It was symbolic for me, because much like the gym, I was leaving my old self behind. I hit the gym with fervor that I did not even have the first time I lost weight. I was at the gym seven days a week and was burning 6000 calories per week on the elliptical.
My goal was to lose 22 pounds and get back to the weight on my driver’s license. I started on the last weekend of September and gave myself until the end of the year to lose that weight. That weight was gone by the middle of November. It meant everything to me to see that I still could succeed despite the many failures that had dotted the previous two years of my life.
Success Changes a Man
I will be the first to admit that I was not the hardest worker from 2009 until mid-2011. As I said earlier, I stayed up late and slept in, and even when I worked, I was not well-rested. In the summer of 2011, I added a job at a learning center to supplement my work as a substitute teacher. Losing the weight changed things in my life. I realized that I could apply that same dedication and effort to other areas of my life. It is why I became so driven (one of my coworkers refers to me as “relentless”).
I came to an interesting realization that fall. I realized that the harder I worked, the more I enjoyed the things I was doing because I felt a greater connection and ownership to them. During my last year as a substitute teacher, I really felt myself come into my own, and even though I did not have nearly the same responsibilities as a regular classroom teacher, I was able to find meaning in what I did. The same could be said for the learning center. I loved that job (at least at the start) because I really felt like I served a purpose and was putting young people in a position to succeed.
In the previous two years, it was not uncommon for me to go multiple days without working. From late 2011 to early 2012, it became commonplace for me to work both jobs on the same day. During the late winter and early spring (when students were preparing in earnest for the ACT), I would often work 12 hours between the two jobs and would head straight to the gym before finally crashing at home for the night.
During that stretch, I changed a bit as a person. Sure, I replaced a lot of bad habits with a lot of good ones, but I started having a bit less fun as well. It was as if I felt I needed to atone for the years that I spent as an unproductive manchild. I communicated with friends less. I even dropped the type of music that I listened to in favor of a more “mature” sound. Fortunately, I was gradually able to reintroduce the aspects of myself that I did like and find a healthy balance between “Productive Jakob” and “Jakob Who Enjoys Life”.
“When you do something worth cheering for, I’ll cheer for you too.”
My lack of professional success coming out of college, quite honestly, made me feel inadequate. I was embarrassed to tell people that I was *just* a substitute teacher. I felt that all sorts of people had all sorts of expectations for me based on my success in high school and college, and I felt that I was letting them down. As my friends and other peers began to settle down in their careers, I was not there. I will never forget what a friend said to me in September 2011 at the homecoming celebration for our friend returning from Afghanistan. When I poked fun at him for cheering loudly, he replied with the sentence that serves as the header of this section.
I know he did not mean for it to be nearly as biting as it came out, but it changed my life. I knew I HAD to do something to make people proud of me. I didn’t feel like what I was doing at that point was making anyone proud, so I had to do something. I knew it couldn’t be small, either. I had no clue what I would do until December 2011.
My dad has been a runner since he actually lost weight in 1998. After I lost all the weight that I did, he could see that I had gotten myself into pretty good shape. He had run a marathon earlier that year and was planning on running another, so he challenged me to do it with him. I never like to back down from a challenge, and I finally had something big to chase after. I accepted the challenge.
I was certainly fueled by the swagger and bravado that came from losing weight in the manner that I did, because I never really took notice of two very important details. First, the marathon was only four months away. Second, I had never run more than two miles consecutively in my life (and I had last done that a decade prior), and a marathon is 26.2 miles. Those things never fazed me. I needed to do this for my own sense of self. I blazed through marathon training to the point that I even had a goal time for finishing the marathon.
When the marathon came, I was well ahead of my goal time through the first 20 miles. Unfortunately, weather and fatigue pushed me to the other side of the goal time, but by that point I was content by having finished a marathon. It made me feel like I was special (or at the least, that I had done something special).
Unfortunately, that feeling did not last very long. I am not the type of person who is able to celebrate success for long. I wish I was, but I am not. Almost immediately after the marathon, I already started to try to figure out how I could top that. I needed to feel like who I was and what I did mattered. I needed another challenge. I certainly did not know what would come next.
“Now I’m given the chance that I want…”
By August 2012 I had give up on my chances of procuring a full time teaching position for that school year. After talking to my parents, we decided that were I not to get a job, my best course of action would probably involve leaving the field of education because the market had collapsed as much as it did. I was very afraid of what was to come because I never really planned on what I would do after teaching. I had no clue what to do. Maybe it was time to finally pursue my dream of becoming a WWE Superstar?
Fortunately, the world was spared from seeing my pale self in spandex, as I received a call from an alternative school about 15 minutes from home. I was very confused when I received the call to come in for an interview. I had absolutely no recollection of ever applying for a job at this school until I visited the school’s website. At that point, I realized that I had actually applied for a job two years before and was surprised that they kept my resume on file for that long. I interviewed with the principal, and we seemed to hit it off quite nicely. She informed me of some of the issues I would deal with at the school (prior to that interview, I was completely unaware of what an alternative school was) as well as the lack of resources the school had. She told me that if I was not scared away that I should call or e-mail her so that she could advance me in the interview process. During the second interview, I met with the directors of the school who informed me that the job was mine. I would be starting out as an assistant but as enrollment increased, I would have the opportunity to have a classroom of my own. I went from being days to giving up on education entirely to having my first full time teaching job!
I was under the impression that I would receive some sort of orientation or training on my first day. That did not occur. Instead, I met with the teacher with whom I would be working in tandem and she notified me of the subjects I would be teaching. For some reason, I was also unaware that the classrooms were self-contained and that I would be responsible for teaching subjects that are not listed on my teaching certificate.
My first day was an absolute nightmare. Students were trying to figure me out, and I was trying to figure the school out. I had not seen a school so deficient in technology since my days as a student at Stone in the 1990s. Gone were the SMARTBoards and projectors that I was used to working with at both Richards and in Orland. Our “technology” consists of whiteboards that actually erase! One student completely shut down and fell asleep and would not stay awake regardless of what I did. I was ready to give up, and to make matters worse I had to work a five hour shift that night at the learning center (I kept that job through November 2012)! As I talked to my dad as I commuted between jobs, I wanted to quit. He told me to give it some time and then see how it was going. I took that advice.
Things got better quickly. The kids took a liking to me and I to them. By the beginning of October, student enrollment had increased to the point that I had the opportunity to be the lead teacher of my own classroom. I learned so much from Mrs. Umgelder in the previous month (and for that I will be eternally indebted), but I was ready to branch off and do what I had been waiting to do for so long. It was my time!
I started out with a small class of students. One of the benefits of an alternative school is the low classroom size. Though it may handicap certain lessons and activities, it really allows teachers to get to know their students. I was able to develop relationships with each of those students and really got a sense of who they were and where they wanted to be.
My first year was not without its bumps along the way, however (though I guess some of that is to be expected with a rookie teacher). In January 2013, I lost both my classroom assistants as casualties to the economy. It was a bit of a miracle that I did not join them as well. In March, I made what could generously be referred to a dumb mistake. Two of my boys had been arguing with one another for months about anything and everything and it was grating both on me and the other students. I remembered what one of my elementary school teachers did and tried to emulate it. I put the boys’ desks together. I knew neither of them was happy with me about the move, and I thought that I could unite the boys against a common enemy (me) so that they could get their feud and work together to accomplish a goal. Instead, they got into a rather nasty fight within fifteen minutes of the move, and although I deescalated the situation rather quickly, I had to do a lot of explaining of my actions. Though I felt quite bad about the situation at the time, I can honestly say I tried to do the right thing.
As the classroom grew in number, my patience diminished. The new students created a somewhat combustible mix with the old students, and though none of the kids were particularly “bad” kids, it was draining (for multiple reasons, some of which will be detailed later in the piece). I knew that if I wanted to make it through the school year in one piece, I needed reinforcements. Fortunately, reinforcements were on the way.
The school placed Mrs. Balfour in my classroom as my co-teacher. Mrs. Balfour is a retired Chicago Public School principal and teacher, so she not only knows how to effectively run a classroom but knows how to run an entire school building as well. She’s been around long enough to see what does and does not work. In that first year, she helped to take some of the burden off of me. We had some growing pains at first, but I can honestly say that having her around for the stretch run of that school year is what provided me with what I needed to make it through.
I ended that first school year feeling on top of the world. I knew I had done a good job, and I knew I had helped guide my students to where they wanted to be. Nearly ninety percent (!) of my students were going to get to return to their public schools and would no longer have to go to alternative school. They did such a great job, and I was proud of them.
Having conquered the challenge that was my rookie year of teaching, I embarked on two more challenges to entertain myself (remember what I wrote earlier about my fear of complacency). Since I did not like how my first marathon ended, I accepted my dad’s challenge to run another marathon in June 2013 in Dubuque, Iowa. Though that marathon was a total nightmare as a result of a torrential downpour immediately before the race, a gravel trail that was not conducive for walking, let alone running, and 90 degree temperatures, I took pride in the fact that I finished. It did not matter to me that I was literally limping to the end as a result of twisting my ankle at Mile 16. It did not matter to me that I finished the marathon at a much slower mark than my previous marathon. I set a goal and completed it.
It was always in my plans to go back to school and get a Masters degree. It was always a matter of when. When I worked as a substitute teacher, I always said that I wanted to wait until I had a full time job before I went to graduate school so that I would be able to afford to pay for it. Once I completed my first school year as a full time teacher, it felt like the perfect opportunity. I transitioned from one challenge (the marathon) to another challenge a month later. Though I had always had my fair share of success as a student, I will admit that I was extremely apprehensive. I thought I would have a long period of adjustment after being away from the classroom for over three years. Fortunately, I had success early on, and that success spurred me to pursue even greater success.
Walking Alone
I talked at great detail in the first apologia about the impact that my friends had on my life to that point. They, along with my family, played the greatest role in getting me to that point. However, I had to spend the greater part of the past three years on my path alone.
Though Merrill was officially the first to move away when he joined the Marines in January 2007, it never felt like he was truly gone because he would always be home a few times a year on leave. When Rex left for Seattle to work for Microsoft in 2010, I began to sense the winds of change. I definitely felt it in 2011 when Rob moved to Iowa, where he would settle for a season before joining Rex out in Seattle. Dan, the old reliable, became less present in my life as work and a relationship monopolized the little free time he had. When we were young, only days would go by before we would see one another. As we got to college, it would be weeks. Once we first graduated college, it would be months. As we enter our late 20s, years elapse between visits. I saw two of my friends on the day of this writing (December 2014), one of which I had not seen since June 2012. It has been nearly three years since I have seen the other two guys as well. I’ll be completely honest and admit that I miss them a whole heaping lot. I never looked to get a new core group of friends to replace them because I knew no one else could compare.
People grow up and move on. I understand that as a necessary evil of life, but it’s never fun when it happens to you. And I get that friends come and go and that I’m blessed to have had the ones I did so close for me as long as I did. I know that they still care about me, but I miss them. What has made it worse is that family has moved on as well. I come from a small, tightly knit family. My family is so small that I only have two cousins (who I jokingly refer to as “The One I Talk To” and “The One I Don’t Talk To”). My cousin that I do, indeed, converse with is the closest thing Heidi and I have had to another sibling. Now that he has a job and moved to the city, I hardly see him. It also does not help matters that his job requires him to travel a lot. I can count on one hand the amount of times that I saw him in 2014. Considering that when we were younger we would eclipse that number in one week, it is a bit disheartening, but such is growing up.
In 2014 I also had to say goodbye to my sister as she moved with her husband to North Carolina. Out of all the people who left, that one probably hit me the hardest, as she’s always been there and possesses a certain sensitivity and understanding of me that few have. It’s tough not having that around on a daily basis. But I am so happy for her that she has a marriage that I hope to emulate one day, and I am extremely excited that she has given me the opportunity to become an uncle. I am so excited to spoil my niece.
Since my face-to-face friends are no longer within seeing distance, I have strengthened my friendships with a number of people all around the country. I consider the people I love to be my family, even if there is no blood between us. Today, I consider myself to have family in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, Alaska, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. I can’t thank many people enough for what they’ve done for me. Zach, for example, has been my right hand man for a long time now. Seeing him in Seattle in 2012 was the best part of a challenging trip. E~! and Matt welcomed me into their home in July 2014 on what was easily one of the toughest days of my life. Ken and Shannon (SJT) are still among my closest confidantes and are probably frustrated beyond belief that I still make some of the same mistakes I did when they met me many years ago. Yet, they still listen to me and somehow our friendships are closer than they’ve ever been. People like them and many others are hard to come by, and I am blessed to have them in my life.
The fall of 2014 was one of the most difficult seasons in my life because for the first time I experienced real, genuine depression. I had a clear picture of where I wanted my life to go, yet I could not make those things happen. As each loss and disappointment piled on one another, I felt myself slowly sinking into a hole. No matter how hard I tried to shake it, I couldn't. I thought that being a good man would help me through it, but I just felt like my hard work was going unrewarded. I was ready to give up. I wanted to give up, but the people in my life would not allow me to give up. I have made it through to the other side, and though I am not certain that my life will go the way I want it to go, I have hope that I will get to where I need to be.
If I’ve learned anything through my interpersonal relationships since I wrote my first apologia, it is that no matter how far away I am from people, I am not alone. Through my deepest valleys, people have been there for me to lend an ear or a voice. I do not make friends based on how close they are to me, but I do make friends based on how much we love one another. People don’t have to be near you to love you. Do not lament the fact that your love comes from a distance; take solace in the knowledge that you are loved.
Reacting to the Unexpected
I am a planner by nature. I like to plot out even the tiniest minutiae of my life as meticulously as possible. I’ve practiced responses to others. I’ve even come up with a number of ideas for marriage proposals. That nature can be a blessing, but it can also serve as a detriment because life is full of things that you cannot plan for. They happen, and you must adapt or perish. My life has been full of the unexpected. I wish I could say that I adapted appropriately in each situation, but in truth all I can say is that I survived.
I mentioned earlier that almost all of my students were able to return to their home school districts following my first year. My success at my job actually put me out of a job for a time in August 2013. Enrollment numbers were unexpectedly low, and the school had no classroom for me. It was a hard lesson to learn that doing things at the utmost best of your ability still did not mean that things would go your way. I was unprepared for such a thing to happen and was not applying for any other teaching jobs since I fully expected to be working in that school for that school year. I scrambled and applied for any and every remaining available job. I was amazed at how I had become a significantly more attractive candidate since I had a year of experience under my belt. I had three interviews. One school immediately decided to move in a different direction. One school named me one of two finalists, but the superintendent decided to pick the other candidate. The third school, an alternative high school, was impressed with me and offered me a job.
I was excited for the opportunity thanks to my previous success with working at an alternative school. I believed I could have the same impact on these students. However, in the case of alternative high schools, little work is done in terms of trying to mold students whether academically or socially/emotionally. There wasn’t the same support system that I enjoyed at my previous place of employment. The lack of rules and order left me feeling helpless and threatened. My assistant would leave the room for extended periods of time, while some larger unruly students would make threats to me when I attempted to progress the classroom academically. I knew I could not succeed and that I would lose my sanity if I stayed. I felt like a quitter, but I had to walk away.
I knew I could not fall into the same patterns and habits that I did from 2009-2011, so I needed to keep myself active and productive. I asked my boss at my old school if I could return to work on a volunteer basis. She certainly had no problem with free labor when the school was in a definite time of need, so she consented. I returned the school a humbled and defeated man. At that point in time, the only thing going well for me in my life was the success I was having in grad school.
I worked for free for two months because I held onto the hope that one day I would get my job back. I began to grow frustrated with the behavior of the students and the stress I came home with from a job for which I was not even paid. I was ready to walk away. In fact, I had discussed walking away with my dad the day before the principal called me into her office to inform me that they were opening a new classroom of which I was to be the teacher. It was worth waiting for.
Sadly, the honeymoon period did not last as long as I would have liked. This group of students was not like my previous group. They had a serious “us versus the world” mentality, and they tried to feed into school politics far more often than they needed. They would even try to pull me into it by telling me that my employers did not really care for me because I was the young outlaw, the outcast so to speak. It was a challenge to keep them on track. I felt a sophomore slump because these students were not responding to things in the same way that the previous group did.
Fortunately, reinforcements arrived in the form of Mrs. Balfour once more. We made it work for us, and ultimately we succeeded. It was not easy, but we made it. I know that I am not going to work at this school forever. It is not built for teachers to make a career out of it. If I have learned one thing from working at this school, it is that things will constantly change, and there is little you can do to affect it. You are simply responsible for how effectively you adapt to change. As someone who had a paralyzing fear of change as a young man, I believe I’ve made definite strides in this area.
Dealing with Loss
As a child and even a young adult, there was not much loss that I had to deal with. I did lose my close friend Katie in 2006, but I was fortunate to have all my close family members around. Even at 27 years old, I have all four of my grandparents. However, from 2013 on, I have been faced with the loss of some pretty great people I was blessed to know.
In 2013, I lost a mentor of mine from student teaching, a former member of a youth group I attended during high school, a student I tutored during my time at the learning center (easily the most polite young man I ever met), and a very close family friend. Those hit hard, especially Doug passing away. Only one of them was terminal. The other three were gone in immediate, tragic ways. None were even 55 years old.
2014 was more of the same. I lost a co-worker from my days as a sub that helped me quite a bit, one of my best and brightest Richards kids, and one of my first and longest online friends. These losses still sting today. I don’t understand why people are taken from us when they are. I try to wrap my brain around it, and it only serves to leave me more frustrated.
These losses have changed me. When we lost Katie, my greatest regret was that I did not say more to her during our last conversation. It still bothers me to this day that I was brief on the phone and didn’t tell her how much her friendship and her caring nature meant to me. I have made it a point to appreciate people more and to say thank you more often. People need to know that who they are and what they do matters. I’m still not where I want to be in this regard, but I’m getting there.
The Changing Face of Love
Death isn’t the only form of loss we all deal with. Yes, it is the most final of our losses, but other defeats can get us down just as much. In the previous apologia, I talked at great albeit vague length about my previous four love interests. To understand the man I am today, it is important to pick up where that left off.
This story resumes with the woman who was #4 on that list. The things I said about her then are mostly true now. She was and is a wonderful person who has an innate understanding of who I am. We were a matter of wrong place at the wrong time. However, at one point in time, we were at the right place at the right time.
In June 2012, she happened to be in Illinois. We had experienced two near-misses in the prior year when it came to meeting up, as a scheduling conflict derailed us in November 2011 and missing luggage stopped me when I was in the Pacific Northwest earlier that month. We both decided that it was time to make it happen.
I drove 50 miles to see her for 15 minutes. She got lost on the way and her phone died. I was frantically shouting directions to her as the phone died, and I had no idea whether or not she heard them. I waited in the parking lot for an hour before I started walking around the store to get out my anxious nerves. As I walked out the store having given up, she walked up to me. We had our 15 minutes.
After that, she made a decision that I did not like but understood. We could no long be a part of the other’s life. However, at that point, I didn’t really feel that the door was closed completely. That said, I wasn’t going to wait around forever. She didn’t want me to.
I am a man of rules and principles. Granted, these principles are my own and might come across as absurd to others, but I am a man of principles nonetheless. I live by my own code of conduct. I have a code of conduct when it comes to dating. I do not ask out people at the gym. I do not ask out people while they are at work. If they work at the gym, it is a double no. I also had a policy about not pursuing coworkers which I broke in early 2013.
I had a thing for the social worker at my school for some strange reason. I refer to it as some strange reason because she really wasn’t my “type” and certainly did not have a personality that was conducive to mine whatsoever. I found her attractive and figured I needed to get back on the saddle, so I asked her out. Long story short, she stood me up and then blamed me for it.
I’m not the type to give up on something when it gets difficult, so I thought I could get back into her good graces by buying her flowers for her birthday. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately in hindsight), I did not have her home address so I had them sent to our school. She then proceeded to send me the longest text message I have ever received with the worst tongue lashing in recorded history. Not only did she have an astute grasp of four-letter words, but she also was an amateur historian. She apparently kept a record of everything I had done wrong since the moment we met, which she then presented to me with painstaking detail. A week later, she acted like nothing happened. This occurred a couple of times over a few months where she would berate me then get sickeningly sweet. I wasn’t too bothered by it by the end because I was entirely devoid of romantic interest in her. Needless to say, once she left the school in fall 2013 we did not try to keep in touch.
In spring 2013, I was right about the door not being closed with the aforementioned Lady #4. Things in her life did not go the way she had hoped, and that presented a small window of opportunity for the two of us. We picked up our communication, which was not difficult because of how well we connected with one another. There was this sense between us that if anything lasting and meaningful was ever going to happen, this was the time. It looked as if things were going to head in that direction until she consulted a third party. That third party gave her some advice that I knew would be the final nail in our coffin. Months later, she would write me a letter more or less giving me my freedom, but by that point I knew it was coming. She had to do what was best for her. I hold no ill will towards her, and to this day we still have a special bond.
That nail was put into my coffin in the same week that I resigned from my position at the alternative high school. I was so defeated. Everything I had worked so hard for had fallen around me. I didn’t destroy it myself; I merely could not stop the storm. I played my best hand, and I still lost. My confidence and my demeanor started to sink.
The people who make the greatest impacts in our lives are the ones who come when we need them the most. About a month after everything fell apart I met someone in the most random of ways that you probably wouldn’t believe even if I told you. Meeting that person changed my outlook on life. Instead of focusing on all that I had lost, I gained a renewed sense of energy and focus on the positive things in my life and a hope in my heart for what lies ahead for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I still make mistakes. Some of the same dumb things I would’ve done at 14 I still do at 27. I connect my mouth to my heart instead of my mind far too often. I sprint when I should walk. I’m not the man I want to be yet. But despite all of that, I am better today than I was when I wrote the first apologia. I appreciate those who put up with me despite these things, and I encourage them to be patient. My best is yet to come!
“Be a good man, Jakob”
Every morning when I look in the mirror, I say that line to myself. I know it may sound trite and clichéd, but it is something I want to reinforce on a daily basis. While I wouldn’t say that at any point in my life that I’ve been a “bad” man, there have been times that I could be a lot better.
In 2014, one of my primary personal objectives for the year was to become a more thoughtful person. The deaths that happened in 2013 really got to me and made me want to let people know that I truly appreciated them. I was able to use my love of writing to reach that end.
I embarked on two lengthy blog series to show my appreciation for those who have positively impacted my life. First, I detailed the 27 albums that shaped the first 27 years of my life. It was really rewarding to talk about the impact that music has made on my life and how it has guided me through some of my darkest moments as well as provided a soundtrack for my brightest hours. Through that series, I was able to make some connections with musicians that have positively impacted me, and I believe some meaningful relationships were established.
The second series (and the one I am most proud of) was the “You Are the Story I Tell” series. I wrote open letters to dozens of individuals who have positively impacted my life since 1987. I believe it is so important for people to know that who they are and what they do matters. Sometimes I feel overlooked and underappreciated. I figure that if I do, others must as well. Through these letters, people have a lasting memento of the impact they made on my life and the knowledge that they are, indeed, appreciated.
I feel a greater need today to be a good man than I have ever felt before. I intentionally waited to this point to talk about my third year in the classroom. The students in this group, quite frankly, are scary. They are capable of doing some very terrifying deeds. Some of them already have. However, they are equally as capable of impacting the world in a positive, meaningful way. Some of them have never received the guidance that they need, so they turn to gang members, rappers, and other unsavory individuals to provide that leadership. That is no way for them to live. They need good men in their lives so that they have a chance to one day be good men themselves. This school year more than any other has taught me the value of treating people well, of thinking before I speak, and remembering that there are consequences to the decisions we make.
Here’s where I am. So where am I going?
I’ve done a lot of growing up since the first apologia. Part of that is an inevitable side effect of adulthood, but a large portion of the growing up I have done has come from the people that have entered and exited my life and the place in which I work. I have seen things as an educator that I never thought I would see. The stress of my position may not have aged me on the outside, but it has worn on me from the inside.
When I met with my friends for breakfast, I came to the realization that we were still the same people we were when we hung out on a daily basis in 2003. Life matures us. It shapes us and molds us in ways that we may not have thought possible or even intended. But I truly believe that at our core, we are who we are. I am more mature than I was in 2011. I work harder and make better decisions, but I am Jakob for better or worse, and I am okay with that.
I don’t know where the next steps of my journey will take me. Though I certainly have a preference for how I would like things to go, nothing is guaranteed. I’m not the man who I want to be, but I’m not the man I once was, either. Though we stay the same at our core, our circumstances and choices both define and refine us. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m excited to get there. Maybe in another few years I will add to this story. I know one thing is certain: My story is far from over.
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