I know this title doesn't sound like it has anything to do with teaching or neurodivergence, nor do time, hope, and Hamilton: An American Musical appear to have any connections, but trust me, it's all connected and we will circle back to teaching, neurodivergence, and #TeachingWhileNeurodivergent. It's just gonna be a bit of a ride, this is going to be a long post, you're gonna have to hang in there with me. Or just not read this one, that's fine too. But don't say I didn't warn you. Speaking of warnings:
TRIGGER WARNING for suicide, suicidal ideation, and Hamilton spoilers.
I have a month left to write 3 papers and complete all my other assignments, finish my grading for three classes, and select my Comps materials. And, to be honest, I'm behind on grading, and it's a month exactly when grades are due. There's going to be a lot of all-nighters in my future. And still I don't feel like I have enough time.
Time.
I often feel as though I'm running out of time. I experience this feeling in two contexts: one, a more immediate and situational context, connected to my bad procrastination habit and the laziness and/or executive dysfunction that fuels it (though, it feels like a crutch or a copout to claim executive dysfunction, and my parents certainly wouldn't buy into it); and two, a much larger/broader, existential dread kind of context in which I feel like I'm running out of time, running out of time in a way that's connected to my ending - that I will not live a full life and will die young or relatively young, either due to a dying Earth, violence, or my long history with suicide. This second context is rather troubling, given that I have a death phobia and I've had multiple panic/anxiety attacks over both the realities and the suspicions and imaginings of my (unfortunately inevitable) demise. But it's definitely a context/concept that I've spent a lot more time ruminating on in the past few years, my college years. Several of my more recent poems in the poetry collection I'm building have discussed or referenced this context. Even when I was young, it was hard to imagine my future. I had some vague ideas, some careers I wanted, but I had a hard time seeing myself as an adult, as being in the future, as having a future.
In fact, this feeling of running out of time is so impactful on who I am right now that it's featured in my current favorite idea for how I want to decorate my Master's graduation cap: I'd like to trace then color/paint inside the lines the Hamilton star logo, add either a picture of a feather quill or stick a fake feather on there, and include the words "Write Like You're Running Out Of Time". The words are a Hamilton reference, from the song "Non-Stop", which is all about how Alexander Hamilton is "Non-Stop" and the people around his questioning why he is the way he is. Aaron Burr, the narrator and the major villain, asks in the chorus, "Why do you write like you're running out of time?" To include the question as a reference and statement on my hat does three things: one, it is a motivation for me to keep writing, which I both love to do and is essential to my career; two, it is a reminder of how I'm running out of time and I need to use what time I have left to make an impact; and three, it is self-deprecation (normal for me) in regards to my procrastination.
I first watched Hamilton: An American Musical the day it came out on Disney+ in the summer, on July 4th. I'd wanted to see the show in 2018 when it came to Dallas, but I didn't have the money to go. I don't know how many times I've listened to (and sang/rapped) along with the album since I watched it the first time. I fell in love with the show as a theatre kid, as someone who very much believes in the idea of revolutions, and as someone who saw parts of herself in several of the characters. Probably the most relatable was Alexander Hamilton himself, flawed as he is. In the show, he never directly replies to the questions or challenges about why he is who he is and does what he does from Aaron Burr or any of the other characters. However, what he shares with the audience when he ruminates with himself throughout the show is entirely revealing. From the first song in the first act, it's revealed that Alexander Hamilton has experienced death from a young age and expects that he will die young. But not only does he expect that he will die young, he often chases it, hoping to die as a martyr, because he, like many in the show, is obsessed with his legacy - but unlike everyone else, Alexander must rise from the bottom make his legacy himself,. from scratch. And Alexander Hamilton desperately wants to have a lasting, epic legacy, which is very hard to do when you believe you're going to die young, and sometimes, are more or less purposely hurtling towards it.
So of course, you "write like you're running out of time/write day and night like you're running out of time". You write and "[e]v'ry day you fight like you're running out of time".
At one point in "Non-Stop", a version of the chorus goes:
[FULL COMPANY (EXCEPT HAMILTON)]
How do you write like tomorrow won’t arrive?
How do you write like you need it to survive?
How do you write ev’ry second you’re alive?
Ev’ry second you’re alive? Ev’ry second you’re alive?
Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote these lyrics, and all of Alexander Hamilton's lyrics, fully understanding Alexander Hamilton's key awareness of his own mortality, which Miranda picked up from reading first and secondary sources from and about Alexander Hamilton, but he makes it seem unknown or incomprehensible to the other characters, even as he tries to explain it to the audience.
Of course, the big difference between the character of Alexander Hamilton and myself here, is that I don't write every second I'm alive - and even if, I don't write "what I'm supposed to" - academia - every second I'm alive. I get far too distracted sometimes with my fiction and my poetry. I have learned to enjoy academic writing, but I tend to get distracted or get procrastinating when things get too much like work. It feels like a failing as a person - I'd be a much better student, teacher, and person if I could write with the same dedication that Alexander Hamilton did. Of course, his obsession ruined a lot of his relationships, but it can feel like the more responsible option.
But I worry I'm losing you in my explanation about how Hamilton has influenced my perception of time and death, so I will try to make my point. Because Hamilton feels a great sense of impending mortality, he is obsessed with securing his legacy. Writing is one of his tools to do that, by putting out knowledge and setting up America, to "make it right" for his children and the next generation, to "lay a strong enough foundation" that they can "pass [America] on" to his children and the next generation.
Three times in the musical, Alexander starts a verse/soliloquy ruminating about his death with the sentence, "I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory". This sentence I relate to a lot: it succinctly sums up both his own sense of impending mortality, and my own, which is intrinsically tied to my long history with suicide.
I first planned to kill myself shortly after my fourteenth birthday, when I was in the 8th grade. I ended up not attempting, due to a lack of options I both had access too and were going to be quick and not painful, combined with a panic/anxiety attack about my death phobia. But for a solid week, I wasn't thinking about much else, and if I concentrate, I can fall back into those mindsets, follow those thought processes again. And, in a few exceedingly dark moments, I've worried that I made the wrong choice, chickening out. Most of the time, though, I'm glad I'm still here.
Psychology theory suggests that repeated thoughts we have as children and young teenagers can solidify into neural pathways that our brain holds onto and continues to use as a habit even if we don't mean the thoughts. It is my rationalization as to why I've spent the last ten years having suicidal intrusive thoughts and occasional ideations, regardless of whether or not I truly meant it and wanted to kill myself. Sometimes, the thoughts are actually a comfort rather than a stressor: that no situation is ever optionless, because there's always a way out, even if it's a pretty permanent one. As you might imagine, none of this gets along well with my death phobia, but again, usually I don't mean it - my brain just follows the neural pathway, or it's an intrusive thought. For those who don't know what intrusive thoughts are or get them often, I compare them to like buses on the street: they show up at your bus stop whether you want them to or not, but it's your decision whether to get on the bus or wave it off. Sure, I've been in planning stages a couple of times since February 2019 when I went insane, but arguably, I've never tried to kill myself.
I tell you this not for pity reasons, because I don't want your pity, but because one of the reasons why I feel like I'm going to die young is because, like Alexander Hamilton, suicide and martyrdom have been appealing before and it's not unlikely that my death could come at my own hand. But there are other reasons too. I've mentioned the dying Earth before, and COVID only makes this all feel more real. But there's also the violence aspect. In Spring 2015, in my senior year of high school, my school was under lockdown for about 6 hours due to a gun situation. No one got hurt, but that day, my first-period class, that I got stuck with, was mostly made up of underclassmen, and at 18 years old, I grappled with the fact that as one of the oldest students, it was ethically probably my responsibility to stay calm and protect them, even if that meant my death. And I also texted my family goodbye. About three or four years later, when I was getting my Bachelor's, I was off-campus when a domestic issue happened on campus that led to someone being shot, and my school decided to frame it as a school shooting, And even though I was off-campus, I panicked because one of my best friends was an RA at the dorms there at the time, and I was worried he was in danger from a mass shooter - although it turns out he wasn't even on campus at the time of the incident. I began a draft of my Will and Testament in December 2018. And in December 2019, when I decided to become a college professor, I acknowledged that there is the possibility of a mass shooting happening on campus, and dying because of it. I believe that there will never be gun reform of any kind, especially not in Texas.
I know to you this probably doesn't make much sense at all, but there are times it feels very real to me.
To sum it up, I feel like I'm running out of time, both in the semester and in my life. I worry about whether I'm doing enough and whether I've done enough, and what will my legacy and my impact be.
But, to connect back to our title, I think we might all be in a similar place - and no, I don't mean contemplating a relatively soon death, although maybe I'm not the only one. No, by being in the same place, I mean that I suspect that we're all grappling with the idea that we're almost at the end of the semester (it really has moved too fast), and we're all trying to cope with a reality that's stranger than Alice's Wonderland and characterized by a sense of doom. The year 2020 feels like it should be a comedy movie or TV series about what happens when all the different apocalypses happen at once - I mean, there was the treasons, the wildfires, the threats of WW3, the pandemic, the denial of the pandemic, continuous police brutality, the threat of civil war, an election we all thought was doomed, the murder hornets - man, I forgot about the murder hornets - the point is, we live in a world that's currently defying logic, that doesn't make sense. And here we are, trying to make sense of an insensible world, while getting a Master's degree and being an instructor and/or coach. And because we're teaching during it, we have to be responsible with and towards our students, who are also trying to do college and work and sense-making during a pandemic, but with much less education.
But, I think, as being neurodivergent and #TeachingWhileNeurodivergent, my whole life has been trying to make sense of things that don't make sense to me. So, while there's definitely a lot more stress right now, I think being able to recognize that I have some level of experience here may make me feel less out of my depth. Sure, I'm stressed out, I'm running out of time, but it actually isn't that much different from my state of normal - the stakes are just higher.
I'm sure you're wondering by now: Caitlin, you've talked about time, and Hamilton, and a surprising amount about death - damn, you're darker than I expected, are you okay, do I need to report you to the suicide hotline? - but also, when are you going to get to hope and finish this too-long blog post?
The answers being, yes I'm fine, no, don't report me to the suicide hotline, I currently don't want to die right now and it's great, and as for hope, we're going to get into it now.
In these last couple of paragraphs, the tone I've really tried to set it is a bit of a "so here we are now, what do I do with all this information, where do I go from here with this established sense of doom?". That may or may not have come through, tone is one of my weaknesses as an autistic person. I think that's going to look different for everyone, since we've all got unique challenges and perspectives and we're all going to make sense of this senseless time a bit differently. But I'm starting to suspect in a lot of ways, it's going to come down to giving hope another shot. And I know that must sound weird coming from me, especially after this post I've just written. I'm not one for hope and faith. That positivity certainly doesn't feel like me. But, I've realized - I've already started giving hope another chance.
Because when I said, "I currently don't want to die right now and it's great", it was the absolute honest truth. And to explain that, we circle back to Hamilton.
In August, one day I was packing to move to my apartment in Denton, and I was singing and jamming along to the Hamilton album on my Spotify account, when all of a sudden, the song "Wait For It" came on. "Wait For It" is one of the big numbers/themes of Aaron Burr, the narrator and major villain. Before this day, Burr was not that compelling of a character to me. "Wait For It" is all about Burr's philosophy of essentially waiting for the right moment and concealing his thoughts and opinions until he's ready to make his move - "I'm not standing still, I am lying in wait" - but I relate far more to Hamilton's decisiveness and opinionatedness. So despite that I enjoyed the chorus, I didn't care that much about "Wait For It" until that day - that day it hit different. The song's chorus are mostly the same with slight differences, being that in each one Burr talks about a different force of nature - love, death, life - and at one point he essentially compares Alexander Hamilton to these forces of nature. The last one he mentions is life, and the lyrics at the end of the chorus were the lyrics were the ones that hit different:
And if there's a reason I'm still alive
When so many have died
Then I'm willin' to—
Wait for it...
I had an epiphany right there in my bedroom. Every time I wanted to die, really wanted to, I also always wanted some miraculous reason to live, and the immediacy was important. I never found an immediate reason to live, or why I should stay alive. I always ended up living because I'd get too scared and guilty to die. But what if there was a reason beyond cowardice - or that reason that I was supposed to be alive caused my cowardice, which kept me alive. I don't believe in fate or destiny, but what if there was some sort of potential or reason why I kept failing to end my life? This has eventually involved into an understanding that I don't have to be in a rush to die or to justify my existence, and if there's some sort of reason or greater purpose for my still being alive, I can find it at the pace that it will come. I don't need some sort of instant gratification. And so I now have the quote "if there's a reason I'm still alive when so many have died then I'm willin' to wait for it" on the lock screen on my phone, so every time I touch my phone, I remember the promise I made to myself to choose to not want to die and to actively go against any and all thoughts of suicide, even intrusive thoughts. I've slipped up a couple of times, but this promise is still helping me push it away easier than I did before. If there's really a reason I'm still alive, I'm willing to wait for it. And I didn't realize it before, but it's hope.
I've had some interesting thoughts about hope since class with Dr. Ahmed tonight - well, I guess last night, I started this while it was still Monday the 9th, but at this point it's past 1 AM on Tuesday the 10th. I wrote it down and posted it on a Tumblr post, which I'll copy here.
So I just got done with class today and we were talking about collective emotions and how they can affect a society and a social climate and two of the ones that my professor talked about were fear and hope, and the discussion about them was really enlightening. He said that in research we've found that fear is a lot stronger/more powerful because fear can come as a response to a situation we've evaluated, but it can also come from a conditioned or instinctive response, so we can have fear without needing to think about it - but hope is a cognitive process combined with positive emotion, which means that we have to actively think through and evaluate a situation and choose to find hope or be hopeful. In other words, we have to be open to the possibility of hope. And I name this as personally enlightening because it really supports the way I've processed fear and hope my entire life. Even excluding anxiety, I can remember a lot more times I've responded with fear than with hope. Hope has never been something that's come easy for me. And apparently, that's what hope is - it's not easy because it's a process. And so it's easy to see why me and others who can have the "why bother?" attitude towards things that seem out of reach or impossible don't experience hope often. To find hope, you have to believe in the possibility that it can exist for you in that moment before you can even do the cognitive work of finding it. Which is easy to believe when you're happy, but you never need hope when you're happy. You don't go looking for hope when everything's fine and dandy. Hope requires belief, which I break down to the logic/knowledge that you already have that supports the belief, and faith, which is what's unknown but you feel/trust might be true, that you bet/gamble is true. And I trust my family, my friends, but I have never been a person that had much faith in anything, especially not religion or humanity. So if my mindset leaves me discouraged or unwilling to start the process of hope, if I feel like trying to find hope is a waste of my time and energy, of course I'm rarely if ever going to experience hope.
Hope is a process, and hope is a state of mind, and it's one that's hard to develop and hard to hold onto when you feel like you're running out of time. But being neurodivergent requires work, and #TeachingWhileNeurodivergent is a process as well. So if this is true, and if my commitment to being willing to wait for it is also hope, then hope isn't as far out of reach as I think it is, yes?
So - it's the last month of the semester. I feel like I'm running out of time in two ways, but we're all running out of time to get things done for the semester. And, we're all trying to rationalize and make sense out of a less-than-sensible, illogical, irrational, disturbing, fearful year. But though we might be driven to instinctually fear and worry, and though it might feel like the end is nigh, I wonder if there is some solace in recognizing that we're struggling to make sense of who we're supposed to be and what we're supposed to do in a stressful time that doesn't make much sense.
And so, though I rarely give advice on the blog, I think I might actually have something decent here for once: if you're feeling overwhelmed, and you feel like you're running out of time, and you're trying to figure out what you're doing - pretend that you are #TeachingWhileNeurodivergent, and every day, you have to puzzle out and make meaning of a world that you don't understand. But because you are #TeachingWhileNeurodivergent, that's just another part of the work, another part of life, and so, maybe it's okay that not everything makes sense - what you do know is that you're running out of time, and so you need to do something about it! And that can be hope. It can be hope that even in this stressful moment, when you're worried that you're running out of time, you can still do something, you can make it to the end of the semester, you can have your legacy and your impact. Hope is not easy, hope is a process, hope is a choice. And hope is key to your legacy, your impact. You only have the now, and everything else comes later. At the end of Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, in his last soliloquy right before he dies, finally comes to understand what legacy really means, and he says "Legacy. What is a legacy?/It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see/I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me". We do our best with what we have, we hope that what we've done makes an impact, we hope we've done enough. But how people perceive us and how people remember us might not be things that we ever noticed or tried to do, but what our words and actions influenced, and what opportunities and impacts we left in our wake. And I think that's what hope does. Hope is the decision to believe that the future can be better. Even the whole idea that you can leave behind a legacy and an impact is hope. It's hope to believe that even in this senseless time, even when we're running out of time, what we do matters. So. You wanna make it to the end of the semester, you wanna succeed, you wanna feel like you've done enough, you wanna give hope another shot?
All you gotta do is write like you're running out of time.
