Each month, author Jess Cleeves shares 12 of her most important points of advice on reclaiming passion.
Growing up is inevitable. Becoming an Adult is a choice.
Excerpt from Planning to Stay:
Growing up is inevitable. Becoming an Adult is a choice. Many people confuse the two, as this isn’t an area our public, secular culture invests much, so we’ll explore the difference. From here on out, we’ll use lowercase adult to describe someone who is simply physically grown and temporally mature, and we’ll capitalize Adult to describe someone who has done the additional internal work of figuring out who they are, who they want to be, and how they’ll behave to stay in alignment with those truths.
Educators are structurally permitted, even encouraged, to skip becoming Adults because they step immediately from the role of student to the role of teacher. By definition, the teacher is an Adult, right? Unfortunately, no. Lots and lots of us are just adults; being a teacher is a role, and only a role. Many of us educators confuse the role for our whole identity without figuring out who we are separate from our roles. This sets us up to have really high expectations of ourselves—or at least expectations that overly align with one part of our lives, often at significant cost to other parts of our lives. …
Excerpt from Planning to Stay © 2022 Jess Cleeves.
