venturing backward: responsibility (march 2012; written November 28, 2014)

a post from my old blog “venturing backward”

Valencia visited me in DC during her spring break that year.

I had a spring break because I was a student, of course. But she had a spring break because she was a teacher in an urban district, like I was about to be.

And that scared me.

Because Valencia had always been passionate about urban education and socioeconomic inequality. So she had actually trained to be a teacher in this kind of environment. She had earned a bachelor’s degree to be a teacher. She had worked with students in high-poverty schools in both Detroit and Chicago.

She was qualified.

I had spent almost six years studying international relations. I had driven myself into 80,000 dollars of debt to pursue a foreign affairs career. I had written an 80-page thesis about Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. I had spent working days at a DC think tank writing analyses of energy issues in fucking Central Asia. I had worked for free in Berlin for three months at the U.S. Embassy. That spring, I was working for free in the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Just two years ago, in 2010, I had poked fun at my friend for pursuing a teaching job through Teach For America. And I had devoted countless nights to refining my statement of purpose to get into Georgetown, as if it were life or death.

After all that, I had called my mom in October 2011 to say – “I’m applying to be a high school teacher.”

Because I knew in my heart now, in the aftermath of experience, that this path I was going down at Georgetown was not what I needed. It was not the path that would help me make my dent in the Earth.

And yet, you had to ask - what the hell was I doing?

It seemed reckless. So I kept this whole thing secret from Valencia at first.

When I applied to TFA back in October, I announced it on Facebook, but I blocked her from seeing the status. When I interviewed with TFA in November, I did the same. It wasn’t until January, over breakfast at a diner in Royal Oak, that I came clean and told her everything.

I had always been so intimidated by Valencia. And now here I was trespassing into her turf; here I was, trying to be good at what she had trained for and believed in.

I’m sure she was skeptical of my prospects for success. Still, she seemed very supportive of me abandoning this path and switching over to hers.

In fact, she was in DC the night before I had to take my comprehensive exam for my master’s degree. She convinced me to go out drinking with her and our friend Tori. I went with them - and with a stack of flashcards in my pocket.

I sat at the bar with them and soldiered through several gin and tonics; I slammed down a couple shots that Valencia bought me. I whipped out my flash cards a few times to make sure I remembered all the important foreign affairs scholars and what their articles and arguments were, so I could weave them into my essays.

The next day, with a headache and some nausea, I woke up, walked across Key Bridge, and sat down behind a computer in the testing room. I read the essay prompts. I outlined my answers. And I wrote a couple dozen pages meant to prove I had mastered the Georgetown coursework.

As soon as I could afterward, I met up with Valencia and Tori again. We partied hard that night at Tori’s house in Georgetown. At first, we were going to go to a bar. We even took a cab deeper into DC. Once there, though, we decided we didn’t like the options. And so we took the cab all the way back without ever even going into a bar.

We played drinking games in Tori’s living room for hours. It was a great night.

I tried to get as much advice from Valencia as I could when she was there. But I was so uneducated about teaching that I didn’t even know what to ask.

She told me I could visit her classroom in Michigan that May. She told me she had a friend who had been teaching Earth Science for several years – which terrified me. It meant now I was going to have a chat with a real science teacher… you know, someone who had actually fucking studied science. Someone who would see me immediately as a fraud, as a charlatan.

Because all I had was my notebook full of notes from lectures on Academic Earth.

And just a week or so later I was on a train to New York – to take the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification (MTTC), so I could be certified in Biology and Integrated Science against the odds.

Right before I went, I had a Skype call with a human resources guy from a Detroit school district. I told him what I was going to be teaching. Then I told him about my background. He found it all pretty entertaining. “Why don’t you teach government?”

Well, sir, because Teach For America assigned me to science.

We shared a good chuckle. He seemed like a good guy; I liked him.

That district didn't hire me.

I spent the train ride to New York reading Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I had been reading it for a couple weeks. Sartre proposed that human beings exist in a state of abandonment by God and thus without objective moral guidelines, without destinies, without any objective reasons to do thisinstead of that.

Moreover, he believed human beings do not have an essence that dictates their actions; rather, our actions create our essence. And that we have freedom to craft our own values, to create our own world, to construct our own destinies, to shape our future as a species however we wish.

We could create a world of genocide, war, and inequality – or a world of compassion, redistribution, and love.

And not only could no one could stop us from doing as we pleased.

No one gave a shit. We could do anything we wanted without worrying about any kind of Judgment Day from on high. We could destroy the whole fucking planet, kill each other and slaughter each other, and no one would intervene at any point.

And that meant we were fully responsible for the outcome of our ongoing history.

I liked reading Sartre. For one, I didn’t have any kind of inherent essence that demanded I continue down the path of foreign affairs. Secondly, I had a responsibility to embrace my freedom, to embrace the meaninglessness of Earth, and to fill that void with positive values.

I must not reject this responsibility by believing I had no choice, by believing I could only be what I had heretofore prepared to be.

Because like all of us – I was responsible. Not God. Me. We.

I checked into my hotel near Times Square. I checked my e-mail and saw that I had passed my comprehensive exam “with Distinction.” I thought that was pretty funny.

I met an ex-girlfriend in a park somewhere. She reminded me all about what a shitty and emotionally abusive boyfriend I had been. That was all true.

But I knew that was not my essence. I knew I could choose to be different next time. The actions I pursued in the future would create a new essence. I had freedom; I was responsible for who I was, what I was. I accepted that responsibility.

I got to the MTTC testing center the next morning, in another hotel near Times Square. I took all the tests – Basic Skills, Biology, Integrated Science. They were easy.

I was seated, by chance, next to a cute girl named 👤 who was also going to be in Teach For America. She was basically a philosophy student. We got dinner and I told her about how I was reading Sartre and De Beauvoir. It made me nervous because I knew she knew more about this type of stuff than I did. She’d read way more philosophers than me.

I liked her, but I didn’t know if I’d ever hang out with her again.

On the late-night train back to DC, I finished Being and Nothingness.

In the weeks ahead, my grandparents, parents, and sisters flew out to DC to see me graduate with my expensive, irrelevant degree. I told them that one day I'd go back into international affairs, just because I felt like you had to say that. And I went to a few parties with people from my Georgetown class. I tried to justify my decision to them by crafting a connection between TFA and various international relations careers.

I remember one of my final moments in DC. I stood on Key Bridge in the dark. I stared out over the Potomac at the Washington Monument with its blinking red light at the top.

Looking across the river, I thought then about my first semester as a student at Georgetown. Every day, I would walk from Georgetown to Arlington over this bridge, and I would gaze at that blinking red light.

I had liked to imagine that I had several years ahead of me in DC. That I would have all kinds of professional adventures. That I would meet all kinds of famous, influential people. That I would work for the State Department or the Defense Department or Congress. That maybe one day I’d even be an adjunct professor of international relations at Georgetown, sharing my experience.

All of that was nothingness now. Just figments of the past – not my essence.

A week later, I was sitting in Valencia’s classroom in Michigan. Watching her teach. Feeling impressed by who she was. Meeting a science teacher who worked at her school. Wondering if I’d really be able to do it. Hoping I hadn’t made a mistake.

But knowing I had embraced my freedom to change course. Confident that, in doing so, I had taken responsibility for my own actions. And satisfied that, as an adult member of humanity, I had embraced a share of responsibility for the moral structure of the world we lived in together.