The Resolution
As a teacher, my new year starts and ends in May. While I attempt to turn off my teacher brain for a few days, it inevitably goes immediately to what I’ll be working on for the next school year. I do like to reflect on the end and beginning of the calendar year, much like most, and I try my best to set goals for myself and strive to reach them (and of course force my students to create goals and work towards them as well). The new year really is an arbitrary thing, different cultures have different dates and mindsets as well, but the important thing about it is this idea of a fresh start. Granted, the joke of messing up on the first day and “better luck next year” always comes to mind, but I think that we as people need that chance to start over, even if the previous year wasn’t so bad.
Enter 2020.
Now, I am well aware that just because 2021 has begun that all of the issues of 2020 would not just magically disappear (a girl can have dreams!), but the world really needed this re-start. We have been through so much more than most of us could have imagined with this pandemic and even though, respectively speaking, there are people who have dealt with worse, the majority of us have never lived through anything like this before and couldn’t possibly have been prepared.
I joined Creators Assemble in 2020 because everything was falling apart around me with the lack of knowing what was going to happen, I’m a planner by nature, and it was hard to feel a kind of purpose. Would we be going back to work? Would we be teaching online? If we go back, how in the world are we going to socially distance ourselves? Will we get sick? Will we potentially pass that on? Would our own kids get sick? What happens if we need a sub? How are my students doing? Are they going to get through this? And so the spiral continues... The uncertainty of everything has made us slightly crazy, and while I do truly believe we can come out of this stronger, it doesn’t make it suck any less.
So the new year has happened, I watched the weirdest NY Ball Drop I’ve ever seen, and thought about what kinds of resolutions I should come up with this time around. And really what it comes down to, is how can I help? How can WE help? In all honesty my family got through this ok, we never lost our jobs (thank goodness!) and our district put our health first, we’ve really managed to get through the brunt of everything relatively unscathed. And no, Universe, that is not an invitation to mess with me... Now that I can reflect, what can I do? Creators Assemble had, and has as it’s still going, the most amazing project working with Make a Wish to turn kids into superheroes and help them see themselves as exactly that: SUPER. It was such a fulfilling thing to watch unfold (and the final products were beautiful) and I am incredibly proud to have been part of a community who would create hope like that. And that’s really the great thing about creators, they can make whatever pops into their heads just...appear. That’s what we’re hoping to keep doing, creating a better world for these kids, and for ourselves. The projects that we have to look forward to this new calendar year all fall in that same line: creating and helping, and helping to create. Our small crew has grown with so many incredible people in all kinds of professions volunteering their precious free time to get right back on those Zoom calls and help out to try and create something great. In all of my exhaustion of life and work and my endlessly energetic children, the idea that something I’m working on could possibly help make someone’s day, or someone’s situation just a little bit better, or help someone in anyway, gives me that second wind.
My New Year’s Resolution is this: find a way to help. Even if it’s indirectly, or something I’m fully a part of, as long as I can help I will be happy. If you’re interested in helping, throw us an email, let us know. Every little thing counts, and if we’ve learned nothing from 2020, we really need to look out for each other.
Happy New Year! (And happy 2nd semester to all of my teacher peers out there, we can do this!!)
- Tiffany Dolven-Strang, Creators Assemble! Secretary