Jessica Inclan | If The Skin Fits, Wear It

What has amazed me about the past couple of years is how I have managed to
finally gain some perspective on myself and my life. What's appalling about
this observation is that I used to think I had this perspective. I thought that
I knew what I was doing and why and how. I thought I had things under control;
I imagined I was in charge. I thought I knew what in the heck I was doing.

Now, however, I realize that I have and had some behaviors and needs and
feelings and thoughts, but I don't imagine anymore that I have control of it of
all. I just sort of "see" myself and know a little more about what I do. I also
know that in another 47 years (should I make it that long) I will be able to
say the same thing about my current self that I just said about my younger self.

But what I can say is that I feel so much better in my skin. My skin fits me
now. I know my skin. My skin may not be the newest and best in style and
function, but hey, it's mine and I seem to "get it" now.

This stunning realization came again to me this past month as I have been in
the process of interviewing teaching candidates. A weird, paranormal experience
occurs sometimes as I watch the interviewees at the end of the table: I see
myself, all those years ago, at a similar table in another room on the campus,
answering similar questions. As they try to give good answers, I hear my own.
As they smile and make eye contact, I see myself trying to do the same. I see
their need and desire and thought and hope and fear. I see all the work that
they did to get to this spot--their education and, frankly, all the driving to
and fro colleges to teach a class here and a class there; and I see mine. I am
brought back to that time in my life, the two small children, the desperation
to get somewhere so I could try to become someone.

And then when I was offered the job, the becoming someone didn't happen as I
thought it would. No one handed me the becoming someone pamphlet. The job, the
arriving at one place, was just one of the many becomings I would have to go
through to get to this place where I realize I don't quite have a handle on it,
but it's manageable.

So interviewing others has become an interviewing of my own past. There I am,
reviewing, really, the past, projecting into the future for them and for me. I
think of the next twenty years, some of which will not be at this college, some
of which I will no longer be teaching, at least in this way. One of these
interviewees will be interviewing others, perhaps, for the next twenty years of
work, everyone's lessons and lives changing.

Even in the middle here, it seems exciting, this movement of life, this knowing
that the becoming is always becoming, that there is no one answer, anywhere.
That it's all a process, a continuum, a moving into and beyond and through, a
prepositional feast of life