For a long time, spring was my season of anniversaries. It was in March of 2014 that I sold my first novel; two years and a few months later, in May of 2016, I quit my day job to write full time. So during the back half of last year I kept saying, “I’ve been freelancing for almost ten years. Basically ten years. I mean, like, nearly a decade, right?”

Unsaid, underneath that assertion: increasingly, I think I might never make it the rest of the way there.

It was a brutal year, work-wise. It felt like everything I touched unraveled. Publications kept shuttering, and meanwhile the projects I did have stalled or disappeared. Budgets froze; editors told me they’d have an assignment for me on Monday and then wrote back to say sorry, they’d actually meant more like some Monday. Eventually. I was running out of money, and then I was out.

I started telling people I had to find a new job mostly as a way of trying to get myself to hear it. “Every time you lose something, an opportunity, it’s because it’s being cleared away to make room for something else, something bigger,” T said.

“Well,” I responded, my voice more manic with every setback, “let me tell you then, whatever’s coming had better be REALLY FUCKING BIG.”

I don’t know if I was manifesting or daring the universe or what, but that’s how I found myself in charge of the grades and minds and comma usage of sixty-some teenagers: fielding parent emails, attending staff meetings and department meetings and team meetings, brainstorming how to evade AI. Photocopying excerpts from Joan Didion and Cathy Park Hong and Hanif Abdurraquib, trying to explain Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes, the meaning of a change in POV, why water so often symbolizes loss and forgetting. I taught my students the Madonna-whore complex, Chekhov’s gun, that Moses couldn’t enter the promised land. The words ebullient and prairie and heteroflexible. In the early weeks I came home empty, just turned inside out. I never decided to nap, exactly; sleep came on like the tide, and all I could do was to make sure I was horizontal by the time it overtook me.

I wrote about this a little bit, early in the semester. This work is so, so big. In retrospect— and I am sorry for two ocean metaphors this close together, but what can you do— last year feels like the moments before a tidal wave: water sucking back off the beach, revealing and revealing, before it roared back to swallow me. Since then there has been nothing to do but kick my legs and try to keep my head above the waves.

Teaching high school— talking to teenagers— makes you feel like Cassandra sometimes. It doesn’t matter, I keep telling them, about their grades and where they’re going to college. What they think they’re going to study. Or, it matters, but you don’t know how it matters yet.

They do not believe me, and why should they; I never believed anyone who told me similar things in these same classrooms, more than twenty years ago now. But god, things do change shape on us. God, do I keep getting surprised.