still i am learning

I like to entertain this extended fantasy where I go back and teach a life skills and leadership class at my old high school. I imagine myself moving desks into a circle, dimming the overhead lights, setting up a vanilla Wallflower haven safe from the rest of the world. This is how you make a decent spaghetti sauce for $5. This is how you register to vote. This is why you should open a savings account even if you’re babysitting for nine bucks an hour, and even if your savings account is a peanut butter jar under your bed.

I’d make them bring in newspaper articles for current events discussion. I’d have them all share their favorite songs. My outfits would be impeccable every school day, because frankly that is what would have gotten my respect and admiration when I was fifteen, and while I am not so old and doddering now that I imagine it would be anything like that easy to earn these girls’ attention, this is my daydream and anyway anyone who thinks good shoes don’t help virtually any cause is kidding themselves.

I’d have them write letters to female politicians. I’d assign them Brown Girl Dreaming and A Nun on a Bus. This is what you do if your boyfriend wants to have sex and you don’t want to. This is what you do if your boyfriend wants to have sex and you do too. This is what you do if you don’t want a boyfriend at all but you can’t stop looking at the girl in front of you and one row over, the dark waterfall of her hair.

The final project for Life + Leadership with Katie Cotugno would be to get up in front of the class and teach something—anything—that the other girls might not already know how to do. This is how you say I love you in Cantonese. This is how you make a fishtail braid. This is how you slay a dragon, train for a marathon, negotiate a corporate merger.

This is how you become the kind of person you think you might like to be.

My resolutions for 2015 are almost laughably simple: make my coffee on the weekdays instead of buying it on the way to the red line. Stop wasting so much food. But my goals are perpetual and enormous and exciting: to be the kind of person I wanted to teach me when I was in high school. To be the kind of person who could possibly teach other girls how.