What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
I can’t hear/read the word “legacy” and not think of Alexander Hamilton’s obsession with his legacy. At least, according to Lin Manuel Miranda.
Of course, he thought of his legacy at the most inopportune times:
What was his actual legacy by the way? Was it his financial system that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t undo if he tried? And he tried? O.k., I’m done with the Hamilton references. I’m a big fan if that’s not obvious. But that song at the end really does have a profound meaning, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” That’s honestly what I want my legacy to be. I want my life story to have an impact. To be fair, my life isn’t something that would make money at the box office if it was turned into a movie. Compared to other people who have done amazing things in their lives and survived experiences much worse than mine, I’m really not that different from anybody else.
Despite that, I have learned a lot about life going through the things I have and surviving it all. I want to share my lessons with the world. I want people, maybe even just one person, to be inspired by something I’ve said. I’m thinking now of what I’ll write and hopefully publish one day, but also, I can’t forget that I was an educator for 19 years. After that many years, odds are that at least some of my students left my class still liking me enough to remember me years later. Maybe that’s part of my legacy.
With the kids I taught, I honestly don’t care if they remember what a gerund is (I had an 8th grade class one year that fought me tooth and nail about that grammar concept. It was a whole thing. Many arguments ensued. Look it up, gerunds are confusing as hell and that one group of kids absolutely hated that lesson). I don’t care if they remember the nitpicky little detailed lessons I taught. Well, I mean I do…hopefully my former third graders still hung onto those multiplication facts I drilled into them each year. I really just want those kids to remember that there was a teacher who cared about them. Not just cared that they got good grades, but cared that they had a good weekend and if they didn’t, I cared enough to listen to them complain about it. I cared. And I loved them. I hope they remember that. What they do with that memory, that’s up to them and I don’t know what could be done with that other than make them smile when they tell their kids about their middle school English teacher who killed 13 goldfish (true story, and totally by accident). Or laugh as they remember their third grade teacher who invited her class to watch her skydive even though she threw up on the way down (another true story. I wrote a whole post about it).
Maybe my legacy with them will simply be warm fuzzy memories. That’s something. In the broader picture, I want my life stories, the ones I didn’t share with my students, to inspire someone to keep going. To know that mental illness is not the end. It is not only survivable, but shouldn’t prevent anybody from leading a productive, happy life.
Maybe I can also inspire someone to be brave enough to quit a toxic job. I did and I will tell anybody who will listen just how amazing it was to do that.
Bottom line, I want my legacy to be the care I showed my students, and the words of my stories that I’ll leave behind. After all, I’ve got 30 years of journals that have lots of stories in them. Who knows how many there will be when it’s my time to leave them behind permanently?
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