My I's

Gray skies are gonna clear up-I
I was sitting next to David—a college sophomore with a dark side persona. We often butted heads in class, arguing over Aristotle or Nietzsche. This particular afternoon, I noticed my name written in his notebook. “Jeta is soooo optimistic” was scrawled across his class notes. I left the class fuming, venting to one of my friends. I felt like he was trivializing me, turning me into some naïve neophyte rather than a thoughtful deep-thinker who just happened to have a positive take on life.
It’s only been the last few years that I’ve begun to ease off my defensiveness of this characteristic and started to admit to myself some of the weaknesses that accompany my optimism—blindness and repression. In my defense, my whole family is like this. I think the source of this is my grandmother—the undeniable cathedral of our family. She was raised in the Depression in rural Oklahoma, and she’s the toughest person I know. But, she’s also the type with no time to dwell on a somber thought. Anything melancholy is pushed to the side, and we push forward full steam ahead, covered in a protective layer of positivity.
In my academic work, I often find this to be a positive feature—a belief that it will all work out in the end can be quite helpful when you’re waist deep in a 20-page paper. The limitation of course is the blindness—the inability to acknowledge and address the weaknesses that may be right in front of my face. This tendency to push forward in positivity may mean that problems or issues get ignored. In my research, I know this is something I have to be conscientious of, keeping my eyes open to problems, being willing to be honest with myself that they are there, and having the courage to address them.
Teacher Guilt-I
In some ways, I feel like every year of teaching is an effort to make up for my first, to make amend s for those colossal failures. Somehow, it feels like if I can become a stronger, more thoughtful, more impassioned educator, I can compensate for the disservice I did to those children in my first class. Partially rooted in my Catholic upbringing, I have a tremendous guilt for failed obligations or unfinished duties. Even as I have been planning my residency project, I can feel myself thinking of my students from my first year, how I could have better served them, how those students could have benefited from what I now know.
I know that I have to be aware of the personal stake that I have both in this project and in this study. My emotional investment in this project will bring perseverance and passion to this subject matter, but it may also cloud my judgment. This desire to make up for something I failed at means I’m yearning for success, unwilling to accept failure. As a qualitative researcher attempting to study things “as they are,” I need to open myself up to whatever may come rather than what will fill a hole in myself.