Daily writing prompt

What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

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When I was younger, I didn’t think much about legacies. I needed all my energy to go from day to day. At the same time, I wanted to do something big to be known by. I didn’t know what that would be, but I was going to do it. Oh, to be young and bipolar!

In my 50s, I wanted my stories to be my legacy. I still do, but very few people have read them, and they’re not picking up very much traction. So the messages in my stories remain unread, and that will not be my legacy.

I never thought much about my students being my legacy, mostly because I am not a popular teacher. I’m not by any means a bad professor, but since being prescribed meds, I am not the high-energy, zany professor I was before. (I’m also not the depressed professor I was before.) But maybe this is short-changing my abilities and my relationship with my students.

I am now convinced I will never know what my legacy is. Perhaps it will be simply being a kind person. Part of being bipolar and being medicated has been realizing how ordinary a person I am.

Daily writing prompt

What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

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In my writing, in my teaching, and in my everyday life, I espouse the message that diversity in people enriches life.

People have always considered me “different”. Some of this may be because of my lifetime of bipolar disorder, but much of it isn’t. I am not autistic, so it isn’t that. Maybe I’m just “weird”, being creative, not interested in fashion, awkward, a little loud, and as much at home in my round body as my clumsiness will let me be. I dance in the grocery store when nobody is listening, I find humor in absurdity, and I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of edible weeds. Oh, and I write, and writers are weird enough on their own.

I believe the world needs diversity. People need to have different philosophies, different bodies, different colors, different customs, different viewpoints, different orientations, different likes, different loves. If they don’t hurt others, their differences are vital for our human ecosystem. Evolution counts on difference; so does personal growth. We grow by coming into contact with people’s differences, if we’re willing to grow at all.

It’s hard to be different, because people fear differences. I think they most fear being found “wrong” or “inadequate” themselves — “If this other person is okay, does this detract from me?” That’s not how difference works. You be you, and I’ll be me, and the world will be richer.