You won't want me with a red pen, will you?

It's nearing June (well it's not, tomorrow is just the first day of February). And my mom has been talking non-stop (okay, not so non-stop, she has to eat and yell at my brother too) about me applying to schools.

As a teacher.

She's out of her mind, yes I know. She's way out of it, you must know.

Okay, here's the deal. I don't have anything against teachers. I don't even have anything against being one. I respect them. Definitely, I owe them a lot. It was a teacher who was first to ever say I could write. It was a teacher who ever told me cheating, in any form, degrades a person--and made me believe. It was a teacher who comes home every night and become my mother. Practically, I have a whole bunch of teachers for relatives.

But to be one? If you know me, no matter how short-lived or wrongly-impressed you have been about me, you would know that me teaching isn't going to do the world any good.

I am refusing to be a teacher in the same way and for the same reasons that medicine refuses me to be a doctor--the profession is about other people's lives and they're better off without me speeding them off to the opposite of positive.

Teaching is a noble profession, we have been told that forever. And I do believe it is. Because it touches lives. It changes lives. A teacher can make or break a person, with a class card or a simple red pen. A teacher's words are something a kindergarten takes home with him and lives on. Sometimes, because the teacher says homework has to be done before cartoons, even if the mother allows cartoons to come before homework, a child chooses the notebook instead. But more than anything, a teacher makes students understand why they have to do something and why they cannot have another thing--like a parent.

I am not ready to be like that. I don't think I'll ever be ready. I can't make myself believe I'm worthy of being listened to or of being thought of when someone is making a life decision. I can go around being a boss, telling people what to do, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure I want those orders sticking with them even after they've left the office. I don't want to hold lives on my hands because I am nowhere near holding mine good enough.

In other words, I am too wrecked to become someone's teacher.

So forget the fact that maybe I just want to do something nobody else in my family does. Forget the fact that maybe I just want to try where I'll be good at and not simply succumbing to what my immediate society demands. And forget the fact that maybe profession is the one field I would really hate to be similar with my mother over.

My own person believes I won't do teaching justice. In fact, I might actually ruin it.