I had my 15 minutes of fame in high school when I was cast as Claire Zachanassian in "The Visit." So I'm good. I had my moment in the sun. I wasn't/am not looking for a spotlight.
When I realized that I was going to need to "go public" to find enough support to have any hope of convincing AISD to change their policy, I thought about remaining anonymous. I even made up a pen name for my blog - Kaydee Pine - not much real significance there, besides the fact that it felt super dorky - or at least, just really not right.
Then a friend on Facebook (cause I asked my fb friends if it was super dorky to use a pen name, because I'm a terribly indecisive person) basically likened being anonymous to nursing in the private room.
That resonated with me, and I scrapped my efforts to move my blog under a nom de plume.
I'm an introvert. I prefer to express myself in writing rather than verbally. In elementary school, kids thought I was a snob. But I was just intensely shy and quiet - I didn't even want to talk to a waiter to order for myself in restaurants. Now, at 36, I can order a meal from a stranger without anxiety, but ask me to give a sound bite to a question on camera - ugh.
So I put off doing a news interview as long as I felt I could, even though I was contacted by a couple of news anchors who wanted to plan for an interview. Then Mel Waxler was quoted in the Austin-American Statesman and I felt our point of view deserved representation in the news media.
I was so stressed when another anchor, Cassie Gallo from KEYE-TV, called unexpectedly and asked if I wanted to do an interview not in a week or two but in 45 minutes. I was so stressed that when my kids went bonkers about me leaving the house without them, I was totally calm.
You know that spectrum of stress responses to your children that starts out at 1 - calm and laid back, then gradually ramps up to 10 - yelling like you're the three-year-old. But when your stress is so intense you speed past 10 and find yourself at 11+ and then - you're all zen.
That's how freaked I was - zen freaked.
I managed to string together enough sentences to not look like an idiot. And here it is, if you didn't catch it on Facebook a week and a half ago:
This links to our YouTube channel, to which you can subscribe.
You can also see it on KEYE-TV's website where there are a handful of comments, and there are many more comments in their Facebook discussion.
I hate that I'm supposed to end blog posts with a question to encourage discussion, but I do what I gotta do. So - how cute is my baby?!
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