Hi there! I’m Sammy aka the Burnt Out Bitch. I’m back – again – to speak my truth. I’m currently living in Los Feliz, my dream neighborhood when I was a senior in high school. So much so I even wrote a novel where I imagined my dream life after college and thus my protagonist “Rachel Evens” lived in Los Feliz. I’m living my teenage fantasy, and it’s just as good as I hoped. Which is a relief. Sometimes you have a dream and you live it, and you’re like, what the fuck! This isn’t what I wanted. So I’m relieved that’s not the situation.
That, however, is the situation with teaching. I’m on sick leave until January because I burnt the fuck out as a teacher.
Surprise, surprise! Are you surprised? I know my friend Vicky isn’t. Many of her friends who went into teaching after college have already burnt the fuck out and left the profession. She told me this would happen.
We were at Boulderdash in Thousand Oaks rock climbing, both in transition phases just before the pandemic would change everything.
The thing I love most about my friend Vicky is that she is honest. She cares deeply about her friends, which is why she is honest. As bell hooks says, “Love without honesty is manipulation.” She’s also a lawyer trained at one of the best law schools in the world so that adds a whole other level to her integrity.
“I’m applying to CSUCI for my teaching credential I think. I keep changing my mind, but being a direct support professional pays like $14.50 an hour. Like I made more than that when I was 15 at the Calabasas Pharmacy, and now I have a college degree from the same fucking place as Prince William and three years of work experience, and I make less. Like what the fuck?! How can I be less valuable now!? Teaching is better paid, it’s not my fault that I care about people, not profit.”
Vicky puts her hand on the level 2 rock and says, “Capitalism!” We both sigh, and then she continues, “Look, I know you want to be a teacher and I believe you could be amazing at it, but just so you know – my friends who are teachers have already left. They were miserable. They fucking hated their lives. My ex-boyfriend studied education and went into teaching, now he’s applying to be a nurse. At least they get paid 6 figures and only have to work 3 days a week.”
What she said was disappointing, but I knew it was her truth and I valued it. “Thanks for sharing that, but that won’t be me. This is my calling! I love reading and writing passionately, I’m an extrovert. I worked in Greece with refugee asylum seekers in a humanitarian crisis situation working 11 hour days with teenage boys with severe trauma and PTSD from Palestine and Syria. That was hard. It can’t be worse than that.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Okay, I’m gonna try this one,” and she bouldered on up.
Five years later, Vicky is the queer woman she always knew she was going to be attending drag shows, playing kickball, and working remotely with her pug feeling like she could be doing more.
Me? I’m the burnt out bitch I never thought I’d be watching Desperate Housewives ready to become one; crying almost daily; and waking up at 6am and forcing myself to go to work like someone trying to force their pet to go to the vet.
In my fourth year, I lost control of the pet – the animal inside of me. I couldn’t coax them or bribe them anymore. They kept biting and wouldn’t stop crying, and even the rational part of me started to think that if I kept going to this vet, they were going to kill me. At first I called in sick once a month, then once a week (Tuesdays to avoid the faculty/department meetings – they were bad for my mental health!), and then I just stopped going altogether.
Every day I went, I would have the same negative thought cycle. “I hate this school. I hate my life, I hate who I have become to be a teacher.”
Ugh, it felt like I was wearing a crib mobile singing those treacherous words until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t put the mobile back on my head and go to work. The broken system had broken me, and now I was so sick, I couldn’t leave the house. The school system had fucked my brain, and now it needed to be unfucked.
The last time I went to work was November 6th. It was only on Friday, November 15th that I officially got the doctor’s note. I’m on sick leave until the end of the semester.
Now I have a new crib mobile song. “It is over. I am safe. It is over. I am safe.”
And yet, it is not over. As of right now, I am going back to work at the same school January 5th to teach.
After visiting my doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, and two different therapists about treatment plans and supports for a burnt out teacher (again very common!), turns out – there are no specific supports for me that they can provide other than therapists who also used to be teachers and burnt out. Even telling admin and human resources that I’m burnt out – they send me a hotline or they don’t respond.
Okay, five working days later they did respond and suggested the hotline or to go to my union, who I already went to and they didn’t respond. I went to my rep but they got defensive and stated they are only responsible for upholding the contract. I even googled, “teacher burn out Los Angeles support group.” Nothing!!
In a school district of 36,000 teachers, it is fucking shocking that there are no supports or resources for burnt out teachers.
After being offered an out-patient program where I have go to to therapy for five hours a day for a month or two but like no real explanation of what we will go over, I decided I was better off just designing my own program for myself. I’d been through the healing journey before, and I’d just do what I did last time.
To heal from my rape and workplace bullying experience, I stopped working, wrote the story of what happened to me as truthfully and objectively as possible, and published it on my blog. I called it a blovel. Those memories that would ruminate and spark in my brain whenever brought up became scars, and I was able to move forward with my life.
Thus I’ve decided to write another blovel, although I might call this one a blemoir. We’ll see how much I actually fictionalize. The only reason I called the first thing I wrote a blovel was to protect the guilty. I am tired of protecting the guilty, because they sure as fuck ain’t protecting me.
Now that I’m a teacher with a cleared credential and a Masters, I can use research papers and evidence from my teaching practice to tell you that in order to learn, people need to experience the authentic consequences of their actions and receive feedback. Without this, we are just enabling them instead of empowering them.
Well bro – get ready to be empowered. I’m not burnt out, I am a wildfire.
Here’s what to expect:
First, I’m going to give you a brief overview of most of what I know about how to heal a fucked up brain and how to help someone you love/care about aka Sammy heal it.
Then, I’m going to go year by year through my time a teacher, and then I’ll talk about my plan to rejoin the world having learned what I’ve learned.
I’ve broken it into three parts to follow the three phases of the healing journey as detailed by Dr. Faith G Harper in How to Unfuck Your Brain.
Thankful for you going on this journey with me.
Read the next post in the series:
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