This was the thought that I couldn’t control. This was the thought that would cause me to start crying and collapsing inward whenever anything didn’t go as expected. This was the thought that caused me to be nostalgic and constantly referencing when I lived in London and worked in publishing, or when I lived in St Andrews and was an English, History, and Film major with blue hair, dyed pink armpits, and a column in the local magazine.
There are two stories I tell about why I left London and publishing.
The short story is that I realized that I wanted to become a teacher, and decided to move home to LA to change careers.
The long story is that after a series of traumatic experiences that I did not have the safety, support, and skills to process – I chose to return to live with my parents in Los Angeles to heal.
The trauma I experienced:
- Being physically and emotionally betrayed by three out of three of my boyfriends (2015, 2016, and 2018)
- witnessing the Grenfell Tower Fire
- hearing stories from friends who witnessed London Bridge Knife Attack, and being a few streets away (2017)
- having a ‘blurred-line’ rape experience (2017)
- work-place bullying situation (2018-2019)
- family evacuated in the Woolsey and Thomas Fires and friends whose houses burnt down (2018)
- friend who was neighbors with the sheriff Ron Helus and a friend who dated the person who was a vet with PTSD Ian David Long involved in the Thousand Oaks Borderline Shooting
- experiencing secondary trauma while serving as a teacher for Action for Education on Samos & Chios hearing the stories of people fleeing Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and other places. I know the people in this New Yorker article and organized the London exhibition for Refugee Week. (2019)
It was a long journey with lots of denial, as I really thought that I could handle it on my own – and did not need help. It was only after moving to Greece and working at a summer camp from Hell did I finally give up.
“Okay, I don’t got this. I’m going home to reflect.”
I decided to move to Greece to help people seeking refuge and asylum in humanitarian crisis situations as I found that the one thing that comforted me during the wildfire and mass shooting was that it was being documented heavily in the news and that I could go home if I wanted to. I thought of the people who could never go home because their houses were destroyed or their was famine or civil war. I thought of the people whose traumas were not being documented in the news and thus as if they were not happening.
I felt called to go and support those people, to bear witness to their struggle, as W.S. Merwin says in his poem “Good People”, that a good person would “try to stop the bleeding/for example with their own hands”.
I went and witnessed and tried to save the world, but then I realized that the problem was very large and complicated and had been created over decades if not centuries, and would take decades if not centuries to resolve (if ever) and that a 25 year old unemployed person with no money could not resolve this conflict by herself. This problem was going to take a lifetime, maybe more, and lots of engaged people working together. I could do more help going back to Los Angeles and working to improve America then I could on this island in the middle of the Aegean Sea where I knew basically no one.
Thus I returned to LA with all those things to process.
I came back home to be taken care of by my family and heal to figure out what I wanted to do next. What was supposed to be a few months turned into three years; the COVID pandemic started six months after I returned.
As my little sister said, “Wow Sammy – something really bad must have happened for you to not leave the nest for so long.”
Yeah- some really bad things did happen, and I was traumatized.
But I processed what happened to me, I went to therapy, I read self-help books, and I created a new Sammy, a stronger one. Sammy 2.0. Sometimes, as my friend Brian and I discussed – you just need to burn it all down, and rise like a phoenix (just like the mascot of my second high school the High School at Moorpark College!). So maybe I’m on Sammy 3.0.
Before I started as a teacher at Emily Dickinson High, I would have described my self as: happy, optimistic, caring, friendly, very social, outgoing, enjoyed going to parties and poetry events and volunteering in the local community, flexible, silly, creative, competent, hard worker, easy to work with, team player, excited about life and going on adventures, passionate, fun, light
When I decided to call it quits as a teacher, to give up, to fail, to burn out, I described myself as: miserable, pessimistic, stays at home, rigid, difficult to work with, irritable, tired, easily overwhelmed, making lots of mistakes and not able to follow through on things, defensive, resentful, angry, heavy
I hated myself. I hated my life. I hated who I become. I felt miserable.
Throughout this process of acceptance and transformation, many people asked me, “But do you still want to be a teacher?”
I do. I still feel so strongly called into the classroom, to share my love of reading and writing and my knowledge of literature, health, and the world to prepare our children for the 21st century.
I believe strongly that Emily Dickinson High is a toxic workplace for many teachers, however, through administrative neglect and lack of teacher unity, my problems fell through the cracks, and that any teacher in my situation would have burnt out.
I write this and share this because I do not want to just run away from this problem and let the system harm another innocent new teacher, I want them to listen to me and to make changes to prevent this from happening to someone else.
One day, when I have more power, I will make sure that no one has to experience what I experienced. As Superintendent Carvalho said in his address to the International Newcomers of LAUSD, I will leave the door open behind me instead of continuing the cycle of oppression.
I told them multiple times over the years in emails, in person, in my behavior about the problems that I needed support. They respect my requests or give me the power to solve my own problems. They dismissed me.
I have found that when you are a 5’2″ white girl who weighs 90lbs and looks like a teenager with a high-pitched voice that comes out all singsongy in a valley-girl/Scottish accent, people have a hard time taking you seriously and treating you like an adult. That is why again and again, I have turned to writing to get people to listen and respect me as well as public media.
This is why I wanted to be a teacher of writing, to share with others this tool for survival. Often people question whether the students respect me when I look the same age as them. I always respond, “My students respect me, because I respect them. You don’t only respect people who look old in society, right?”
As Peter Blyshe Shelley said, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Oh don’t I know it.
Well I won’t be dismissed anymore. Finally, they are actually starting to listen to me. I mean – if you just stop going to work or doing any work or responding to emails or messages or submitting your grades on time which affects your teacher attendance rate, budget for paying for subs, and student grades that determine college outcomes and parent satisfaction, it’s kind of hard to dismiss that person…
I told them I couldn’t do it, and then I tried to do it anyway – disrespecting my own needs and voice. And then, like I told them, I couldn’t do it. So I stopped doing it. I stopped trying to do it, pretending I could do it; hiding I couldn’t do it. I just stopped.
My line had been crossed so so many times to the point that I had the same thought three times, “This burnout experience is so much worse than my rape experience, and that this was a type of rape, professional rape.”
My body was not consenting and now my body was not cooperating. I felt like a toddler who had nearly drowned in a pool three times, and yet my parents kept forcing me to go back in and try swimming without giving me swimming lessons or fucking floaties.
More than that, I had become aware that the other kids in my grade were being asked to swim in the shallow end and I was being forced into the deep end with two weights (aka my co-teachers) holding on to me while trying to swim.
I had noticed this difference in my second year and asked for them to allow me the same grace as the new teachers and give me a year in the shallow end, and then I would happily go back to the deep end. They refused.
I asked again, this time less nicely. As my fourth year began, I started having what felt like PTSD. I was fucking paralyzed. Anytime I tried to work, I just started panicking and crying. It happened for four days. I could get nothing done. I decided instead of trying to prepare for the year, which I concluded from rational thought deduced from three years of prior experiences that I was destined to fail, instead I decided to focus on changing the work load so that I could be successful.
I spoke to my UTLA rep – but he said I had no power and got really defensive and invalidating when I talked about my personal health symptoms caused by this job.
“Maybe you’re not strong enough to be a teacher,” he said.
“Maybe you’re not strong enough to be a teacher.”
My mom helped me write an email citing the contract stating that this was against my contract and that I did not consent to the workload.
All three female assistant principals called me in and spoke to me saying there was nothing they could do, and that this would be my line as long as I stayed at Dickinson High, and that, “Maybe I wasn’t cut out for high school because having three preps is normal and almost all the teachers have it except for new teachers as in the contract [which I didn’t get in my first two years which is the contract!!!?!?!].”
“Maybe I wasn’t cut out for high school because having three preps is normal and almost all the teachers have it except for new teachers as in the contract [which I didn’t get in my first year?!?!].”
I felt powerless, I felt gaslit. I decided the best thing I could do, given the school year started in two days, was focus on surviving the year and do everything I could to change schools. I decided the best thing I could do was share only what was necessary with those people and try to keep everything good enough so they’d give me a reference letter and let me leave.
This didn’t work because they were the ones responsible for my problem, the ones causing it, and the only ones with the ability to improve it. I kept thinking it was me, and that I wasn’t strong enough. But in reality, I wasn’t supported enough by those I needed to rely on to function within the system, the people whose job it was to mediate and advocate for the teachers, the students, and the parents.
This powerlessness and shame I carried home with me after that meeting, and because I couldn’t handle it, I asked my partner to help me carry it. He couldn’t carry it, and so we broke up.
Maybe there were other issues in our relationship, maybe we were truly not compatible and wouldn’t have worked – but it doesn’t even matter. I met him in the middle of my story, when I was in grad school and working full-time- I moved three times while we were together, I was reaching the climax of my plot line. When he expressed concern about my strength and commitment to teaching and my students, I tried to explain that he met me in the middle of my story, and it would be over soon. And that I had been fighting for years, years! And that I was tired now, and I needed his support.
He left right before the climax, he has popped in for moments in the falling action – and now that things are resolving, now that I am finally human again and not in survival mode – he is gone. He left me when I needed him, when I was falling apart, and now he will not be here to celebrate when I have resolve my problem and finally move into the next plot line.
This has happened to me in multiple relationships – when I start having mental health challenges and need their support, they abandon me. I have started to think that my mental health challenges are caused by self-abandonment and it is only by being abandoned by my romantic partners and other relationships (as well as abandoning relationships myself – I changed high schools and moved to the UK for 7 years for a reason!!), and being forced to take care of myself that I have found my strength, my inner power, the gold at the bottom of my soul.
In these moments, I tell myself, “This is a requirement; in order to be in a healthy, loving adult relationship, I need to be able to love myself and create a healthy adult relationship with myself.”
“This is a requirement; in order to be in a healthy, loving adult relationship, I need to be able to love myself and create a healthy adult relationship with myself.”
In moments when I have been at my lowest, I have learned to give myself the love I need, as well as find those able to give it to me, and rise up again. I am like a vase that has been shattered over and over again, and each time I glue myself back together with gold. Now I am starting to become more gold than porcelain. This is a Japanese artform called Kintsugi that I find inspiring and a beautiful metaphor for what I have experienced.
I am grateful for these experiences so that I could learn how to love myself even when I am at my most desperate.
From these experiences and others, I have realized that one committed life partner is not strong enough to endure the journey of life. Even a nuclear family is not enough. It requires an extended family, a community, a civilized society. (What does it mean to be civilized?)
Also, the dating process in the 21st century needs to be updated just as much as our education systems and family systems need to be.
This is why I have paused dating. I wanted a boyfriend so there would be one person who understood me in the world, but even when they were identified as “boyfriend”, they still never understood me. Some of my friends do sometimes and at moments I felt they truly did, and that has been blissful. With ‘growing up’, we have been dispersed across the world making it so we cannot help each other and understand each other’s situations the way we once did, and it makes me so sad.
Even the friends and family I have in LA feel dispersed, living in different neighborhoods and cities so that it is not convenient to be together. Requiring gas and money and time and a car and logistical discussions to see each other (Although LA is one of the worst planned urban cities in the US, making things even harder).
From talking to my friends about this feeling, we have started to accept that this is what is normal now. This is what it means to be an adult, to no longer be in school or college.
All I have ever wanted is to be understood – that is why I write and started writing. Even my friends say that I am confusing sometimes, and I don’t know why I am the way I am, but this is the way I am and sometimes I need help being understood – but people are always in a rush- they don’t want to understand, they want to be entertained.
They see a manic pixie dream girl and want to see only that, not the broken, lonely person inside.
Actually, I do know why I am confusing and have a hard time communicating and being understood, and why I am so lonely inside.
By the time I started 1st grade I had attended five different schools and lived in two different countries; my first depression was when I was three years old when I started at the American School in London, and then again at four years old when I changed elementary schools in the middle of the year in 1st grade.
I had my brother who was 18 months younger who changed schools with me and thus was one grade below me, but we didn’t get along very well. We always had to play by his rules if we played, and if I didn’t play by his rules or if he didn’t win, he would throw a temper tantrum.
I often would end our sessions trying to play running to my room to cry, and writing down what I was feeling.
In one of my kindergarten assignments I wrote, “I love writing. I just have so many thoughts in my head and I have to put them all down.
Thus, early on it’s clear that I struggled to communicate about my needs and boundaries, and being able to play healthily with other people.
This doesn’t seem to be about work, but it is. Everything is connected and the boundaries between work and personal life are liminal.
Relationships are work. Maintaining a home is work. Managing a social life is work. Getting your needs met is work. Cooking and meal planning is work. Teaching students at a school and preparing curriculum is work. We are part of a system that is interwoven and we all rely on each other. That is what it means to be part of a society.
Other people help me meet my other needs so that I can prioritize teaching and raising their children for them. And yet, that is not what is happening.
I am taking care of their kids, and no one is taking care of me. I became so broken, I couldn’t take care of myself. Now, I have stabilized, and I am able to take care of myself.
But I am so scared to go back into the pool, and so I must reflect, learn, and communicate about what happened so that history does not repeat itself.
Now that I have stopped crying – I can feel my anger, I wish I had said to them – “Well maybe you’re not cut out to be a UTLA rep, or maybe you’re not cut out to be an admin!”
As stated again, this blovel is focused on teacher burnout. It is holistic and all areas of your life are affected. Everything is connected, but I can only process one area at a time, and also that would be a lot for you to read.
Thus, I am only going to focus on my teacher burnout problems. I have decided to organize them sharing what happened each year; what I wish had happened; and what I have learned; and what resources or supports I wish had existed for me, or how this could have been prevented.
I am prioritizing this because I need to go back to work, I want to go back to work – and I need to start planning my units and lessons again, and I feel blocked to do so until I sit down and work through some of these problems. Even writing reference letters for my favorite students to apply to college feels like an attack right now. I need to do this.
I am at a threshold.
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