My mind is all over the place and I am overwhelmed and foggy. I’ve been here before, this is a form of decision fatigue caused by the existential crisis I’m having over whether to leave teaching or not.
It’s been a roller coaster.
While I had been instable for a while, teetering on the edge, I fell off the wall on May 15th. I hit my resilience ceiling. I gave up fighting to be a teacher, especially since the person I was fighting against was the administrator responsible for managing me.
I just stopped. I was ready to resign immediately. I felt hopeless. The feeling of despair and powerlessness and betrayal and fear was overwhelming. I wrote my letter of resignation. Then I showed it to a few people, who told me – just contact your psychiatrist and take medical leave. This is a big decision that you have worked nearly six years to accomplish, that you have accomplished.
You are a permanent status teacher with a clear credential assigned to teach English at a school that won “best magnet school in America” in 2023 with a ten minute commute. Why would you leave now?
You’ve just made it.
But I was miserable. More than miserable. I felt like my spirit was being murdered by this school. That it already had.
Instead of resigning, I took medical leave until June 19th and started attending a group outpatient program with 9 sessions.
I am currently on session 6.
I spent the first couple weeks processing what had happened to me and what had caused me to completely give up after years of being resilient and fighting to stay in the classroom, to get to a better school with a more reasonable workload and a supportive team.
On Friday of Week 1 of Project Stability Sammy, I spoke to my principal about the situation. My mom was in the next room to support me if needed. I felt heard and that it went okay.
I requested what I have been requested since my second year teaching when I realized that my workload was not equitable and was in violation of new teacher policies, that I would like to be responsible for two curriculums instead of four.
His response was neutral.
“I’ll do my due diligence.”
“Thank you,” I said, “I know I’m just a number in a large district and that it’s not personal. Thank you for listening.”
Monday of Week 2 I got a voice mail. He said there was a teacher leaving and I could take her schedule, 9th and 10th grade English with special education students. YAY!
I was over the moon!!!! This is what I had been fighting for for years. This was my dream position. I had thought I would have to take a year or two off and then apply around the schools for that role, and now I had it now!! Yay! I was ready to start planning my curriculums and felt completely invigorated!
I called so many people who had been supported me through these challenges on the daily, the people I’ve called venting for years.
On Thursday I checked my email. “The teacher who was leaving isn’t leaving anymore. Your schedule assigned is your current schedule.”
WOW!!! Now I know I am constantly saying things and then saying, “Just Kidding” and now I was being just-kiddinged by my principal.
I first felt sad, then just numb. I texted a screenshot to the family chat. “Fuck”. My mom called. She suggested I call a friend of hers who had worked for the school district for 28 years.
She was helpful. She told me to not give up and that the kids’ need me. She told me other stories of teachers experiencing what I have been experiencing. What you are going through is normal. You will overcome it. You will get through it. You are strong. You can do this. She told me.
After hanging up I went to yoga.
When the class finished, all I could do was laugh. This just felt ridiculous. The universe had a cruel sense of humor I decided.
I was right back where we started. To quit or not to quit? That is the question.
Except now I knew that I still loved teaching and was passionate and excited to create my curriculum and work with students. That wasn’t the problem.
Then I went to my Aunt’s birthday dinner. A lovely dinner.
We talked about Papa Joe, because also during this time – my grandpa Papa Joe passed away. He left this earth on June 5th. I didn’t get to see him in person to say good bye.
I was too overwhelmed by this work situation.
So many things I had missed, so many important life events, birthday parties, weddings, trips, I had missed because of my job as a teacher.
My grandpa Papa Joe taught me how important love is in your life – friends, family, and a partner.
He had great friends, decades of friendship who had accepted him and supported him and loved what he loved. They built cars together and hiked together and biked together and went to the gym together. They had ditched work together.
He had devoted daughters and sisters who visited him even when he told them not to, even when he accused them of using him for his money, even when he threatened to kill himself over and over and over again. They still visited him. They still called him. They still loved him.
At the end of his life, he told me, all he wanted was a partner. Someone there in the room with him going through what he was going through. He just wanted to know that they were there with him. Just someone sitting next to him. They didn’t have to say anything special. Just someone there. He was so afraid of death. He just wanted someone to go through that together.
My Dad’s parents had that. Grandpa Derek and Grandma Myra spent years just sitting and watching TV together and going on walks. That was enough. They were blissfully content. They had lived their lives, and they were content to sit at home and enjoy the time they had together doing simple things.
Even as their fingers started to hurt so they had to give up carpentry and painting and embroidery, they were still content. Even as their vision started to go away, and they had to stop reading, they were happy enough. They were together, and that was enough.
Grandpa Derek passed away last year. December. On his birthday? The day before? I don’t remember.
Comparing their two experiences, I know which one I would rather live.
Papa Joe never figured out romantic love. His anxiety spiraled. His death is sad, and makes me angry. Physically he was healthy, he could have lived for another ten years. He was way healthier physically than my Grandma and Grandpa in the UK.
But mentally, he was very very sick. Suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s that just got worse and worse because of COVID and moving into my parents house, the years of social isolation piling up. No one who understood his experience.
We used to commiserate about that when we both lived at my parents’ house during COVID. We were both socially isolated, separated from our friends, from our generation, from our community, from like-minded people.
When he moved into a senior home, I decided I wanted to move into one, too. I found Treehouse (a senior home for young professionals) and moved in.
I was lucky and made friends. My grandpa struggled. He had autism, before we knew what autism was and how to support people with it.
I didn’t get to say goodbye because I was too busy with my work challenges. I don’t want to live like this anymore. I don’t want a job that doesn’t allow me to be human, especially one where I am meant to be teaching children how to be human.
The more people I talk to though, especially those in my group therapy program, this dehumanizing work culture is everywhere!!
It’s not even at work. This dehumanization is everywhere. What has been happening in LA – people with every right to be in this sanctuary city kidnapped. Taken from their families and forced onto a plane to a country that does not want them, where they will most likely be murdered.
Being an English major, aka the humanities – that’s what I spent years studying. Reading literature is listening to the human heart over centuries, and slowly realizing that as much as the world has changed, the human heart has stayed the same. Human needs have stayed the same.
Is this really progress? Who defines success? The end goal? What is a life well-lived?
A celebration of life. That’s what we called it. What does it mean to live a good, long life? What does it mean to be your time?
But Papa Joe died because he stopped eating. He decided he wanted to die. He was done living. If I am brutally honest, I consider Papa Joe’s death a suicide.
Two suicides this year. Both by people I love who I believe were neurodivergent. Our society could not love them the way they needed to be loved. They could not love themselves they way they needed to be loved.
This is the same war that I am fighting in my role as a teacher.
I am witnessing children not be loved by society in the way they need, and I myself am not being loved in the way I need to be in order to function in society, in the workplace, in school.
This indoctrination, this learning that you are not enough, that you are the problem, that you are not allowed to feel sad or anxious or scared or weak or rejected or abandoned, that you are not allowed to express those emotions, that you need to be constantly positive, that you need to be independent and do it on your own, that you need to constantly compete against your peers because there are only so many slots at Harvard or UCLA or USC.
I have been trying to unlearn this. I have been trying to change this culture. To intervene. But again, after four years in this toxic culture, I am too sick to fight. I am starting to think I am the problem again. I am being told over and over again that I am the problem.
That I’m not cut out to be a teacher. I don’t have what it takes. By people who reek of misery.
There are other voices. But it is hard when two out of two of my direct line administrators have basically told me that I don’t have what it takes to be a teacher.
I think of Tony Robbins in these moments. He says, “There are only two choices when someone responds, either lovingly and a call for help.”
These two women are asking for help. But I can’t help them because I need help, too!
From writing Burnt Out Bitch and processing my experience as a teacher these last four years, I know exactly what I need to stay an English teacher.
Well, I gotta finish publishing year 3 and year 4 – I got so triggered reading year 3 I had to stop, but I have some new tools to go back in their with thanks to my Group Therapy Program!
I will ask for that help. I will create the resources that I need, and I will share them with other teachers. And then, when I am ready, I will go back into the classroom.
I won’t abandon the future, I won’t abandon the children. But at the root, I won’t abandon myself. I won’t abandon my hopes and dreams and visions.
I have been dreaming of starting a nonprofit and calling it Action for Words. I imagine that the programs it runs are all the things I wish I had to support me in my journey as a child in Los Angeles who loved reading and writing, as well as an adult who still loves reading and writing, and whose job it is to nurture that love in children.
I can see it. I feel it inside me. I must write it out.
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