By Sammy Ginsberg
I knew that I would get triggered. I thought it would happen Day 1, Week 1. But it didn’t. Thankfully! Amazingly!
The first two weeks felt like a homecoming. How I missed being with the students, talking about reading and literature.
This week, though, week 3, I was triggered. I decided to try to talk to other teachers more. I shared a bit more than I was comfortable with about why I am subbing, and triggered myself.
Then being triggered in front of 30 students I’m responsible for triggered me again.
Then I came home and went to yoga, which helped.
But also while teaching has been going well – I’ve basically been working constantly. I am teaching, and then I am coming home and trying to work on the freelance projects that I had scraped together.
The thing about this situation is that I burnt out for a reason. And now I’m so busy working and feeling financially unstable that I can’t address the root reasons for my burn out.
I can feel the burn out returning. My nervous system is overwhelmed.
The root reason has to do with my need for deep, meaningful, committed relationships who I feel close to and a sense of companionship with.
From reading Perks of Being a Wallflower with the students and watching TedEd videos, I have realized that the conflict is not in lacking close friendships.
I have friends who I feel close to. Thank goodness!
The burnout is caused by being forced to work closely with a lot of people I don’t feel close to; and being so busy working that I don’t have the time or energy to spend quality time with the people I do feel close to, and thus feeling guilty, misunderstood, or lacking the support I need to do the work that I need to do.
This was the core conflict that caused my burn out.
I have been trying to address this conflict by trying to go for coffees and hang out with people I am working with so I can get to know them better and feel closer to them.
Or trying to work on projects with people I already feel close with or people who I think I can work closely with.
The thing is, you can’t work closely with everyone. There are compatibility factors at play, as well as the amount of effort it takes to nurture and maintain close relationships.
This conflict is playing out right now in that I am trying to nurture and maintain more relationships than I have the time or energy for, as well as some of them do not help me survive.
And right now, just surviving feels overwhelming. Hard enough.
It’s odd because a lot of feedback I have gotten grappling with this conflict is that being friends with your colleagues is unrealistic. It’s not a guarantee.
Reflecting this, I was able to develop friendships with colleagues, at the same time that these colleagues were not able to provide me the professional or personal support that I needed – and I needed to build stronger relationships with the people who could actually help me in my life do the things I needed to do to do my job well and get my personal needs met.
And ideally these people could be the same people! Not all of them, but at least a few people who could truly understand my life because they were able to witness me both at work and in my personal life.
There were one or two friendships that were developing in this way, but this year – having stopped full-time teaching and left the schools, and they changed schools – we are no longer as convenient to each other as we were before.
Like drifting icebergs.
Like fish in a river.
This is part of life.
We are on different paths now. Who are my companions on this new path I’m on?
What is my new path even?
I think this is the question to answer, to ask for support with. This new chapter. This plot line.
I keep calling chaos transition phase. But when does it end? I have been in the chaos transition phase for one year!! Since September/October when life pushed me off the iceberg and into the cold artic water.
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