Unqualified: Part 2
A few times a year, I look back at where I am in life and take stock. What makes me happy? What's no longer bringing me joy? What even is joy to me? Where am I failing myself? Consistently, I arrive at the conclusion that I need to rebrand myself and my ambitions. If I change the pillars of my day-to-day life, it will get better. The stress will disappear, and my immense pressure will dissipate into the abyss. You can imagine what happens. Still, I'll explain. I fell back into a pattern of too much one or another and came back to shifting life around once more. After all this time, I still don't have it figured out, but I came to two startling conclusions this year.
First work-life balance is not a thing. There is no way to balance everything I need to do for work and what I need to do for home because the weight of my profession and household is too much, and I would be crushed in the end. That scale needs a third arm to separate the household needs, the inner me, and what I need, which is very small since I haven't figured it out yet. In that, there will never be a complete balance; one will overtake the other, which will only frustrate me more. Instead, I need harmony between work and life, between all parts of it, me included. How can they coincide together gracefully?
I am not qualified to wear all the hats I do in my profession.
I am not qualified to wear all the hats I do at home.
Where am I as a person in all of this?
The second revelation is that chasing goals with steps to reach those goals is stressful when I need to figure out what's next or coming. So instead, I look to chase an emotion. How do I want to feel about my days, my life, and how do I get there?
Life and Teaching don't partner well.
Yes, thousands do it and will continue to do it. Still, you will be hard-pressed to find a thriving teacher who hasn't had to sacrifice something on the family side of things, who hasn't felt personally attacked in some shape or form regarding a comment or stance or rule they now have to abide by, or who's kids haven't served on the long hour's free labor committee.
I'm part of this issue.
I have made my child stay at school till 6 pm, knowing we have to be back by 7:30 am.
We didn’t do sports for a long time because I couldn't figure out how to work full time, cook dinner, and get her to sports when my husband works an hour away.
I've felt attacked for my beliefs at work.
I've felt attacked for my skin color at work.
I've felt attacked for not "fixing" a child, when "that's your job."
Laying on my couch recovering, I have had unlimited time to think about where I am without living in the mess of the dailies. The difficulty arises when I think, ok, if this is so much, what next. What's the ideal job? Where are you going from here to help put food on the table for your family and be present? See, the problem is, I've done that... Twice. I've left the profession and tried something else for a while, only to return because I felt my new job was pointless, with too much redundancy of the tasks. I'm used to moving around doing 30 things at once. Sitting still behind a desk all day, I was losing my mind, because I'm so conditioned to put out fires. The other job I LOVED but didn't make nearly enough for what we needed to bring in as a family unit. Then there's the guilt, of taking off work when my daughter needs something, putting her in daycare on her days off since I'm not, or working from home but not truly being present. All these invisible strings pulled me back in because the truth is, I don't know what I'm good at or what's going to be a logical, healthy fit for me outside of education. I'm trapped, but feeling this way right now is ok.
It's ok because I've learned I'm looking at it wrong. I have spent all this time thinking about life around a career choice when instead, the career choice needs to fit into my life. What in your life fills you up? What are you Highly Qualified to experience or give to the world? Well, if you've read my blogs or followed me online for the past few years, you know the answer to this question before I even finish typing up this blog.
I love:
Disney everything as an adult for the joy and childlike encouragement it brings to my life.
Travel not to significant places but the small ones. Sure, we all want to go to these gorgeous exotic islands, but also, traveling right here at home is equally impressive and much more obtainable regularly. Travel is happiness in tangible form.
Antiques and curating our home are sacred to me. I love the hunt for the correct item, organizing each room to fit our needs, and assembling a home that is perfect for us—warmth and coziness exude from the rooms of my house.
Working out my brain and my body feeds my soul. This includes physical workouts, something I need to discuss more, but it has been part of me for years. Then also the reading and writing I do in mass amounts regularly.
These things fill me up. They help shape me into who I am. In each of those areas, I am overqualified to discuss and feel exuberance when someone wants to discuss it with me. During the school year my time feels out of my control, and setting aside dedicated time for each of these seems a monumental task. To achieve time enjoying any of those arenas in an unrushed, completely relaxed singular focused way means I'm taking away from something else, and I drown a little, which lies the problem. The feelings of not being good enough, are entangled with the "If I was, I would be able to enjoy XYZ." It’s finding the ability to do what without being uncomfortably tethered to responsibility. The responsibility and my feelings around such are hard enough, but if my soul is not full, I cannot succeed.
Perspective is ever present when you step out of the water and can view the fingerprints outside the fishbowl. Changing my habits and priorities, creating those boundaries, and not by any means letting them waver will change my life. Don't get me wrong, I still have to decide how I feel about teaching going forward, the schooling I still need, the pressures, the changes, and the flow of life, but one cannot tackle a mountain without preparation. So I'm changing the narrative to focus on how I want to experience life.
