During my teacher training, one of my mentors compared teaching to being in a relationship with a bad boyfriend: it treats you badly and you know you should leave, but there’s something about it that you love, which makes it hard to walk away. I never fell fully out of love, but just over four years later, with a heavy heart, I have finally walked away. I would love to say I found the courage to walk away, but really it was quite the opposite. I felt so weighed down, despite the antidepressants I’ve been taking for the past few months, I just couldn’t carry on any longer. Friends and family keep asking me if I feel relieved, but I’m not quite there yet. As anyone who’s been in a bad relationship will know, it’s one thing to walk away, but the real challenge is letting go.
For the past few months, I’ve been experiencing a recurring dream, where I have chewing gum stuck in my teeth and no matter how much of it I pull out, it just keeps on coming. At first I found this dream disturbing, but it’s now become so familiar, I can literally recognise it in my sleep, and calmly reassure myself (via dream voice-over), that it’s not really happening. Some casual googling suggested this dream could reflect a state of indecision, frustration and powerlessness, and whether you believe in interpreting dreams or not, these were certainly feelings I could relate to. Sometimes the relentless internal battle between stay and go was even more exhausting than the workload, poor behaviour and endless scrutiny.
So here I am: burnt out, somewhat disillusioned and without a job. And now that the battle of stay or go has been unceremoniously resolved, it’s time for a new internal struggle: what am I going to do now? Of course, it probably would have been wiser to ask that question before leaving my job. In fact, I recently finished reading School’s Out! The Definitive Guide to Leaving Teaching and Rebalancing Your Life by Phil Fletcher, which amongst other useful advice, advocates the benefits of a planned exit strategy, so I can’t even argue that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nevertheless, my teeth are free of troublesome gum and it’s time to start looking to the future. It’s time to find the spark and light a new fire that will burn brighter than the old flame. He really was a bad boyfriend.
What the Teacher Did Next 