It took me 46 years to truly listen to myself for the first time in my life. Deciding to listen, though, is – perhaps more than anything else – what has allowed me to be at peace with the life I have today. It’s what quieted (not silenced) the clock that had been ticking in my head for decades telling me I was running out of time and my life wasn’t adding up to enough.
I’m a teacher and in August of 2022 I was starting my third year at a prestigious private school. On the very first day of work, I sensed something had changed and felt the school might be moving in a direction that wasn’t comfortable for me. I asked some questions and was told that, in fact, it was moving that direction. Over the course of the next couple weeks, I became increasingly anxious about what felt like an unacknowledged effort to make anyone who wasn’t totally on board with the changes feel uncomfortable. My instincts were telling me it was an effort to push some of us out and I felt very under the microscope. Still, I needed a job. I had rent to pay and kids to take care of, so leaving didn’t really feel like an option.
When I’d first arrived at the school two years earlier, I felt welcome. It was a Catholic school, but I didn’t need to be Catholic to teach there. I just needed to be a good teacher. At that time, I was going through a divorce and life felt incredibly difficult. Most days, simply getting myself to work in the morning seemed to take everything I had. For much of the next two years, my drive to work was awful. The 35-40 minute commute was nearly always filled with tears and a very real belief that I couldn’t do what the job required of me. I was beyond exhausted all the time, I felt like my body was shaking internally, and my mind was consumed with finding a way to be invisible.