I love hiking. I love flyfishing. I love spending time in nature by myself and with my family. I love taking my dog on adventures–digging truffles, foraging for mushrooms, picking buckets full of huckleberries in late summer. I love writing. I love reading books and discussing them with my book club friends.
I don’t always love my job.
I know how this sounds. Whiny. Privilege-y. Comfortable, middle-aged white guy insufferably concerning the general public with his entitled mid-life angst. Boo-hoo. I have to go to work instead of indulging my inner child who just wants to hunt and gather and think big, inconsequential thoughts. Such injustice.
Bear with me though (or stop reading now–I wouldn’t hold it against you). As an educator, I am supposed to love my job. There seems to be a refrain in education that none of us got into teaching for the money. I remember a professor on one of the first days of my educator program asking the twenty-five or so students in my cohort “so, since I’m going to assume none of you decided to become a teacher to get rich, what is it that drew you to education?” Everybody–myself included–gave lofty, altruistic answers:
“I’m just passionate about teaching.”
“I imagine a better future, and the key to that is educating the youth.”
“I just want to be the teacher that I needed when I was a teenager” (this one was probably my response).
“I just love kids.”
If I were being honest, I would have said that I made it pretty much into my 30’s without any direction, and I came from enough advantage (again–White, male, middle-class, both parents with professional degrees) that I could live fairly easily with a come-what-may attitude. I worked in a cool book store for a few years before I worked in a cool toy store for a few more. Neither of these jobs offered a clear path to what I vaguely understood to be a “career,” but I earned enough money to pay rent, go to concerts, drink with my friends, buy records. I had a girlfriend who, after several years, started wondering when I was going to propose marriage. It’ll happen when it happens, I thought. Then, at 28, we had our first child–a circumstance I took to mean that it was finally time to get serious.
The only problem was, I didn’t have any experience getting serious.
I had been studying Japanese in college, so when an opportunity to teach English in Japan presented itself, I convinced my now fiance (and two year-old son) to take it. We moved out of the country, and now I was a teacher. And serious.
When the birth of my daughter necessitated moving back to the US, I knew that I couldn’t go back to the life I had before. And since I had a bit of momentum as a teacher, I went to graduate school while working as a paraeducator at a high school, got my teaching license, and was hired the day before school started at the school I still work at, 16 years later.
In other words, I wasn’t driven by a passion for education. I was driven by the invisible pull of being a dad, a husband, an adult. And to be these things, I needed a career. I needed money.
For all three of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know that guilt has played an outsized role in my life. As a teacher, when I was exhausted, I felt guilty. When I was assigning 140 essays each week and only made it through 90 of them before I had promised my kids I would pass them back, I felt guilty. When I phoned in a lesson (“ok guys, today is a work day!”), I felt guilty. When, as an instructional coach, I canceled an observation debrief with a teacher because the morning had been unexpectedly hectic, I felt guilty.
Why? Because somewhere in the last decade, I forgot to prioritize my needs. I somehow accepted the altruistic motivation for being an educator–as I’m sure many of us have. I suffer because there is a greater need. My energy, my happiness, my fulfillment are not as important as the vital work that I do every day. The students need my sacrifice. So when I have been unable to “show up” in the way that I know my profession demands, the only response I have is guilt. And that eats away at me. I notice myself spending more evenings staring into the Food Network abyss for hours. Or doom-scrolling on my phone. Or just being aimless with the hours that are supposed to be for me.
I’ve been told that this is called rest. When I am stumbling into the kitchen after work to grab a few handfuls of potato chips before collapsing onto the couch for an unsolicited nap, it is supposed to be self-care. And I know this, because the endless memes posted on social media by my colleagues tell me so. When did we embrace the Scary Sunday as an unavoidable reality? When did the patron saint of education become a bag-eyed teacher asleep in a mug of instant coffee?
It is not cute, or funny, that educators are depleting ourselves to serve.
I’m going to shake my fist at the clouds for just a bit more here, folks: I believe the industrial machine has sold educators a bill of goods. Far too many of us have come to accept that, because our work is good, that we are “called” to this profession for selfless reasons, then our exhaustion is a forgone conclusion. And it is holy. It isn’t collapse, it is rest. And we have earned it.
I would like to propose two ideas. One is that you don’t need to earn rest. It isn’t something we deserve only after sacrificing ourselves at the altar of “above and beyond.” Listen to your body, your mind, your heart. What are they telling you that you need?
The second thing I want you all to think about is this: What does rest look like for you? And I mean real rest. Not escape or disassociation. What is the kind of rest that replenishes, rejuvenates, and pulls ourselves back into balance with our values? Again, we owe it to ourselves to provide ourselves with real opportunities for rest, and prioritize these opportunities.
The honest to God truth is that I often do love my job. It makes me happy when I can serve others. I am a personable, kind, caring, nurturing person by nature, and my work as an instructional coach gives me plenty of opportunities to apply these traits. I can usually help people feel better about the work they are doing and, if I’m really firing on all cylinders, I can help lighten their load.
But I have to remind myself that in order to feel fulfilled in the work I do, I need to prioritize care for myself. And rest when I need it, not when I’ve earned it.