I Might Become a Burnout Teacher

I've wanted to be a teacher since 8th grade. The only other career I've seriously considered since then was being a youth director, until I discovered the not-so-pleasant things that happen behind closed doors that you discover when you're involved in the inner-workings of a church - it seriously shook my faith, and I don't wish to return to that place. There have been fleeting thoughts and "what-if's" of other careers, most of which wouldn't provide the kind of stability that I need to stay sane. But the only thing I've really wanted to be was a teacher. But lately I'm much less sure.
It's not always that I don't want to be a teacher anymore - it's more often that I don't know how to handle the pressure, particularly as a math teacher. I don't know how to balance instruction, prepping, grading (plus entering grades), parent contact (both replies and "proactively" contacting them), paperwork, communication with other staff, before/after school tutoring (seriously, 2-3 hours daily), and probably other things that I'm forgetting. I don't know how to keep up with both prepping and grading, much less the rest of that list. And, forget about having a life, or even managing to barely take care of myself outside of school. It's probably ridiculous the number of days I look at myself in the mirror at night and try to determine if I can get away without showering the next morning. My dinner is almost always a bowl of cereal because even when I have time to cook, I'm too exhausted to do so. I don't even manage to walk my dog as often and as far as I should because I know that I have work to do. All this, and I still often manage only 2-4 hours of sleep on school nights. Even when I try to let work go and go to bed early, I wind up lying in bed awake for hours because I'm so stressed out about the stuff that I haven't finished yet. I am overwhelmed and exhausted.
And I feel isolated at school. I hate that we have no department office to go and just be around other teachers during a prep period or before/after school (this also means that I'm always in my windowless classroom where students can find me whenever I'm there). And I have no emotional support system at school. On many levels, this has everything to do with me and very little to do with my co-workers. I have serious trust issues. At school, this primarily stems from the experiences I had at my last school where I dared to open up to people (generally only after they caught me either in tears or in the middle of having a panic attack), and I'm not entirely convinced that my mental health issues and/or feelings of being overwhelmed aren't at least a part of the reason that I'm no longer working there (despite the 3 open positions). Despite the fact that I enjoy the company of my co-workers, and I'm finally to a point where I can vent about the day-to-day stuff, I can't bring myself to open up about the bigger things. I don't know how to tell people that I'm exhausted and overwhelmed all the time. And I'm flat out scared to death to talk to anyone about my struggles with depression and social anxiety. I don't know who to trust; it doesn't help that everyone else seems to have things at least manageably well - even the fresh-out-of-college teacher who teachers 3 different courses (compared to my two) and works 2 or 3 part-time jobs on top of teaching gets more done than I do. And, unlike most schools, we don't even have a single regular school counselor that I could at least stop in and inform about my mental health issues (we have deans who are more responsible for academic/behavioral issues than they are mental/emotional issues). So most days I feel isolated, and it's terrifying.
But it's not nearly as terrifying as the idea of actually talking to someone else at school about all of this. Now, anyone who has payed much attention to my Facebook in the last month knows that I have a slight obsession with Frozen. I am in love with the movie, not just for it's music, but for how much I relate to it. Lots of people talk about how the character Anna is a super-relateable Disney princess because she's more awkward. I, on the other hand, relate incredibly deeply to Elsa. The feeling of needing to hide who you are, to hold in your feelings, and then the desire to run away and feeling much safer when isolated, I don't know that I've related to another character more than I do her. But Disney movies always have a "happily-ever-after." Life isn't so easy.
I don't know how much longer I can keep this up. I managed to survive last year when I was overwhelmed and exhausted (though not this exhausted) but had a support system and felt connected to my students. But this year I feel disconnected from people in general. Part of it is that from the end of May to the beginning of September, I was rejected by two of the only support systems I still trusted. And maybe I also feel like I learned that having a number of students who love and appreciate you for being a good teacher doesn't mean that the people in power will want you back the following year. So maybe I've closed myself off because it hurts to much to feel connected to people. But either way, I feel like a crappy teacher because I feel so disconnected from my students.
On and off for a while know my therapist has asked me if I've thought about a career change; I'm starting to wonder if she's right. I don't have a clue what else I would do, but I also don't know that I can survive the rest of this year much less any years after this. I don't know that I hate my job - I tell my parents this a lot, but it's really more of a "I'm so overwhelmed and exhausted that I want to run away and never look back" kind of feeling than anything else. But I don't know that I really enjoy it anymore either - but I can't figure out if that's related to my stress levels and/or mental health issues, or if no matter how well I'm doing I won't enjoy it again. Or maybe this district just isn't a good fit for me. The current end-game: I want to be a stay-at-home mom. But seeing as I'm not even dating right now, that goal is a ways off. I just wish I could figure out what to do between now and then.
Things might be different if I weren't a math teacher. I think about the semester that I student taught for music and remember still being exhausted, but it was a good exhausted. I've never felt that way while teaching math. But getting a full-time job teaching music generally requires starting in out-state Minnesota, and I don't know that I could handle that.
I've thought about doing Gifted and Talented Education - it's what I intend to get my masters in. But that will require going back to school. But most masters programs require you to still teach while getting your masters, and if I'm overwhelmed and exhausted now... There's a reason that I haven't started working on my masters yet.
Part of me is afraid of what people would think if I decided not to be a teacher anymore. I don't think that anyone would have seen it coming - particularly back to the time I was in college. Particularly in math, I was seen as one of the top math ed graduates. And then I have a couple of my greatest teaching mentors whom on some level I fear disappointing. Or, in one case, losing touch with because we no longer have teaching in common.
I might become a burnout teacher. I think I've known that for at least a year. I think my personality in and of itself puts me at higher risk for teacher burnout. But I was always so determined that I wouldn't be one (in a way that kind of reminds me of my mentality about thinking that I would never have depression). I don't know that I can handle it anymore. I'm already cracking under pressure, and days like today I fear that just one more bad day will break me.

My Personal Anthem of 2014

I'm not much of a New Year's person. The holiday has generally been meaningless to me, and a great majority of the time I can't stand seeing all of the hype about beginning anew as soon as the clock strikes midnight on January 1st. I've never in my life made a New Year's resolution, and doubt that I ever will. This year I even announced my New Year's holiday apathy to the world via Facebook status. Maybe it's because I live in the world of Education where my new beginning comes around in September, and the Christmas-New Year break doesn't even mark the change of the academic term. And in an age where I rarely write the year when I write the date, I honestly keep forgetting that 2013 ended and 2014 has begun.
But within 6 hours of when I declared that New Year's was meaningless to me on a personal level, I determined that I had found myself a song to be my personal anthem for 2014.

Now, I don't think that this means that New Year's will suddenly be important to me a year from now. My proclaimed personal anthem of 2014 grabs that title more out of timing than anything. Even though Disney's 53rd animated feature, Frozen, was released over Thanksgiving, I was unable to find the time to see it until between Christmas and New Year's. Based on early trailers, I didn't have much interest in seeing the movie in theaters, even when I learned that Idina Menzel voices one of the main characters. It was only critical acclaim that compared it to the best films of the Disney Renaissance (aka my childhood Disney) that Frozen jumped above Saving Mr. Banks in my list of movies to see this holiday season. The resonated with me on so many emotional levels (the only movie that makes me cry more different times is Homeward Bound), and I fell in love. To the point that the amazing music which I could gush about for so many reasons (the use of yoik in the opening moments of the film, the moments of beautiful choral music, the spectacular vocal talents of Idina Menzel, the score by Christophe Beck who is known better for his four years of work composing the score for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the clear contemporary Broadway styling of the songs that will almost assuredly lead to a Broadway stage adaptation of the film) was icing on the cake. But I knew by the end of the opening piece that I wanted to get the soundtrack at some point, knew the moment I saw Christophe Beck's name flash on the screen in the closing credits (seriously gasped - my parents will vouch for it) that I needed to get the soundtrack relatively soon, and knew by two days later when I hadn't been able to get "Let it Go" out of my head nonstop (minus, you know, 90% of the lyrics since I'd only ever heard the song the one time I went to see the movie). And 4 days after seeing the movie, I had the deluxe soundtrack in hand courtesy of a fantastic mother who works at Barnes and Noble and gets a discount on such things.
So on my way home on New Year's Day I put in the soundtrack, and I never made it past "Let it Go." The song had been stuck in my head for 5 days with most of the lyrics missing, so I was determined to learn them well enough that I could at least kind of sing along to that tune that had been replaying itself in my head. But the more I listened to the song, the more it struck a chord in me (no pun intended - okay, maybe a little, but mostly because I didn't feel like rewording it...) The idea of letting go of the need to put on a public face of who you think the rest of the world expects you to be, of letting go of what other people think of you, of letting go of the fear of being yourself - it's a liberating concept. But hard in practice - especially for someone who has (what feels lately like ever-worsening) social anxiety.
My life is so often centered around the fear that everyone around me is constantly watching me with disapproving judgment. To the point that as much as I'd love to become a hermit who never deals with the outside world like some people with social anxiety, but I'm too afraid of the way the rest of the world would judge me for becoming a hermit. No joke. The idea of letting go of the fear of other people's judgements and just being able to be me is probably my biggest life's dream right now. But it's an increasingly uphill slope right now.
Oftentimes being a teacher makes this worse. Let's be serious - teaching is one of the professions that our society holds higher standards for. Even as someone who wanted to become a teacher and who had made a point since at least junior high to promote the fact that teachers are real people too, it definitely rocked my world for a time as I learned about the "real person" sides of some of my own former teachers who I continue to love and respect to this day. So you pile together someone who has social anxiety, someone who is a perfectionist (which I'm fairly certain in my case is related to the social anxiety), and put that person in a profession where they are held to higher standards by society as a whole - it's been an often rough year-and-a-half.
In the last few years, I've at least gotten more comfortable with being myself at least when I'm by myself, which is something. And most days I just wish that I could be invisible in the rest of the world so I can be a part of it without being noticed because if no one sees me, I can just be myself. It's at least a step. And more than anything, it's affected who I am as a singer.
Coincidentally enough, my college voice teacher's teaching method was based in getting students to physically let go while they were singing and letting the body do what it was made to do. Despite how controversial this approach was within my college's music department, I can say from experience that it works. Unfortunately, it took me until after my 4 years of voice lessons were done to really feel what it meant to "let go" when I was singing, and I can only imagine what more I would have been able to accomplish if I could have figured it out when I was still taking lessons. But it took being in the isolation of my van driving to and from my second student teaching placement to figure it out the first time. It took me until losing my voice for almost the entirety of December to be able to at least occasionally match the technique when other people were around even just at church. But they're baby steps.
It only took me a few times through the song to realize that Frozen's "Let it Go" needed to be my personal anthem of 2014. Because it's been such a long, rocky journey that I need to feel the liberation of letting go of trying to live up to the person that other people think I should be. I need to feel comfortable and confident in being myself not just when I'm by myself but when I'm out in the world. It's like experiencing that song both in the movie and on the soundtrack gave me a glimpse of what could be like, and so much that I've learned through Frozen, both its onscreen and off-screen stories, has helped me to see instances of people starting where I am and making it to that point of self-realization and self-confidence that "Let it Go" tells the story of. I had only recently rediscovered the hope of such a thing coming (I'll save that story for another post), but the song gave me the energy and determination which, combined with the rest of the world's fervor for "New Year, new start," led me to think "This is it; I think this is going to be my year. I'm going to make it my year. And this is going to be my song to make it through." Baby steps, but for the first time in forever (I may be spending too much time listening to this soundtrack...), I feel like I might actually start to make some progress.

Accomplished: Stopped caring if my neighbors could hear my singing (at least during normal waking hours) and sang my heart out nonstop to "Let it Go;" also sang into my mirror to try to use good facial expressions - getting past this awkwardness is a big deal for me
Short-term goal: Manage to sing "Let it Go" in front of someone (even if it's in a motor vehicle) as well as I do when I'm by myself
Long-term goal: "Let it go, let it go/ And I'll rise like the break of dawn/ Let it go, let it go/ That perfect girl is gone/ Here I stand in the light of day/ Let the storm rage on/ The cold never bothered me anyway"