The number of times I've heard this question at my school is numerous, but no one really listens to what I have to say. I know that they want to help me be a better teacher. But as someone fighting a constant battle with depression and social anxiety, I need a place to be safe before I can handle constructive criticism. I need to be supported on an emotional level before I can even think about getting support on a career level. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, people. Love and Acceptance and Self Esteem are the two tiers before Self Actualization. If the lower-tiered needs aren't being met, I don't give a crap about the higher ones. I've tried to express this multiple times over the past year, and it gets ignored every time.
But I shouldn't be surprised. I work in an academic institution, not a community. I had the privilege of working in a school that was a community during my first year of teaching. While I didn't want to discuss any of my mental health battles at first, I didn't have much a choice after a teacher walked in on me having a panic attack in our teacher office. (Okay, technically I had talked to one of the school counselors first, because we had actual counselors there who spent much of their time supporting students' mental health needs versus deans who deal with students' academic and behavioral issues). But once I had talked to one teacher, I wound up talking to others, and I had their support. I could walk into another teacher's classroom having a panic attack when they were on prep and ask if they could cover my class until I could hold things together. The message was always that I needed to take care of myself if I wanted to be of any use to my students. I didn't always listen, but they were there telling it to me all the same. And any discussion of students with mental health issues was one of sympathy and support. We were a community. While things didn't end well there, and I've never been convinced that my end-of-year mental health breakdowns didn't play into that, I felt supported both as a person and as a teacher for the vast majority of the time that I was at that school.
Here's the thing that, for lack of a better wording, pisses me off. If a teacher were to have to take time off to get treatment for a physical disease such as cancer, they'd be showered with support the whole time. People would bring dinners, donate sick days, etc. But if a teacher takes time off to seek treatment for mental health issues (or more likely just leaves because of the stigma attached), they become the fodder for lunchtime jokes. I never fully understood mental health stigma until I came to work where I do. In a place where people condescendingly talk about the math teachers that didn't last long and left "because they had a mental breakdown." Or who complain that their own children dealing with mental health issues who just can't deal with life like a normal person. So outside of the untimely panic attacks in my principal's office last year, I haven't breathed a word of my mental health issues to anyone. And I avoid talking about it with the principal who doesn't get it despite my efforts to explain. But it's no wonder that this is an issue - I work at an academic institution, not a community. We only care about supporting academics, not people's overall well-being. My word, the place could use a NAMI seminar. And if I was in a better place mental health-wise right now, I'd suggest it.
All last year, people kept telling me that the second year would be better. That adjusting to a new school takes time. That getting into a classroom with a window would help. That new meds would help to solve my problems. Things were good for maybe a week or two in there, but have quickly spiraled to the worst they've been since college. I haven't felt this depressed, worthless, and hopeless since my darkest times in college. But those times were easier because I was surrounded by friends fighting battles similar to my own. I even had professors that I could confide in. For as much as Concordia's fickle music people helped to lead me toward deeper depressions at times, they were also the ones who I could tell early on "I was just diagnosed with depression" to which so many replied "I have it too." Dealing with depression and anxiety was so much easier as a college student. But it also helped that Concordia was a community. We were there to support each other as people in all parts of life, not just academically.
If things don't change, I don't think that I'll be sticking around beyond this year. Right now, I don't even know how I'm going to manage to teach my first class tomorrow, much less all five of them, much less make it through an informal post-observation meeting, much less deal with conferences tomorrow night. I shouldn't have even gone to school today; but it's much harder to take a mental health day when you have to prep for a sub. Plus, I know that if I decide to stay home one day, I'll have an even harder time going back later. Because, right now, I have no desire to go back.
And I'm starting to think long and hard about what I really want to do for a living. As hard as it would be logistically, I'm seriously thinking about trying to focus on finding a music teaching job. I honestly feel much more passionate about teaching music, and, speaking at least from my clinical and student teaching experience, teaching music takes a lot less outside of school work; it requires more time working with extracurriculars, but at least those are more fun. And when I taught music I ended the day exhausted but satisfied, which I've never been able to say about math.
But because music jobs are so few and far between (especially as I know it would be best for my mental health to stay in the Twin Cities area), I'm also trying to figure out if there's any other career path I'd be interested in. All I've figured out so far is that I'd prefer to be connected with the arts - I miss the arts. I miss the humanity of the arts. I want back in.
Any prayers you could offer as I attempt to discern my future would be much appreciated. And prayers that I can survive the next 8 months too (as mentioned previously, I don't know how I'm even going to get through one class period tomorrow, much less the rest of the school year). But I must at least say that there's a certain level of peace that comes with accepting that, despite how much I long for stability, I need to seek out a change in the future. Because if I stay longer than this year, I forsee myself being one of the teachers who is fodder for lunchtime jokes for leaving due to a mental breakdown.
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