thoughts
Before we begin, I need to know how many of you are familiar with Christine Miserandino’s “Spoon Theory.” If you know all about it, you can skip the next paragraph. If you’ve never heard of it, I’ll try to explain.
Miserandino created the “Spoon Theory” to help a friend understand what it’s like to live with lupus. Every morning you’re given a certain number of “spoons” and each activity you engage in throughout the day costs you a “spoon.” (Okay, I’m tired of doing the quotation marks thing, so from now on I’m just going to say spoon.) Because of the limited number of spoons, you have to carefully weigh all of your decisions to determine whether or not it’s an activity worth depleting your spoon supply. Miserandino explains that simple tasks like getting out of bed, showering, and putting on clothes cost one spoon each. By the time you manage to drag yourself to work, you’re already running low on spoons. If you manage to make it through your entire day, you might have one spoon left when you get home, so you’re forced to choose among making yourself dinner, doing something fun, or just falling into bed as you cradle your one remaining spoon and pray it will carry over into tomorrow. (For more information on the Spoon Theory, check out Miserandino’s original post at butyoudontlooksick.com.) For those of you who skipped my explanation because you’re already familiar with the Spoon Theory, you may start reading again. Everyone with me? Great. Now, I don’t have lupus, so my spoons aren’t affected exactly like Miserandino’s. Instead, my spoons are stolen by severe anxiety and mild depression. Also, for the purpose of this post, I’m going to refer to my spoons as “pencils,” because I’m specifically discussing how my anxiety disorder affected my life as a teacher. So, I tentatively present to you, the “Pencil Theory.” Actually, before I get too far into this, I feel the need to include a disclaimer: My teaching experience was not normal. The situation I found myself in was more of a freak accident; one that my teacher friends find appalling because the series of unfortunate events I endured is extremely unusual. So if you’re considering going into teaching as a profession, don’t let my story scare you away. Also, I won’t be covering everything that happened during my short-lived teaching career, because I need to save some stories for the memoir I’m working on. This post focuses solely on how my teaching experience affected my mental health. Okay, here we go. For real this time. I taught high school English for one year. I’d worked as a substitute for a year and did a semester of student teaching, so I felt more prepared than many first-year teachers. I also come from a long line of teachers, so I had plenty of sources I could turn to for advice. This helped make the beginning of the school year far less stressful than it could have been. For the first few months, I genuinely enjoyed teaching. Of course, there were hiccups every now and then, but I expected those and tried not to let them get to me. Then, in November, everything changed. (To be honest, I don’t know if things actually changed in November, or if I was just blissfully unaware of the cracks in the system for the first three months.) I’ve always suffered from anxiety and depression and I’ve had infrequent panic attacks since I was a teenager. But in November 2014, all of that became significantly worse. My anxiety caused me to get sick every single morning before I left for school, sometimes to the point where I had to call in for a sub or risk having to carry a trash can around while I taught. My depression made it difficult to drag myself out of bed in the first place, and usually the only thing that coaxed me out from under the covers was the sudden need to vomit. My formerly infrequent panic attacks were now occurring at least three times a week. This continued from mid-November to mid-May. I spent half a year of my life completely consumed by this unrelenting beast. But why? Why did this happen? This is where the “Pencil Theory” comes in. While I didn’t realize it at the time, all of my increased anxiety was caused by the severe daily depletion of my pencil supply. Let me explain. Every morning began with sacrificing pencils by being sick for at least 15 minutes. I don’t know how many pencils are contained in that much vomit, but as you know if you’ve ever had the stomach flu, it’s exhausting. If I knew a particularly stressful day awaited me (which happened more often than not), the vomiting would subside long enough for me to curl up in a ball on my bathroom floor, clawing desperately at my chest as I failed to pull enough air into my lungs to convince myself I wasn’t really dying and the walls weren’t actually closing in on me. After my heart finally realized I hadn’t just run a marathon, I could peel myself off the tile, spend a few more minutes kneeling in front of the toilet, and then find something to wear that would complement the purple bags that my sleepless nights thought perfectly accentuated my eyes. Armed with significantly fewer pencils than I possessed upon waking, I could finally leave my house. Upon arriving at school I was bombarded by pencil thieves in the form of my co-workers. Two pencils to the male teachers who refused to respect my personal boundaries because they craved attention from one of the few single women in town. A pencil to the co-worker who would legitimately spy on the teachers and report everything back to the principal, despite having no context for anything she’d seen or heard. A pencil to the co-worker who seemed trustworthy, but also did some pretty shady stuff that I inevitably ended up taking the blame for. Three pencils to the veteran teachers whose favorite pastime was reminding me that “this is how we’ve always done things; stop trying to implement new ideas.” A handful of pencils to the co-worker who needed constant validation that she was good at her job, that she wasn’t getting fired, that yes we really were friends. And this was all before the first bell. Then come the students. Don’t get me wrong; I loved my students. Most of them were perfectly fine and I didn’t have problems with them. But they still took pencils. The good kids asked politely to borrow a pencil, which I gladly gave even though I knew that if they remembered to return it, it would be a mere stub of its former self. The kids who tried to behave, but just weren’t great at school required their own set of pencils, which I handed them without being asked, knowing I’d never get them back, but hopeful that these pencils would give them the confidence to keep trying. Then there were the asshole students. (Don’t look so offended; you all know kids like this. And if you don’t, you probably were a kid like this.) The asshole students were the ones who marched up to my desk, grabbed a fistful of pencils, and spent the entire class period sharpening them down to unusable nubs and then biting off the erasers for good measure before tossing them in the general direction of the trash can on their way out the door. I had one student who was brilliant, easily my best student, but by the time she reached my class at the end of the day, her own pencil supply was dangerously depleted. So if I had any left I would loan her a few of mine, hoping that would be enough to get her through that final hour before she could go home and curl up inside herself until she learned to breathe again. By the time the final bell rang, I was lucky if I still had a handful of eraser crumbs left, much less a full pencil. But my day wasn’t over yet. After school consisted of detentions, make-up tests, IEP meetings, conferences with parents, committee meetings, play practices, forensics practices, forensics competitions, yearbook duties, concession stand duties, basketball games, etc. Oh, and my personal favorite: ambushes from the principal and superintendent who made a habit of calling me in with no warning to demand I change certain aspects of my teaching style despite the fact that they never came in to actually watch me teach. Most of these activities could have been mildly enjoyable (well, not so much the administrative ambushes), except I usually had to lock myself in my classroom, curl up behind my desk, and hyperventilate/sob for a few minutes before I could even consider engaging in social interaction again. If some miracle allowed me to drag myself home before nine, possessively clutching any remaining eraser crumbs or slivers of graphite, exhausted, nauseated, and in desperate need of a long shower cry, I was greeted by piles of papers to grade, lesson plans to create, and an endless barrage of messages from a co-worker insisting I come over because she needed constant human contact from the moment she woke up until she finally fell asleep. Now, math isn’t my thing, so I have no idea how many pencils I was expected to dole out for at least 18 hours every day for six months, but I’m positive that it’s significantly more pencils than I had in my possession. And after digging myself into a bottomless pit of anxiety for half a year, I finally knew that it had to stop. Quitting my job wasn’t easy, but the never-ending strain on my mental health ultimately led me to walk away from teaching - possibly forever. As I’ve mentioned, my severe anxiety disorder was not the only reason I quit teaching, but it was the most important. While I wish my first and only year of teaching had been a better experience, I’m a little bit grateful that it ended as horribly as it did. Without the snap of that final pencil, it’s entirely possible that I would’ve listened to everyone advising me to stick it out for another year, and I honestly don’t know if I could have survived that. But I recognize now that I have to be careful how I distribute my pencils throughout every day, and this was a lesson that I needed to learn in order to understand how to better help myself so I never get sucked into that tornado of anxiety again. So if you take nothing else from this post, please remember that you own every pencil you’re allotted each morning and no one can demand that you hand any over. And if someone tries to steal one of your pencils, offer to sharpen it first, and then aim for the eye.
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In my twenty-five years of life I have been in at least ten weddings and attended several more. I hate weddings. Even if the couple is perfect for each other (they’re usually not), I hate going to weddings. I still go if I’m invited and I usually bring a present (or at least a card with $20 in it), but unless I’m required to help with something at the reception/dance, I almost always cut out as soon as the recessional music dies away. There are several reasons for this, but I don’t feel like getting into those right now, so I’m just going to focus on the most important one.
While making small talk at the reception (something I’m notoriously terrible at), the conversation inevitably turns to, “And when are you getting married, Jacinta?” I used to laugh and give some vague time in the future, like after college or after I had a good job or after I found a boyfriend. Not anymore. Now I shrug and answer as honestly as possible: “Probably never.” (Cue looks of horror from everyone within earshot.) I haven’t always been opposed to my own marriage. For a while in my youth I eagerly planned every detail of my wedding to the point that all I needed was a man to stand at the altar and let the perfection of my vision work around him. But things have changed. I’ve accurately predicted the failings of too many marriages. I recognize what causes incompatibility between two people. I’m all too aware of my own inability to tolerate another human being for more than a few hours at a time, and apparently marriages are supposed to last for a lifetime, which, I’m not great at math so correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m almost positive that a lifetime lasts more than a few hours. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that no one should ever get married. Some people get married and live happily ever after, and that’s awesome. I’m just saying that I, personally, don’t feel the need for me to ever get married. Obviously, this isn’t written in stone (mostly because I’m too lazy to chisel all of this into a rock), and I might one day get married. But I’m not holding my breath. I’m also not worried about it. I mean, I kind of want kids at some point, but not enough to settle for someone I probably wouldn’t want a miniature version of. Besides, there are so many kids who need adopted, so should I ever decide that I definitely want children, I have options. In the meantime, I’m going to just continue to enjoy being super single. I’ll go on dates that will probably end with me politely explaining that, no, he can’t come back to my apartment because he’s already surpassed my two hours of human contact and I now need to be alone for at least forty-eight hours to recover. I’ll attend weddings, regardless of whether or not the couple has a chance at staying together, and sneak out before anyone engages me in conversation. I’ll grimace politely when people make comments about the fact that I’m not married and not getting any younger. But most importantly, I’ll continue to do whatever makes me happy. And right now, I’m happy doing my own thing and figuring out who I am and what I want out of life. And if marriage is never in the cards for me, so it goes. P.S. Don’t tell my nieces about this post. They’re overly concerned that I’m going to die alone. |
Jacinta M. CarterProfessional Book Nerd Archives
March 2019
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