August marks five months since one of the rare and momentous occasions where I was wrong about something. Back in March, I was seven months into my teacher training, but I genuinely didn’t believe I would last the year. Well, here we are! I have been ‘recommended for qualified teacher status,’ which is the title you hold when you’ve withstood the baptism of fire that is the PGCE year but haven’t completed the next two induction years which grant you the privilege of being fully qualified. I’m not sure I’ll bother with them, if I’m honest, but I am open to being wrong about how things turn out again.
Endings are strange, and that period before a new beginning is even more so. I think I have become numb to it all so that the feeling doesn’t sweep me off my feet. I didn’t cry when I left my school, when the children came to say goodbye or when my head of department did a lovely speech about me. People kept asking me how I felt about it. In all honesty, I didn’t – and still don’t – feel much of anything at all. A lot of people have also told me how proud I should feel for completing the course, but now, with a bit of distance from it all, I don’t feel any of that either. Proud of what? Continuously and repeatedly disregarding my own misery, carrying on solely for needing the money and a fear of what would happen otherwise? Being able to admit this was never what I saw myself doing but terrified of rocking the boat, mostly because I would upset other people? Dressing up my cowardliness to change direction as dogged persistence and an inability to quit what I’ve started? I’m not proud of sleepwalking into situations the way I have done my entire life. I don’t feel any sort of gratification from suffering with a terrible combination of both tedious, navel-gazing learned helplessness and an inability to live a life not dictated by others. To live for myself.
One thing I do feel at the moment is a loss of a part of my identity which I have inhabited for the last year. Before when I have said goodbye to parts of myself, I have felt an overwhelming sadness to the point of grieving, but this time, it is a relief. For the last year I feel as if I have had to present a version of myself to the world that is not only tempered, timid and bland: it is also objectively a lie. So much of teaching is a performance which extends beyond the classroom and encroaches on your personal life, to the point that you must inspect your speech and actions in your own private spaces for any hint of unprofessionalism which could cost you your livelihood. I’ve written before about the panoptic gaze of professionalism while in the school building, but it feels even more perverse the minute you step outside, especially as an autistic bisexual Marxist within the current zeitgeist of renewed McCarthyite sentiment and queerphobic witch-hunting. It’s a constant and unrelenting form of paranoia. I recognise the need for stringent boundaries and professional conduct across the public sector, but the first thing I felt when I left was that I could breathe again. Maybe it’s just not for me.
Something that made me feel a bit more human again was meeting up with a friend from uni in Leamington Spa the other week. We retraced the old routes we used to take, up and down the streets fringed with white buildings and remnants of the second year of our studies which we had forgotten existed. We talked a bit about the strangeness of it all, and how, as a place, it holds memories from parts of our lives that we wouldn’t revisit even with a gun to our heads, and yet there was a nostalgia so acute it was painful. I said that I hate to sound like one of those astrology girlies who manifest and collect crystals, but nostalgia feels like an involuntary reflex to memories that – regardless of being positive or negative – made us feel something at one point in time. It’s just a hunch, but I don’t know if the body can tell whether a memory is a good or bad one. It simply knows that it was powerful, and reconstructs a narrative around it which makes us yearn for a snapshot in time, something familiar that we can cling to. A song or scent. A way someone touched you. A fresh breeze that brushes past you and through the trees or a sliver of sun peeking out at a specific angle, the way it did that one time where you felt loved or lost or hurting. In a way, I think I needed that. I needed to become anchored to myself and my memories again.
The main big news in my life is that I am moving to Melbourne in late September, and the only way I can think about it is through the objective details. I am hopeless at putting my own daily life in order (boring, unstimulating, a repetitive chore – you mean I have to do this every day for the rest of my life?!), but I am in my element when it comes to organising the big one-offs. I have sorted flights, accommodation for when we land, stopovers in Singapore and Seoul, and I have had a great time doing it. But I feel that this is maybe an avoidance tactic, a way to deny the fact that I am in another transition period in my life where I have no control over the passage of time and no idea what I am going to do there or afterwards. I did the same thing when I went to live in Paris aged 20: everyone was amazed that, in all my youth and naïveté, I’d managed to clinch a beautiful apartment in the 16e and sorted my health insurance and Eurostar tickets months in advance, despite being terminally incapable of turning up to a seminar on time. If I can’t be certain about how something is about to play out, solidifying the practicalities is the least I can do to ground myself in a new situation.
The idea of having a whole year to explore a new place, to travel and find a job which doesn’t have to be forever is a lovely distraction, but I also have a paralysing but vague fear of running out of time. I will turn 25 while I’m there, and it feels awfully like I am being backed into a corner to make decisions that will dictate the rest of my life: do I follow my heart and apply for the PhD I have always wanted to do, despite a near-zero prospect of ever getting an academic job and effectively taking a lifelong pay cut in exchange for three years of indulging my academic interests, or do I grow up and jump on the career ladder bandwagon the way everyone is telling me to, which will ensure a certain level of financial security but will in all probability lead me to feel unfulfilled and full of burning resentment? More concerning still: should I be worried about having a baby soon, even though I would most likely be a terrible mother who is selfish and disturbed by the mundane horror of having a small version of myself be dependent on me 24/7? I hate to sound like Sylvia Plath, but it does feel like all of these possibilities are so overwhelming, and closing in on me so fast, that I will miss the boat with all of them. It is so much easier to do nothing, and risk nothing except regret, than to commit to something, and risk everything else.
I’m trying not to think about anything too much. Between moving out of the loveliest house I have ever lived in during my adult life – no doubt only to be sold onto another soulless buy-to-let landlord, when I know that my partner and I could have made this place beautiful – and moving to the other side of the world, the sheer amount of change is incomprehensible. I read back over some of my old pieces of writing recently, including one I started in Spain exactly one year ago. I think I may be a fundamentally different person to the one speaking through those written words, and somehow it is a comforting prospect. I’m alive. I’m growing, if only in the deepest recesses of my flesh and bone. Somehow, deep down in a tiny, buried piece of myself which remains ignorant of all the dread and angst, I feel like something good might be coming.
This is really wonderful - I relate so much to the endless possibilities and struggle to seize any of them too! Good luck in Melbourne :)
thank you so much! ❤️❤️