Dread

A funny thing happened just a few days into my Christmas vacation. It started as a flutter. A deep, increasingly constant feeling inside me, like a desperate, flightless bird trying to take to the air, wings pumping feathers and dust, noise and pressure, without ever taking off. My day was greeted by this feeling and I tried to push it down, ignore it, and distract myself with holiday affairs and the levity of family. But it was always there, lurking in the depths and recesses. I would lie down at night and feel that bird flap its wings once or twice in warning. “I’m not gone.”

As the days went by, and the end to my vacation edged implacably closer, the feeling only got stronger, anxiety knotting up inside me, taking up more air, constricting my diaphragm. As much as I tried to unravel it, it wouldn’t go away. Towards the end of my time in Seattle, I finally figured out where this feeling was coming from.
My cousin and I had several talks about teaching (she is also an educator) and my frustrations and worries about the job started to pour out of me as she listened and commiserated. That is when I realized that the idea of going back to work was what was strangling me. Four days into my vacation and the very notion of having to return to my classroom was filling me with very real, very palpable dread.

Finally confronting this fact has been hard. I’ve been trying to ignore the stress that the job has put on me for the past three years, but I think I might have arrived at the point where I need to start reflecting on my present and my future. I am not sure where this will take me. Perhaps the process of reflection itself will be enough to assuage my panic. Maybe I am so unhappy because my job feels like an obligation rather than a choice. Maybe teaching is a vocation to which I am not called. Maybe it is just a job. I need to start thinking. I hope you don’t mind me doing some of that here.