Does anyone else feel like technology is actually getting in the way of life? Things were so much simpler when my phone was connected to the wall. But, I was also like 20 years or more younger and didn't have all these adulting responsibilities. It seems like being an adult has gotten in the way of being me.
So what does that mean? It just means that I spend so much time and energy having a job and keeping afloat in the world that that is all I end up doing. Just doing enough to get by. Does anyone else feel that way? My new year's resolution was to continue improving my life. I'm trying to count calories and lose some weight and declutter my entire house and thus my life.
I joined a 90 day declutter challenge and it's going to easily be a year long journey for me. I just can't balance a serious declutter of a room along with work and daily chores. I am getting better at buying things I don't need and at getting rid of things I don't use. Sometimes I still fight that inner battle and fear of "what if". As a child we didn't have much and so I have this embedded fear of what if I lose my job or something happens and I don't have the extra money and I need something but can't afford it and have to go without it when I had it, but got rid of it? Kinda sounds like I might need some therapy. Which I considered, but for right now I am self learning.
Since the last time I wrote a lot has happened. I posted about losing my Granny in 2013. In 2015, my dad passed away three weeks after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. That was a difficult experience that I am not yet ready to write about. It involved opening, ripping open, a lot of old wounds and facing a lot of new wounds being made. By the middle of June, I was lost, battled, bruised, strengthened, built up, stronger, weaker, lost and found.
As I faced the returning school year I felt an uneasiness that I had never before felt about returning to my school and my job. I wasn't ready. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to go back. I loved my kids and my coworkers, but this anxiety eating in my stomach was slamming up against me like nothing I had ever experienced before. I had no way to explain it and couldn't understand it. I just prayed. A lot.
Wednesday evening, the night before teachers were to return to work from the summer, I got a text from an old friend. We had taught together when I first started for five years before our school was closed and we got spread throughout the district. We also had gotten our Master's Degrees in Educational Psychology with our Gifted and Talented licensing courses together. I never did the reflection piece to get the license because I had never planned to leave my special education position in the foreseeable future. Do you know what that text said?
The text said, "Amy, there's a third grade excel (what we call high ability in the district) opening here and you need to take it. I already have the principal (a friend who I had also taught with my first five years) talked into it." I cried. I text the principal who confirmed there was an opening, but wouldn't tell me more until I talked to my new current principal, and then I cried some more. I was having dinner with my principal that had just moved to another district the previous year and my third grade cohorts from my current school where I was the resource teacher. My former principal wasn't giving me a real answer lol, I think it was possibly because my friend who was the other resource teacher there had left at the end of the year and me leaving would mean an all new special education resource teacher staff. My third grade friends told me to go though. They said take it, this is what you were meant to do. I did. I took it. I cried so hard and I was so scared that I felt sick, but I took it.
When I took that job, I was found. I landed on the fresh page of a new chapter. I found a new home that had meaning and purpose to me. I was doing what I had set out to do as a teacher. I was teaching in a gifted and talented classroom. Just like my first grade teacher who had made me want to be a teacher. And the best part was, I was under a principal who believed in me from the first day of my teaching career eleven years earlier. Someone who had been my friend and given me words of encouragement and comfort when I was beaten down those first several years.
This post all stems from watching the "A Year in the Life" of the Gilmore Girls series reboot. Seriously. I related a lot to what they were going through. I think there's a time in all of our lives where we feel completely lost. Maybe a few times. Last time I felt that way it was short lived and didn't rock me to the core quite like this time did. But I understood how it felt. I have planned all my life. I have known what I want and tried to go for it. At that point though the world and chewed me up and spit me out and I had stood back up and had no idea where to go next. I just knew I had to go somewhere because I wasn't done. I was destined for more. And even if I had been beaten down I was invincible because I had risen again and I always will as long as I am meant to. When you fall to your knees, or flat on your face, just remember, the only thing to do after falling is to rise back up again.
Love to you all.
Amy
