More of me whining

I can’t get excited about things. I can’t care about things. I’m calling the doctor this next week. He’ll probably just tell me that it’s “part of the grieving process”, like last time. But I need something to make me care.

Graduation is on Wednesday. My housemates’ parents are coming. I have a couple of people coming, but all along – most of this year – I just haven’t cared that much about graduation. I know my achievements from this year. I checked my transcript today (again) and, yes, my dissertation was the highest mark that I got all year. And I’m graduating with merit. Yay me. But the ceremony itself? It’s for other people. It’s for parents, it’s for families. It’s a ceremony marking the conclusion of a year that most people have spent two or three months moving on from. And I’ve had two. I had my high school graduation and I had my BA graduation. It’s not that I don’t care about the MA – I do, I’m quite proud of it, and I miss the work terribly. And I have people coming to mark the occasion, and I’m excited to see the people that I haven’t seen in weeks who are coming for it (everyone I know, except one, is graduating at the same ceremony). But I don’t actually care about walking across the stage and receiving my certificate. I don’t care about the ceremony.

I do have quite a lot of free time, but I have low energy and low motivation so all the projects that I have on my list never quite get done. And then I feel guilty because, if I want to be a writer, I need to write. But I end up watching old TV shows and rereading books that aren’t very good (and ignoring the books that I haven’t read yet) and writing falls by the wayside. It’s an excuse, but I can’t seem to break out of it. When I do get around to doing something productive, like applying for more jobs or something, it always takes about five times longer than I want it to (because I have no energy and get distracted easily

Maybe I just need this time of apathy, to recharge. I don’t have the money to let it go on too long – and it’s affecting my teaching to the point where I’m REALLY not going to have any money because I’ll no longer have a job, hence the need to go to the doctor – but I need to stop with the self-imposed guilt. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually the other stuff will, too. But the first step is to get myself mentally healthy again.

Yeah, just more of me whining

I seem to be at yet another career crossroads. I have been teaching part-time at a school, covering some classes for a teacher who's been ill long-term. I am getting incredibly bored. Some of this has to do with the timetable - it's very sporadic, but just enough that I can't really find another part-time job. Some of it has to do with my general mood - I am incredibly apathetic right now, and it's hard to tell which is causing which. Some of it has to do with the fact that teaching kind of feels like a "been there, done that" - and that worries me. I know I am a good, caring teacher. I'm just no longer sure that I should be.

I have started to take steps to get past it. I still have the employment problem that I don't have a teaching qualification (so, if I stay in teaching, I would either have to stay at private schools or get one, which is the current Plan) but I don't have experience in anything else. I have applied for a couple of internships at my postgraduate university that should help expand my experience and CV. The thing is, though, the school may still need me. It's still very nebulous whether the teacher that I'm covering will be coming back full-time at all, I learned today. I don't want to abandon a school that needs me; I don't want to abandon a job even if it's not ideal when I don't have anything else in the pipeline. But I can't keep going in this limbo - coming in and essentially being at school full-time or nearly full-time when I'm only teaching 1-3 lessons per day [I have been getting to school at 8:30 or so every day, and leaving at 1:30 ish except for days when I need to be there until 4]. If I'm going to stay, I need a more....consolidated timetable. Or a fuller one.

I have to do something to get past this apathy. I have any number of projects bouncing around my head, but I do not have the motivation or energy to work on them, even when I give myself deadlines. I just can't seem to care, and that's not going to help the job search or the productivity at all. I spend my time doing the things that should be done in 'coffee break' times (like, say, blogging. Or checking Google Reader), and not doing the things that I should be taking a break from. And then it's nearly 10 or 11, and because I'm either exhausted or the alarm's going off at 6, I still don't do them. Something needs to change. I need to get my drive back. I need to pull out of this incipient depression (after several days of being relatively okay, I woke up crying again this morning). I need help.

The devil is in the details

The school where I'm temporarily working is having an inspection this week. Everyone's very worried about it. Sometimes I think I should probably be worried about it too, but I just can't make myself care. For one thing, an inspection is supposed to see how things normally run, so there's not really anything different I can do. For another thing, I don't have any administrative responsibilities that they'll be checking. For a third thing, no matter what the outcome of the inspection, I am not really going to be affected. For a fourth thing, I still have the "I'm new" excuse.

I keep running across tiny little things that I have no experience with. Like yesterday, when I told my class to finish our activity for homework, they told me about "homework timetables" and that they're not supposed to have English homework on Mondays or they'd get overloaded. These are the sorts of things that it is good to know. They are also the sorts of things that, if you are used to the system that uses them, you don't think to mention. They are so automatic to the way you work that it doesn't even occur that it's not done or done differently in other places.

I just know that something is Not Right in my life. I believe very strongly that your body/mind/soul tells you when something's wrong and, while nothing seems Wrong right now, something's Not Right either. I need to do something to get back to where I'm 'supposed' to be - the career path where I feel comfortable - not complacent, but comfortable. At least I've stopped crying in the shower every morning - but that doesn't mean that whatever was bringing it on has been solved, just that my mind/body/soul has shut down from dealing with it. Hence the apathy, I suppose.

One clue to this Not Right-ness was Monday afternoon. I felt fine at school, developed a headache on the way home, was home by 2....and was asleep by 2:15. I woke up sometime after 4:30, still with a headache, and was groggy and headachy the rest of the night. The temperature in our house doesn't help, either - our gas bill was higher than we were expecting and higher than we want, so we're trying to conserve. This, of course, means that we do things like bake more and keep the electricity use high, but whatever. We'll get through it somehow.


I think I'm getting burned out from education. Not from me learning - I still want to do a PhD at some point - but just from being in the education bubble. I am quite bored and apathetic right now about being a teacher. While for some people that may make them stricter, for me it lets my classes kind of run amok, which then doesn't do anything to increase my enthusiasm. I want to do something else for a while: it will help me clarify, one way or another, my desire to be a teacher. I still have the problem of have experience in education but qualifications for other things, but I'm working on that. Back to the soul-destroying job hunt I go, I suppose.