I have been a teacher for eight and a half years. It's what I was trained for in college. I graduated in 2005, full of passion to make the world a better place. I was so young. So naive. So ready to believe only good of everyone.
I have been feeling trapped in a meaningless job. My despair and desperation has led to my relapse into a severe depressive episode, accompanied by anxiety so intense, it is almost completely debilitating.
So I decided, for the sake of my sanity and my career, to appropriate three weeks of my yearly Family Medical Leave allowance and attempt to heal, both mentally, physically (because anyone who has ever suffered from depression and/or anxiety understands the toll the disease takes one's body), and spiritually. If I am going to finish out the year, I need to be able to function at 100%.
Before I left, I told my students I would stop by the following week to pick up and grade the essays about heroism they had been writing (my reasoning was that since I gave them the original assignment and had been walking them step by step through it, it wouldn't be fair to ask anyone else to grade it).
Today, I drove to my school to fulfill my promise.
I received quite a shock when I walked into my classroom.
My walls had been stripped of everything I had put on them.
The desks had been rearranged into groups, each of which had a sign over them, indicating the students were now working in stations.
Computers (which were supposed to have been delivered to me two months ago) lined the back wall.
All trace that I ever breathed inside that room had been erased, replaced by our reading specialist: who has been absent from work herself since the end of September.
I was a stranger.
When I got back in my car to go home, I started to cry.
I have felt unhappy for a very long time. But I have never felt so unwanted as I did this afternoon.
Perhaps the reason it affected me the way it did, was because I intend to return to my classroom after the Christmas holidays.
But I have already been forgotten.
I have become extraneous.
I am completely replaceable and completely irrelevant as an educator.
Perhaps this is God's way of helping me cut whatever emotional ties I had left to the teaching profession. I don't know where I'm going to go from here, but perhaps God will show me that road when I'm ready for it. I only know that if and when I go back to my job in January, I will be ready to leave for whatever He makes available.
Maybe that was His plan all along...
