“I had a secret motivation for starting this blog.”

Me (high school teacher)

Female, mid (late????)20s

New York City

I had a secret motivation for starting this blog. When people asked me about it, I wove together some big words about a quest to understand the way people make sense of the parts of their life they cede to career, and while that’s true, it was really a front.

I wanted to know if I should quit my job.

I wanted to know if I was doing this whole “career” thing right. I wanted to hear about how people made their decisions to compare my situation to theirs to create some helpful rules for myself so that I could do this….right.

I’m constantly in the midst of a life audit. I am observing, collecting data, calculating, inferring, constantly wondering if I am on the “right” path, if I am going to be happy with the decisions I’m making years down the road, especially when those decisions dictate how I spend the majority of my waking hours. And in my twenties, now off the preset path of four-year educational stints, in the absence of a predetermined endpoint, I can stay at a job until I decide it’s time to move on, and the responsibility of making the right decision lies solely on me.

Over four years ago now, I made a decision that I thought was right. I chose a school, the first where I’d teach by myself. While spending two years as a teaching assistant, I noticed a big, beautiful school just a few blocks away. I quietly admired it, first from afar, and then, from up close when I attended their open house. On one long weekend in the spring of 2016, as my teaching assistantship came to an end, I crafted my demo lesson for that school. I also applied to one other school based on a connection I had. After walking out of my second nearly full-day interview, drained from having sunk double digit hours into crafting scripted-to-death demo lessons to teach to strangers while being considered for deeply relational positions, I told myself that if I got an offer from either school, I would take it. 

I didn’t get what I thought was my dream job. I got the other job. And that fall, at 23, I found myself teaching Literature I to 120 freshmen. I fell into a routine of blaring 6 AM alarms when blanket departure sometimes seemed more momentum than motive. I felt the haze of too-full days, of shaken hands and mustered-up smiles, of facedown crying on the bus on the way to spring break because I just didn’t know how to make sense of the way there was always more to be done. Often, I chose self-imposed isolation and lived in mourning for hours lost on working too much and connecting too little. I learned of my heart’s persistence in giving a rhythm to all of the ways I had failed that day and all of the ways I’d have to face it tomorrow-- and how that rhythm keep me sleepless into the hours of the morning.

And I will remember all of this. But I will also remember how that winter gave way to spring, and how seemingly endless cold gave way to sunset-streaked skies viewed via Broadway, to watching circles of freshmen congregate, full of the hope that I had then misplaced, but was still too stubborn to call lost. I will remember one sleepless night that gave way to a surprise meeting-- I thought I was in trouble, but my principal told me that they’d be extending a return offer, and that he was proud of me. I will remember how the smaller days brought unseen fruit. How what I couldn’t do in November felt like breathing by May, how after school visits from students dissolved both their and my façades, how a half day seemed to roll around every time I really needed to take a breath.  

I stayed there, and I grew roots there. I sat in the same desk, sharing the same corner classroom with the same history teacher, spending the same few minutes after dismissal unpacking our personal and professional lives together. I cried less. I learned that mistake was not another one for failure, and that kids are resilient and that I still felt like a kid sometimes. I made a home there, knowing every student by name and clearing the hurdle that stood between work and real friends. In my third year, I got to teach my freshmen of two years prior, and enjoyed their maturity, thoughtfulness, and trust in me, and I marveled at how much growth had happened but how much they still kept what made them them.

And I grew up there. I ascended four flights of stairs to this walkup school in the same phase where I noticed the hairlines of men my age starting to recede and exes getting married and I learned of the revolving door that is cities in your twenties and sometimes I thought that getting older just meant adding more to your list of lost. Loss looked different all the time and I saw it everywhere—from friends in new relationships with no time to freshmen learning their own limitations to sweet students graduating to feeling our school shaken by the death of a kid who so loved God and the world that his taking actually seemed downright offensive. And as I felt the sinking sand of loss shake my ground, I longed for ways to seek stability and to seek home when so much felt like just passing through.  

And one day, when I decided I wanted to start explicitly teaching nuance after grading a pile of essays, I don’t know that I could’ve articulated that it was because I was learning it too. That I was grappling with the knowledge that I was doing something that engaged and challenged me, but that I didn’t like the way it bled indelibly into the rest of my life and led to seven-day workweeks. That I believed in the hearts of my coworkers but also noticed policies and structures that didn’t always make kids feel heard. That I grew rapidly as a new teacher, but noticed that a lot of the development and coaching was geared towards making new teachers decent, and not decent teachers great (like our kids deserve). That I enjoyed cultivating credibility over my time there, but that even this credibility wasn’t a lever for enough meaningful change. That I liked leading and believed I had something to give, but questioned what structurally led to so much young and inexperienced leadership. That I created friendships of a lifetime with coworkers who were both professionally impressive and adept and personally kind, hilarious, and empathetic people who listened to tales of my fresh breakup over churring copiers, and were always down for a beer and a hot dog. Yet a pressure to perform still pervaded the adult culture— or was that pressure internally perpetuated? That I loved the kids I worked for, but I also want to have my own, and with the hours and emotional energy asked of me, I struggled to see where I’d find the time to even look for someone to raise those kids with. 

I used to approach everything with a keen readiness for classification, deeply wanting to label it “good” or “bad,” an appealing option or one without redemptive possibility, and I still feel that temptation sometimes, especially as I approach decisions about where to live and work, and who to spend time with, and how to spend that time. I want to know what’s “good” so that “good” can become “permanent.” I find myself moorless and uncertain as applying this binary feels more elusive each day, yet I know that practically, decisions still must be made, and the lack of a decision is a decision too. So in May, somehow awash in both doubt and conviction, and reluctantly accepting the truth that leaving usually says more about who leaves than it does about who remains, I decided to leave my lovely, complicated school home at the end of the school year.

And the nuance follows. I am excited to seek new growth and pursue a school that is trying to center the felt experience of kids and adults, and I feel the loss of leaving people and a place that I love. I am working on reclassifying loss and change and impermanence as not just “bad” or tragic, but also edifying, sometimes perspective-giving, sometimes the exactly perfect kick in the ass. That loss can be painful and unsettling and still a homeward step. 

Upon the news of my departure, one of my students wrote me to say, “sometimes, we might need some or a little change in our lives and that makes us more clever, boosts our experience, and makes us who we are.” I think he’s right. 

So this month, I began work (remotely) at that big shiny school that I admired years ago. And though it is somewhat the fulfillment of a long-standing goal, I don’t know that it’s the right decision. It felt wrong to pack up my desk and erase the board of marks from March when I went back in June, to say goodbyes through emails and Zoom calls to kids and adults that I’ve known for much of my adult life. The reasons why this fell into motion during a pandemic that completely changed the nature of my work are still a mystery to me. I fear the pain of leaving my little home and that I hope that the next place could be the Big Home, or it might not. The allure of the big shininess and of touching what seemed untouchable in the past might too quickly give way to disillusionment. But also, I’ve felt that it’s time for me to go somewhere else. For me to experience the loss involved in that and to learn what it has to teach me. 

As a twenty-something, I often find myself in conversations with friends describing changing jobs, changing apartments, looking for therapists and making other decisions by saying “it’s like dating.” Or maybe dating is like everything else. Leaving my school feels like a breakup. It feels unmooring and displacing and liberating and indelible and full of possibility all at once. And I could not be more grateful. Or more heartbroken. Or more hopeful for what could be a homeward step.