I’ve completed nearly two months of my job now. It’s hard having a borderline personality, a disorder built of its fluctuating emotions, a harsh inner critic, and difficulty managing relationships in a job that’s full of stress and talking to people! Here’s what I’ve learned about life in this position so far.
It’s hard. Like really fucking hard. I knew it was going to be, because I’m new to the position, but I was not prepared for how really intensely difficult this job was going to be. There are a lot of different things I’m expected to manage. Case management. Testing. Social lunch groups. Consultation with teachers. Phone calls to parents. Documentation of everything: reports, phone logs, progress monitoring, education programs.
It doesn’t matter how on top of things I feel at the end of one day. The unexpected is coming, whether it be a concern about a student or a new referral. I’ve learned I need to get used to the fact that it’s never all going to get done in a day, my to-do list is just going to be a revolving door.
Closing my door is a boundary. It lets people know that I’m busy. Boundaries are important. You don’t always have to answer the phone when it rings. You don’t have to answer an email right away. You can wait a few hours, regroup, and call back.
I’ve learned that you can ask a question four different times and get four different answers, depending on who you ask. Administration isn’t always cohesive, and everyone has a different agenda. You need to be careful of what you say to who, and avoid throwing someone under the bus.
The nature of my job and the nature of my age puts me on my own little island. Sometimes what I need to do for a student goes in line with what a teacher wants or perceives the student needs. Our values do not always align. I’m not there to make friends, I’m there to do a job.
I’ve learned that the rumor is true: high school never ends. Especially when you work in a school. There are cliques, there are loners, there are politics to navigate. It’s confusing as hell.
I’m really bad at this, by the way. Put me in my office writing reports all day and I’m fine. Put me in classrooms and offices asking for missing surveys or making a suggestion for a kid and I’d like a hole to appear in the ground and swallow me up.
The minions constantly want me to believe that other people think badly of me. For example, I’ll stop in during a teacher’s lunch to ask for something and walk away feeling insecure and anxious. They’re talking about me. They’re annoyed at me. They hate me for asking for that. I might be right and I might not be, but it doesn’t really matter.
When I’m there during the day, it’s about everyone else. It’s about my students. It’s not about me. My problems get put on a shelf and will be returned to later. However, it does need to be about me during lunch. I need to eat, need to drink water, need to take bathroom breaks. Otherwise I’m of no use to my students. This is not always easy to remember, and days have gone by where I have forgotten to eat lunch and then wonder why I’m cranky come 2:00.
I’ve learned you can go down to the cafeteria and ask for pizza at 1:00 on a Friday and they’ll give you leftovers. And if you bribe the technology guys with candy, they install programs on your laptop when you can’t figure it out yourself.
It’s really easy to compare myself to the girl who came before me, the one others thought highly of. She had five years experience on her way out the door and I have two months experience. I want to be as good as her, and I find myself inserting myself into situations and trying to make comments just to show that I know things, to try to justify why I was hired.
It’s okay not to know everything. It’s okay to sit back and watch, to examine the dynamics and absorb more information. These things do not make me worthless in the position, they show that I’m interested in learning.
I don’t always believe this, but other people say it, so it’s probably true.
I’ve learned that work follows me home each day, even if I don’t take any physical reports to write or try to update my calendar. The kids come to me in my dreams. I find myself thinking about them in the shower. I’m so obsessed with the notion of being effective and making a difference that their needs bleed into my world and overshadow my needs to get a break.
For this reason, I’m working on setting timers to limit work outside the walls of my office. I’m working on affirmations to share with myself when I feel like thoughts of my students crowd my brain.
I’ve learned that 6:00 is really early, but that I can survive being among the conscious world at that time.
And, as it turns out, 9:00 feels quite later than it ever used to.
I’ve learned that when all eyes are on me, I panic. When we are sitting in a referral meeting, my brain refuses to concoct questions or make connections between what’s being spoken and the things I’ve learned. I may as well be useless.
I try to make lists to compensate, so I have something to refer to and can develop enough information to make a decision. This helps in some ways, but doesn’t in others.
Without a doubt, I love my students. I am 100% positive of that part. They have their unique challenges, but I am learning them. Their histories, their mannerisms, their needs. I want so desperately to help them grow. I celebrate them as often as I can.
Most importantly, I’ve learned to adopt the mantra of one day at a time. When I want to stress about everything coming my way, the multitudes of spring evaluations on top of referrals, and our program’s growing number of needs, I immediately feel panic rising.
But then I remember, that’s not today. Today, I have X number of things on my list to tackle. The rest is coming, but it’s not here yet. I’ll focus on what’s in front of me.
I’ve learned that this job is stressful. Not just hard, but stressful. I was afraid from the beginning that it would tear me apart. Sometimes I still fear that, like the nights where I break down crying because there’s so much to do or because I’m so tired.
When people ask how my job is going, especially my friends working the same job, it’s easier to just say “It’s fine” or “It’s a lot, but I’m getting through.” Sometimes I just call it a challenge. No one knows the true extent of it, except my one friend C, who I told just the other night in the middle of a panic episode.
The truth is, I wish I loved my job with the same passion that my friends do.
I’ve learned that I don’t know if I want to do this forever, but it’s what I’m going to have to do right now. It’s a job and it’s a salary, and that’s what I’ve worked for. Acceptance is still iffy on this front, but I get up and go in each day.
One day at a time.