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How It Feels To Go Back To Teaching After Taking A Year And A Half Off
I don’t know if there’s a word for it
A year and a half ago, I got to a point where I felt I couldn’t teach anymore. I’d go into work exhausted and stay tired until I left. Everything felt the same. New coworkers could see it in old pictures; I wasn’t the same. Lots of them asked, “What happened?”
I’d burned out. Even the fact I’d been living out my dreams of traveling and living abroad didn’t cheer me up. I had enough. I felt I had to go home. And it looked like my teaching career died the day I announced I quit.
A year and a half later, I’m back in the ESL world, but I’m teaching online this time. I’m not sure how I feel about being back to teaching yet; it’s more of a surreal thing than anything else.
I made no secrets about my success on this platform. I started okay, but now I’m lucky if I make enough to pay my phone bill. It’s a discouraging, but humbling experience. I thought I’d be an instant success, but I had to learn the hard way writing is a slow burn.
It’s one of the only reasons I went looking into teaching English again. Being in the middle of a global pandemic isn’t helping much either. As happy as I am to fulfill a dream of being an author, I still need the money to eat and pay the…
