Is the payoff worth it?

Autumnal musings

The pumpkins are ripe, shiny orange jewels lie in amongst muddy fields, the smell of bonfires creeps into nostrils, and crunchy, delicious looking leaves wait to be trodden on throughout the countrysides. This season, where crisp cautious sunshine doesn't warm your bones as it did in summertime, where long stomps are chilly and satisfying and end in great talks over a cider or a cozy hot chocolate curled up in front of a log burning stove. The season with the best colours nature can offer (according to me).

It is also a season of new beginnings for me. 

I have to be honest, I have found this blog post particularly tricky to write. The last post I wrote, I quickly deleted, for fear that the person of whom I was writing would exact some kind of retribution and I would be blacklisted from the teaching profession forever. Taking the post down was done out of fear, but also at the wise advice of some of my very close friends who care about my future and my reputation. I have since been feeling a gloriously unhelpful mixture of guilt and fear, then anger at myself for feeling this, followed by fury towards this person who manages to continue to somehow inject negativity into my life, and the olive topping this emotional cocktail was a sense of sort of hopeless despair that I am still bound to my resentment in such a way that it has not ceased to steal my time and my energy. Time heals all, and as some of my friends have said, and I quote "This is a storm in a fuckin teacup!" and I am grateful for the gentle, unhurried hands of time, and for my friends, as I think leaving the post up would have been an unmitigated mistake. This is why I didn't write anything for a time, as I felt almost nervous to. The feelings have passed, or are at least mercifully dormant.

Around the same time that the proverbial was hitting the other proverbial, I decided that I was going to start building my own business, without relying on head teachers feelings about me, whilst walking away from the stress and dread that use to slink before me, surround me, and trail behind me as I stumbled through my day as a class teacher, especially in the last few years of it. So, I advertised myself as a piano teacher, spruced up the little space in my house where my piano sits, and within the first 2 days had 6 piano students. In the same week, I applied as a piano teacher at a music teaching studio close to me that doubles as a coffee shop, and was hired as the manager of the coffee shop, a piano teacher and a children's' music workshop leader. A week later, a school asked me to teach music to 4 classes on Fridays. I plan to use my talents and creativity in further business ideas and I am so excited about it. 

So I am now working 3 days a week within these various odd little situations for about half the pay I was receiving as a part time class teacher, but without a fraction of the stress and exhaustion I felt most of the time. 

The payoff. Is. Worth. It. 

My relationship with my husband has improved. The energy, creative and otherwise, I have for my very fiesty, very bouncy, very demanding and very very cute 3 year old has increased. I am 100% happier. I have managed to stop drinking. I actually....wait for it....LOOK FORWARD to going to work. 

With all the other unspeakable horrors that are revealed to us each day in the rest of the world, although my heart aches and dies and crumbles for the people who are being tortured and undeservedly battered with them, I am trying to focus on the whole, the lovely, the lasting, while I still can.

In Canada, where I grew up and where my whole family resides, it was thanksgiving yesterday.  I keep having moments of gratitude, little head rushes of happiness, and I can truly say that I feel enormously blessed. I feel like I am in the right place for the first time in a very long time. 

Thanks for reading x