Manageable Me

Education is quite focussed on management. Managing situations into good outcomes and managing deteriorating situations to avoid bad outcomes.  Bad outcomes involve less premptive work but require much more paperwork after the event.

It's taken 4 weeks to get to this point where the first "down" of 2020 has occurred.  It's easy to spot the the 'event' which broke the camel's back but harder to focus on the corcumstances which led up to it. In the aim of better mental health (as I think that's all anyone can aspire to) what happened?

Working in education is difficult, but so is any job. The difference is the person you are when seen outside of hours. One must be very protective of their own life away from the edu-space and that can be draining.  It can be more so for people who live in smaller communities where their life can seem to exist in a fishbowl. Someone saw you telling off your child at the football ground and cant wait to tell you what their parents thought of you come Monday etc. In a good week I can get to be myself (uncensored warts aand all) for around 30-60 minutes.  Enough time to get air for the upcoming week,

What happens when that time becomes rationed? Well, I have an idea. 60 Minutes a week (just over 8 minutes a day) became 60 minutes in 2.5 weeks (17-18 days give or take) thats now 3min 20 seconds per day.  One pop song's time to let go of everything if you can find that time.  One thing I am not good at is time manufacture. Two nights I was watching a film, which entailed watching snippets of 10-20sec while adding to work pintrest boards, adding planning, writing on a student shared document and researhing options for hands on ways to teach narrative writing.

"There are some great resources online", is a term that can hugely misrepresent the time needed to locate and implement such things. Multitasking via smartphone is my only way of getting close to the job done because to work in education nowadays you must feel you are 'called' to be so. It can be a position which consumes all of you until the point where I feel like I cant draw breath and my heart races and my head is dizzy and I write annoying run-on sentences with a total lack of punctuation or regard for the poor person who may or may not wind up reading them just to show what it can be like and how important those 60 minutes are because you are on show and a model of responsibility, compassion and humility while putting yourself aside for the needs of others in and outside of your employment....

So the break time is important and I cant figure out where to take it. Do I not be there for family? do I not be as prepared as I can be for work? or do I not take my 3min 20sec a day? guess which I have been choosing.

I need help to manage my life.  I don't know how to let other's know of that expectation. Maybe it's unreasonable but its the expectation I've had to work under my entire professional life. Today it will seem to others that I'm all bent out of shape over breakfast.  I'm bent out of shape over the compromises and failures of the last two and a half weeks and not being able to get air leading up to breakfast.

The bad mood has been mostly kept to myself today and I shall contunie to try and stifle it for as long as possible.  Knowing its probably another 10 days until air. Breathe shallowly.