Life After Teaching

The first morning I woke up with no timetable, I did a happy dance in my kitchen. There were no bells, no rigidity of time, no classrooms to be in at a particular moment. I opened my back door to the fresh air and rolled out my yoga mat.

While I stretched and bent, I remember thinking - this is how I will start every day now.

It did not last, of course. Within days, something else had started creeping in alongside the joy, quiet at first, then less quiet. How would I earn a living? Not just any living, but the one I had built over decades, the one that had always simply arrived, month after month, without having to think about where it came from. And underneath that question, a stranger one: why, when I sat down in the middle of the day, supposedly free to do exactly that, did it feel like I was doing something wrong. Why was I hit by guilt and a noisy nagging feeling that I should be doing something?

I understand now what was happening, though I did not have language for it then. My mind and my body had spent thirty years inside a structure so rigid it had become physical, written into me at the level of muscle and breath, not just habit. And when that structure disappeared, I did not relax into the space it left behind. I filled it. I started filling the hours with stuff I told myself was necessary because some part of me had decided this was simply what one did, this was working, and working was the only shape I knew how to hold. I was, within weeks of leaving the very thing that had been quietly grinding me down, doing it to myself all over again, just without the bell to mark when it should stop.

What I had not fully reckoned with was everything else that was waiting. I did not leave teaching and walk gracefully into balance. I left, and then built two businesses, while parenting alone, while a teenage daughter started the enormous transition into college, while my father's care became a more complex and constant thing than either of us had expected. A burst pipe. A panic attack on the motorway that I had not seen coming and could not explain afterwards. Care calls and care systems that have their own bewildering logic, that ask you to be three kinds of competent at once while also somehow holding everything together quietly, invisibly, so that nobody else has to notice the weight of it.

I am learning, slowly and against the grain of how I am made, that resting is not a weakness. I say it to myself often enough that I suspect I am still trying to believe it rather than simply knowing it. My house is, as I write this, genuinely a mess. My mind is still frequently full of shoulds and oughts and musts, the old structure still issuing instructions even though there is no one left to enforce them. I am naturally impatient, and I know exactly what I want to build, and I can see it clearly enough that the gap between seeing it and having it sometimes feels unbearable.

But here is what I could not have done inside a classroom, not once, not for thirty years: in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, when the ‘shoulds’ get too loud, I can put on my shoes and walk with my beloved dog, Hercules. No one needs to cover my class. No bell will ring before I am ready to come back. I walk until something in my chest loosens, and then I come back to my desk, to the work I have chosen, to the women I get to help find the shape of their own stories, and I begin again.

I think often of the protagonists I help other women build. A good one is never finished meeting obstacles. The story would not be worth telling if she were. What makes her worth following is not that the path clears, but that she keeps walking it anyway, a little wiser each time about what she actually needs.

I am still working that out for myself. But I am walking it.

If you are writing a novel in the middle of everything else life is asking of you, I understand something about that. A Story Clarity Session might be exactly what you need to find your way back to your manuscript. You can find out more here.