Where We Stop, Nobody Knows

This morning I interviewed over the phone for a job--teaching English in Oakland. I answered questions, and asked questions, and then I asked "What is your hiring plan?"

"We do this interview," the lady explained, "and then I'll observe some teaching, either in the classroom or on videotape. Then we'll be ready to hire."

"OK," I said. "I hope to hear from you..."

"No, you don't understand," she said. "I would like to see you teach."

I told her I'd get back to her.

I am not sure I can teach this fall. I'm not sure I can NOT teach this fall. I'm trying to stay calm about this. But given that I have now completed SEVEN MONTHS without getting any financial aid, or having a job beside this summer-school teaching gig that nearly sent me tumbling back into depression, making a living is getting scarier and scarier.

This is complicated.

Surviving On My Own Terms

Today, I mostly stared into space. I have things to do, I just didn't do them. And then, while rummaging through a box, looking for some spare printer paper, I found a holy card, given to me at a funeral at the beginning of the school year.

I met this woman only once or twice. Our only connections were these: I had taught her son at St. Dympnha's for a quarter, when his regular English teacher was on maternity leave, and we had met in a few planning meeting at St. Attracta's, where I went to work this fall, and she was also employed.

She killed herself the night before school began. It seems ridiculous to say that perhaps my tenure at St. Attracta was cursed--it seems like a pathetic attempt to make drama out of someone else's tragedy--but I will remember always meeting the principal at the door of that first school day, and the words tumbling out of her mouth. I didn't remember who this woman was, at first. I was surrounded by her grieving friends, people who had worked with her for many years. I was responsible for children who'd known her their whole lives.

I have no idea, finally, exactly what pushed her past breaking. She'd struggled with depression for years, a bad, deep, depression that put her in the hospital at one point. It seemed terrifying to me that she did it the night before school started. Was it an attempt not to start the school year, not to begin anything she didn't plan to finish? Was it coincidence? Was the thought of being surrounded by the children again too much? She loved her job, I was told. The kids said they could see when the depression began to get the better of her...she stopped laughing, she stopped playing with them on the playground.

The first year I taught, I was so overwhelmed that I had no idea what was going on around me, but I did notice in February when I got an e-mail saying that one of the eighth-grade English teachers was taking the rest of the year off for health reasons. I barely knew this woman. I assumed she was getting cancer treatment, or going for back surgery. It was the next year that I learned that a combination of terrible job circumstances forced on her by the administration had pushed her depression and other heath issues to the point that, on Valentines' Day, she ended up in a locked psychiatric ward. A forty-year teacher, this woman. An acknowledged giant at what she did.

She came back in the fall to finish off her last year before retirement, and when people asked how she was, at the staff meeting in the fall, she smiled and said, "I'm on three very powerful psychoactive medications, thank you, so I feel fine."

This last winter I was so deep under the depression that I stopped eating. I have never stopped eating in all my life. I lost fifteen pounds. I had them to spare, but it was deeply frightening. I eat when I'm sad, I don't fast. I was so deeply stressed that I was responding to stress in ways I had never done before.

And I thought of them, the woman who killed herself, the woman who was hospitalized.

I told everyone, and laughed, that I quit because I didn't want to end up in the psych ward like my old coworker. But it was deeper than that. I was afraid I wouldn't be hospitalized, that I wouldn't break, that I would become sicker and sicker but never let go of the rope, never give up, and let my self-loathing take over from the inside out, while I kept going to school every day, and pretending I could get the situation under control.

I was pretty sure that something horrifying would happen if I tried to do that until summer.

It's really hard for me to remember how important it was to let go, to let myself find a place to hide and heal. I'm scrabbling for work right now, and my finances are just a mess. It's easy to tell myself that I should never have left a perfectly good job. (Perfectly good=pays the rent).

But I was in serious emotional and physical danger, and I could not stay. I had to start over. I had to be serious about my own survival.

The woman who killed herself left behind a sixteen year old son, one of the best kids I have ever met.

The woman who had the breakdown retired to the Russian River with her husband and took up flyfishing.

And I am going to go on to the next thing, and thank God for the strength to get myself out of harm's way.

Paxil, Rebellion, and Talkin' Bout My Generation

Allow me to discuss my experience with anti-depressants, and my current feelings about them.

I started taking Paxil back in the spring of 2006.

I started taking Paxil because work, my first teaching job, was becoming intolerable, and I was having panic attacks every time the principal walked into my room. So I took the Paxil, which smoothed my depression over work and such over remarkably, and all was well.

Well, not exactly, because the jerky, problematic arc of my teaching career continued to be both jerky and problematic, but I was very emotionally contained while several different jobs went to hell in a handbasket. Relatively speaking.

Now, I had been in therapy for a number of years, with a marvellous woman, and had gotten through a lot of stuff, and, in fact, learned quite a bit about managing my depression. My therapist never mentioned drugs, and when I brought it up once, she discussed it with me, but did not seem to think I needed anti-depressants, unless I felt they would seriously improve my quality of life. Which, at the time, I did not.

I fell a bit through the cracks with the Paxil, to be honest. It was some doctor at the ER who put me on it, and when I had to get a doctor to approve a refill a while back, she was fairly horrified that I'd just been casually left on it for four years with no follow-up. She did manage to make it seem as though it was my fault, which I resented.

I tried to get off the Paxil a couple of times, only to discover that getting off Paxil is not exactly easy or fun. I went online when I was first put on the Paxil to read up on it, and was immediately bombarded with all sorts of dreadful warnings from sites with names like paxilsurvivor and mypaxilnightmare. Most of these sites were overblown, at least from my experience, but they did warn me of some things that Kaiser failed to. One of these was 'the zaps', a sensation of electric shock that often accompanies withdrawal from the Paxil. If I hadn't know about the damn zaps, I would have thought I was losing my mind when they started. The problem with getting off the Paxil was that it could be done, but once it WAS done, I started crying again, so I went back on. And stayed on.

Paxil is just plain hard to get off of. I've been told by a couple of doctors that the intense resistance that the medical community has had to labeling it addictive is that they're not actually sure why it's physically habituating. The chemical reason for whatever leads to the zaps and such isn't clear. And so, doctors being doctors, they simply resist the idea that people are actually having symptoms. Doctors are like that.

It was this past fall, though, four and a half years after I went on the Paxil that I finally got off it, with medical assistance. This time, I got a doctor who was an actual psychiatrist, as opposed to the genprac guy who told me to go on a half dose for a week before cutting it out, and I'd be fine. We did an elaborate dance of getting me off the Paxil, and onto Prozac, and then off Prozac.

I did this for two reasons. First, and most immediately, I wanted to get pregnant, and Paxil is strongly, strongly counterindicated for pregnancy. The other reason was a little more complicated--I had had two good years at St. Dymphna's, and I expected a good year at St. Attracta's (HAH!), and I thought maybe it was time to face the world unmedicated. I thought, at the time, that if it didn't go smoothly, I could go back on anti-depressants, but it seemed worth while to experiment.

Of course, St. Attracta's was a housefire of a disaster, and after a pleasant summer and early fall, I simply detonated, and fell down the rabbit hole of my own depression. It was in those days that I ranted to a teacher blog about how miserable I was, mentioning that I was off my meds, and was roundly scolded and told to get right back on the Paxil, pronto. "You know that you need to take your medicine, so do it!" one lady snapped.

Well, on the one hand, that seemed like someone being quite concerned about my wellbeing--and it was followed by many exhortations not be ashamed of NEEDING my medication (I wasn't, but apparently even thinking that you might not need it forever was suspect), and on the other hand, I started thinking of all those movies about 50s housewives drugged out of their minds on tranquilizers. I started wondering how you told the difference between taking a medication that addressed your psychiatric needs, and taking a medication that was covering up for your actual needs in life.

And thinking this sort of thing through sensibly while you're in the grip of a crippling major depression is harder than you might think.

Anyway, I finally did something that was either eminently sensible, or completely missing the point--instead of numbing myself down further, I gave two weeks notice to the source of stress. And I immediately felt much, much better.

I've felt much, much better ever since. Even with the worry of finding money to live on, and a new job, and health insurance, and many, many other things, I'm now back on the barest trace of Zoloft, and I'm FINE.

This is not meant to be a rant against anti-depressants, because God knows, they have been there for me, and great, when I needed them. But anti-depressants are meant to balance your chemistry so you're OK, not up your tolerance so you can handle things that are by no means OK.

Most of my work life for the past five years has been by no means OK. And I am going to fight like hell to get to a place where I am OK.

Catching Everyone Up, Finally

OK, here it goes. I quit the job at St. Attracta's.

Mid-year.

I have never done such a thing in the years I've been teaching. Wanted to, yes, wanted to very badly, but I have never done it.

I did it. I told the principal, and I told no one else, and on the last day before Christmas break I let all the kids run out screaming, and that was it.

Now I am hunting for work, and trying to get a student loan, and taking classes for an online MFT program, and seeing what happens next.

I feel a hundred and seventy-five percent better. I had gone down into a deep, ugly whirlpool of depression, and despair at my inability to do a good job.

I quit, and I feel better.

There it is.

How can you tell?

I'm trying to figure out how you can tell if you're just chemically depressed and going through a transition to a new job, or if you actually have realized that you don't like what you're doing for a living much and should change.

Bumping Along

I'm sad. I'm now also on these alarming Vitamin D pills which I'm supposed to take once a week for eight weeks and then once a month. I told the Balebos not to be surprised if sunlight starts to come out of my ears.

But so far, just sad.

I am STRUGGLING with, well, everything. I feel sad about struggling. I have whined too much at my teacher boards and been told to stop. I'm still sad. And frustrated as hell.

There is nothing, nothing at all, like spending ten minutes calming a class down every SINGLE time, when you know that their not calming down at once with a light ring of the chimes is a moral failing of your own. Do it over. And over. And over. And over. And over.

I wanna go back to high school.

Confession is good for the soul, they say

Today was my Weird Bullying Issues day. Won't go into too many details--just spent half the day with the Vice Principal saying, "What would you advise?" and the other half talking to weeping children who didn't think they'd get caught.

This was at the end of a week that started off very badly, after a Friday that dropped the bottom out of my newly not-on-antidepressants state and left me weeping and shaking all weekend. I came back feeling like hell, and rebuilt a little. I still don't feel great, but I'm OK.

Anyway, toward the end of the day, I caught a kid sitting at another kid's desk, going through it. The desk of the kid who's been complaining that his stuff is going missing, and junk being put into his desk when he's away from it. After I spent five minutes this morning talking about the terrible stuff that would happen to any child caught messing with another kid's desk.

I kind of leaped at him, when I registered what I was seeing and said WHATAREYOUDOING, and he started to say something, and I snapped that he was in SOMUCHTROUBLE and sent him back to his own desk...and then didn't get a chance to talk to him after school because he escaped during dismissal--so I talked to the vice principal again instead.

And I realized something.

I am being weird with the kids because being back in middle school is scaring the bejaysus out of me. The last time I was in middle school was a bad, bad year. Around January, I got a GLOWING review from my principal, and literally a week later, a parent wandered into my classroom at a bad moment, and I had a dust-up with the Education Expert, and suddenly I was persona non grata at that school.

And I am so afraid of it happening again. And when the kids misbehave, my blood runs cold, because if ANY child misbehaves EVER, I figure it's going to be 'don't let the door hit your tush on the way out' again. So I'm trying to get them behave by sheer force of will--and getting angry too easily because I'm SCARED TO DEATH.

And I can't do that. I have to teach the kids. Like they are, not like I want them to be in the future. I have to deal with their stuff now. I have to be real with them and their parents now. And if my best isn't good enough, that will have to be too damn bad. I am working hard, I'm being as sane and consistent and strict as I can manage under the new-school, wacky-talky class conditions, and I'll get better. But I can't scream DOYOUKNOWHOWMUCHTROUBLEYOU'REINMISTER at an eleven-year-old boy because I'm afraid other grownups will blame me if he does something wrong. He will, probably do something wrong. He's eleven. And human.

I will probably do a lot of wrong things too. Because I'm thirty-seven and human. I didn't handle it right today. But I need to stop being so afraid.

Also, I need to get my Vitamin D count up to at least fifty from THIRTEEN. My doctor has spoken.

Not feeling so great

Friday was the point at which my post-Paxil calmness plummeted in the face of 28 sixth graders who absolutely refused to shut up.

I cried through a three-day weekend. I went back to school today, and it was lousy, lousy, lousy.

You want to know what the lousiest part was? It was the part where I had to ring the 'attention' signal to get attention in the middle of a transition to math class.Why? Someone's backpack was missing.

So why did they ignore it? Well, it turns out that they HAD to get to math class, because Sister is 'strict'.

I, of course, am chopped liver.

Did I mention it got up to ninety-five degrees by late afternoon?

I have a headache, I want to cry all the time, I am furious with my class, and with myself, and I'm overheated. It's really, really special.

I want to be back at St. Dymphna's.

March Slog

I took Friday off. I NEVER take the day off. I'm still sick. I spent three days in bed, and I'm still sick. I'm sick, I'm miserable, no one will give my husband a job, and I'm depressed.

BLEAH!!!!!

OK, moaning and ranting over.