Being Brave

As a child, I suffered from bouts of existential anxiety. Obviously, I didn’t know the name for it until years later, whilst studying a Philosophy module at university, but I used to lie awake for hours on end pondering Big Questions and scaring myself silly worrying about the meaning of life. As a child who often dwelled on these sorts of worries, the scariest villain of my childhood was not Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars or Miss Trunchball from Matilda, but The Nothing from The Neverending Story. Something about the fact that I couldn’t even wrap my head around the idea of ‘nothingness’ taking over Fantasia made it a thousand times scarier than the much more tangible Chokey.

The three weeks of probationary year that I managed last August have become my own personal Nothing, a shady shadowy creature squatting in the corner of my mind. Something that I can’t see clearly, or even quite understand, but that scares me half to death. And the more I try to fathom it, the more confusing and ominous it becomes until I shy away from it again. Now that I am learning to cope with my depression and am thinking more clearly about things, I can rationalise that the three weeks I spent teaching were difficult, and a sad and confusing time for me, but not the horror story it has become in my head. Being the stubborn little thing that I am, (I think it comes from growing up with brothers, this need to prove myself to be tough!) I decided that being able to rationalise it wasn’t enough for me and I would return to the school, just to prove to myself that I could.

Today was the first time I have set foot in the school since I left in September 2012 and it was actually amazing! I’m pretty sure I just grinned all day long J

The building –especially the staff room – was not the enormous terrifying space I had remembered. And although the children there are from an area of social deprivation and have some behavioural issues, they weren’t the monsters with a personal vendetta against me that they had morphed into in my head. In fact, the bad behaviour I saw today wasn’t anything that I haven’t encountered before on university placements and dealt with effectively myself. It was such a confidence boost to realise these things and know for certain that those ‘awful’ three weeks were mostly due to the demons in my own head. Probably the only time in my life when I have been pleased to discover that I was the problem!

I went back to what had been my old class to say hello to my little Primary Twos (now very nearly Primary Threes!) and was met with the announcement from one little darling:

“I didn’t miss you at all. I don’t even remember who you are.”

A year ago, that would have completely and utterly crushed me, but today I laughed aloud, and even repeated the story to much more laughter in the staff room. You need a thick skin to deal with the no-holds-barred honesty of little kids, and it appears that I have finally grown one J