The Best Thing I Did This Year

On the Usefulness of Getting Help

Before I get too far into this one, I want to be clear that what I’m going to discuss was useful for me. It might not be useful for you. This post is the definition of your mileage may vary.

I have taught school for 21 years. The first half of this school year was probably the hardest time I’ve had in the job.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, and it won’t really do well for me to get into the details here. I’ll just say that I was as unhappy with my work life as I’ve ever been. Not the actual teaching. Nothing is as ever as enjoyable as the actual teaching. It was a lot of other things, not all of which were directly connected to work.

I was stuck in a series of mental loops. Thought spirals are not a completely unknown thing to me. My brain is such that it’s pretty easy for me to get stuck thinking about various things that are less-than what I might want them to be. Sometimes I can improve these things. But I can also get stuck thinking about stuff that I can’t do much of anything about. Of course, this is a completely irrational to do. No use in spending any amount of time or emotional energy ruminating on things you can’t do anything about. But if you’re like me, that doesn’t stop you.

Until the start of this year, this aspect of my psychology was one that I have managed. I never got myself out of these thought spirals, but I could tolerate them. No significant impacts, at least not…