Why I Miss Summer Already

I’m trying very hard to have my desk not look like this. I’m succeeding more at work than at home. Photo Credit: Karl Sinfield (Creative Commons)

I love my job.  I really do.  Being back at work the past few weeks and having students in my room since last Monday has reminded me that I do actually enjoy teaching, even though I may not love all the planning and set up work that has to go along with it.

And yet when it was time to leave yesterday at 6:30am, my loudest thought was “I miss summer.”  Or more accurately, as I was telling some friends at lunch yesterday, I miss who I was in the summer.  I managed to actually achieve some sort of balance this summer: I would read, I would write, I would watch Netflix, I would go to the gym, I would run errands, all those things normal people seem to manage to do along with their jobs.  And it was fantastic.

But now that teacher-Rachel is in control, it seems like all the other parts of me have withered and died, especially writer-Rachel.  I keep telling myself that this is just normal beginning-of-year-busyness, but I’m not all that confident that it is.  A lot of the things that are keeping me at school late this week are things that I will have to do week in and week out – grading, lesson plans, parent contacts, making copies, etc.  And even though I’ve been doing things early and trying to get ahead, I still feel like I’m behind.

I don’t want writer-Rachel to wither and die.  I woke up at 4:15 this morning because I want to time to write and think and I know I won’t do it after school.  But even with that, I find myself staring at a blinking cursor, with not much to say.  It requires more effort than usual to string these few sentences together because the words and phrases just will not come.  I write a sentence, drink some coffee, take a bite of oatmeal, and try to write another sentence.  A month ago, this post would be 800 words long already and my coffee would be getting cold.

Other teachers have lives outside of school.  They have relationships and spouses and children and hobbies and social lives.  People with other types of time-consuming jobs have those things too.  How do they do that?  Is there some secret to adult life that I haven’t been able to discover?  Or is real life just like high school, where I think everyone else has it figured out, but we’re all just faking it?

*Photo Credit: Karl Sinfield (Creative Commons)

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Posted by rachelheather on August 22, 2012

https://rachelheather.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/why-i-miss-summer-already/