Questioning

Back in October I wrote about being single as a teacher.  I considered how I’d always been a solitary sort of a person and, although I had learned to be fairly content on my own, I worried that a lack of a family life had led me to unconsciously seek alternative attachments in my professional life instead, leading me to struggle to let go when students I’d invested time in inevitably left my care.  As I said then, I’m not claiming to be any more invested in my job than any other teacher, but that lack of meaningful relationships outside of work means that (a) I’ve often taken professional setbacks too personally, and (b) when it’s come time to take a break from work, it’s left a kind of vacuum that I’ve sometimes found hard to fill.

This Christmas break has been a reminder of both of these consequences.  A couple of weeks before we broke up, I received – on a Friday evening – a emailed complaint from a parent who had wrongly believed their child’s version of events following a sanction I had issued.  I should have left it (it was a Friday evening, after all) but I ended up replying, which instead of clearing up the issue as I had intended instead led to the parent doubling down and sending further, increasingly vicious emails over the course of the weekend.  In retrospect it was a minor (and indeed avoidable) event, but the stress that built up was enough to make me depressed and miserable for about 48 hours afterwards.

And then came the Christmas break.  I’ve already written about this in two blog posts (here and here), but one thing that has struck me since then is how much I’ve just needed time away from people – how attempting to de-stress by heading back to spend time with family just didn’t work.  I was on edge pretty much the whole time that I was away, and I felt that I’ve only been able to relax since I’ve come back home and shut the door on the rest of the world for a bit.

I can trace my need to get away from people and have time to myself back to when I was a kid; I was always happiest in my bedroom, working on little projects, and I think I struggled with other kids because I didn’t like doing the things they wanted to do.  I loved rainy days, because then there was no pressure to “play out” and I could do my own thing instead.  I particularly struggled with being forced to hang out with boys, because boys inevitably wanted to play football and hit each other and that stuff didn’t interest me and made me feel weak and excluded.  I was also one of the cleverest in my class at school, which again set me apart from others. I remember there was one other kid who was at a similar level to me, academically, and with whom I was friends for a while and whom I would walk and chat with around the playground, away from the others. I thought I’d found a kindred spirit, but then one day I guess he had enough of that and just ran off to play football with everyone else. 

I wasn’t an entirely lonely child – I did find my friends and cliques, like most other people – but I continued to be interested in things that other kids weren’t and, rather than pretending to like what they liked, I preferred to spend time by myself doing the things that I wanted to do.  There was a struggle, I think, on my parents’ part, to try to make me more “normal”.  I was encouraged to spend more time with other boys and told that I needed to “toughen up”.  There was definitely an element of homophobia in this attempt to make me more masculine and more aligned with society’s view of what a boy/man should be.  It could be that I still feel some resentment about this struggle, as long ago as it was, and that not feeling able to confront my parents about it is part of why I still feel awkward around them.  I don’t know that for sure, though.

Growing older, I became more sociable, particularly during sixth form and at university where I had good circles of friends.  It was in the time after university that I started to struggle more; I continued in shared living situations, mostly, but with people I didn’t click with in the same way.  And even, I think, when I did live with people I clicked with, I wanted my own space away from them sometimes.  When I found myself getting too close to someone – and I mean as a friend, rather than in a romantic way – it would get to the stage where I wanted them to back off.  It was like I didn’t want anyone to know me that well, and that it scared me a bit when it felt like they were going to.  I wonder, too, whether this explains why I’ve been so chronically single – that I’ve been more comfortably with unrealistic and therefore unrequited crushes, rather than with someone where things might actually realistically happen.

When the opportunity presented itself for me to move into my own place, I took it very willingly, and I’ve now been living solo for over a decade – a decade during which, of course, lockdown happened and we were all forced to isolate ourselves, a time when I went without face-to-face contact with anyone for about six months.  (It honestly didn’t seem that big a change from my everyday life.)  And now I’m suddenly in my forties, and the friends I have I catch up with every few months – usually only in the school holidays, when I actually have the free time.  And of those friends, a number of them now have families of their own, and when I see some of them it’s often as part of other groups, and the visits are well in advance with everyone checking their calendars for availability, rather than the spontaneity you had back at university.  I enjoy seeing them, but again I find I can only take a certain amount of time in that kind of group before, again, I need a break and can’t wait to get back to my books and my music, or even back to my daily work routine.

So I guess Christmas, with its holiday greetings and gay happy meetings and everyone telling you “Be of good cheer”, forms a stark contrast with termtime (particularly when the preceding term has been almost four months long) and serves as a reminder that I’m not part of a close family unit or a relationship or anything else.  And when loved ones are near, it doesn’t help me relax, which by the end of last term I desperately needed more than anything else.

It also means that, heading back to school this week, I need to make the opposite mental shift, away from being in my own little world to being around others again – and bless the teenagers, but they don’t make the transition particularly easy, do they?  That said, I don’t dread returning to work after a break like I have done in the past, and that’s partly because I know now that routine and the enforced sociability that teaching brings is good for me.  But once again: is it healthy that I only now feel that sort of social fulfilment in a professional setting (and in a setting that, at times, causes me a buttload of stress)?

I imagine this week I’ll go back to school, get back into the rhythm of things again and this stuff won’t worry me so much.  I might end up looking back at this post, during term time, and feeling it was all a bit dramatic.  I also know, though, that whatever coping mechanisms I use to keep myself going, there’ll come a time – probably in the early hours of the morning, lying awake while I’m struggling to digest something – that I’ll return to all of this stuff and feel that I’ve made a mess of life, wonder where things have gone wrong, what choices I could have made differently and where it’s all heading.  And, as has so often been the conclusion to these posts, the answer will be that I just don’t know.