It was 6pm and it was pitch black outside. I had spent the last hour
perched on one of the pupil’s desks staring at the ceiling and trying to avoid
crying. It had been a tough day, but nothing had happened. It was just that everything
felt like it was too much. I don’t ever remember feeling so isolated.
I spoke to another teacher who very generously gave up a
large portion of her evening to talk through how I was feeling. It was after
that that realised that my mental health had deteriorated to the point that I
needed to seek professional help.
I find this quite a challenging blog to write. Since
starting therapy, I have only discussed it with a very select number of people.
I think this is due to a combination of mild embarrassment about how I felt as
well as a prevailing sense that it would be seen as a sign of weakness; the
fear of not being ‘tough enough’ to cut it as a teacher.
For me, the biggest challenge I felt was of loneliness. I
used to work in the city which has a reputation as being a dog-eat-dog
environment and moved teaching with a reputation of being a caring and
compassionate environment, but at times I felt it was the other way round. I
think being in a school environment can remind people of their school days with
the social cliquiness that this entails.
When I first started teaching like so many, I felt
hopelessly inadequate and I think that led me to start withdrawing from people.
What I did not realise until much later was how isolated I had become. I could
go weeks without speaking to a single colleague outside of my department and
over a year into the job there were still significant numbers of staff I had
never spoken to.
It is hard to pinpoint a ‘moment’ when I felt my self-esteem
deteriorate or a sense that I was alone in life. Looking back, I think that
this was a gradual process. The problem is that when you have an insecurity of
not being liked it becomes your default setting whenever you are stressed, a
habit of mind that becomes very difficult to break.
So whenever anything did not quite go as I wanted it to, the
instinctive reaction I had was ‘it’s because they hate me.’ It then becomes a
vicious cycle. You assume people dislike you and so you do not engage in
conversation with them. Through doing this they find you aloof and do not warm
to you to and as a result you do end up being alone. A self-perpetuating myth
that becomes a tragic reality.
I recall being in school for an awards evening with some
colleagues and then 15 minutes later walking home and seeing them all in a
nearby pub as I walked home. Looking back now there are a wide variety of
reasons for that. They may have been good friends, I don’t drink so they may
not have thought I would want to go etc But at the height of my illness I
remember going home feeling genuinely devastated that (in my eyes at the time)
I had been excluded.
Or another time, I decided I really needed to do something to
ingratiate more and so went along to the pub after work. I sat down for a brief
conversation and gradually people started to leave to go outside for a smoke.
Again, on a warm day there is nothing untoward about this but when you have a
heightened sense of being disliked, suddenly your project your insecurities
onto others and over analyse every moment in a state of hypersensitivity. I silently
left and never went to the pub again.
The moment when I think it dawned on me how low I had become
was when I had an INSET day at another school. Usually in school I would eat
lunch alone in my room, but this was not an option on this day as we were all
served lunch in the canteen and I had nowhere to go. I was dreading the thought
of sitting at a table and watching everyone avoid me and so I walked out of the
school and spent my lunchtime in the freezing cold not eating just to avoid
this imagined situation.
It even had an impact on me in the classroom. People always
warn new teachers that you are not their to be friends with your pupils but
when there are inevitable confrontations this all-pervading sense of being
unlikable did flare up feelings that all my pupils just hated me and so the
anxiety perpetuated.
The ridiculous thing was that so much of this was in my
head, but it had gotten to the point where it was dominating every aspect of my
life. I had stopped talking to my own friends and family and I felt completely
alone. Telling myself I was being irrational
did not make it feel any less real.
A lot of these incidents seem absurd looking back and it
seems clear now (as I am sure it does to you reading it) that this was all in
my head and not a reflection on the actions of anyone else in my life. Yet even
now as I write this I well up a little bit as I remember the pain that I felt.
What is interesting is that on the face of it, things were
going well. Lesson observation were going well, pupils were making good
progress in lessons, I was getting good feedback and had published a few
articles on my teaching practice that were well received.
But I had never felt so worthless.
Finally seeking help had a huge impact on me. Talking about
how I felt, digging deeper into why I felt this way and where these feelings of
hurt came from have transformed my life. I still consider myself to be someone
with mental health challenges but through gaining a greater understanding of my
feelings I am able to observe them in a less judgemental way and my mind is
much more at ease than at any point in my life.
The main reason I write this is that I could have avoided
such an ordeal if I had spoken up earlier. Reading people like Tom Rogers,
Victoria Hewett and Matt Pinkett on Twitter discuss their own challenges made
it a lot easier for me to speak up.
I feel a moral responsibility to also share my story so
those who are struggling can understand they are not alone. I had every
negative stereotype that a male working-class Glaswegian can have about therapy
and speaking about mental health. But finally opening up about it changed my
life.
Please do reach out to someone. If you are worried how it
will look to your employer, then there is some excellent professional help
which can be entirely anonymous. Your happiness is far too precious to be
ignored.