1. My job made me miserable. Not every day. But, you know, today, for example, I have four days left there. One might think this would cheer me up, but I can't ever see the silver lining through the pendulous Eeyore-quality cloud of: I have to go to work today. Everyone loves a snow day. Not everyone finds themselves envious of this guy, because sepsis would likely get them out of at least a couple of weeks.
2. My jobs don't always make me miserable. I mean, often I think they do; this is the risk one runs when attempting to do life without the battery of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that one so clearly needs (remember when I was home with my perfect, healthy son, and started to have panic attacks about acquiring Lou Gehrig's Disease and the likely absence of any higher power?) But often there are also things to cheer me up: my office is clean and well lit, my colleagues friendly and respectful, my work meaningful and goal oriented.
Unfortunately, what we have learned from this experience seems to be that I have a disappointingly low tolerance for: messy boiler-room offices where I am literally surrounded by echoing shrieks every thirty-eight minutes; being regularly muttered at and heckled by school safety agents; receiving hate mail from teachers; being told by our school principal and parent coordinator that there's "no real reason" for my program to exist.
I may just need to give myself permission to not want to spend another minute in middle school -- a sentiment for which I have a hard time faulting myself, given that I have never met a person who did not share it. I actually enjoy middle school kids, even in the aggregate: teaching classes of them science, for example, or tutoring them weekly. I even enjoyed working in residential care, where at least one night in five, I was holding kids down as part of our agency's "crisis management" protocol. And to be honest,
3. If I had no other options, I could keep doing this. I could make the best of it and bring myself my own flowers and ignore the daily existential crisis triggered when one is literally spending two hours a day walking ranting, angry kids from one inappropriate location to where they are supposed to be, only to have said kids walk out the moment one's back is turned. But
4. I have other options, is the thing. I have options where I am doing something I believe in -- taking care of sick people -- and find challenging, and love.
Where, as effed as the system in which I work may be, at least some of the people want what I'm selling.
Where someone in my job doesn't think I'm a clueless moron with no actual authority to tell anyone, even eleven year olds, what to do.
If only the kids in question thought this, I could maybe stick it out, though I'd still be passing up an opportunity to do what I love in order to stick it out at a job that, on a good day, I only sort of hate. But given that it seems to be everyone -- from the security agents who refused to come assist my staff when a five-foot-eleven-inch child started whaling on a teacher, to my supervisor, who now is apparently looking into whether or not we have to write up my after school counselor for pulling the child off said teacher -- who feels this way, I'm inclined to say fuck it.
5. I think my boss is currently seeing the choice as: fulfill my commitment to her, or screw her over. And I guess it is that. But it is also this choice: I could do this thing, or I could do another thing where I really believe I can be useful. If not to my patients -- though why not? at least some of them must want to stop having cancer! -- then to my child, who, with any luck, will get back the mother who was able to express feelings beyond frustration and rage, and who may now be able to have his hair cut in a cuttery-of-hair, rather than not cut, because we keep believing we will do it at home, to save money, and then chickening out.
It still hurts, though. I don't know if the problem is that I'm weak for not loving a job with these particular work conditions, or selfish for choosing the opportunity to do what I love, or both. But I do know that being actively resentful of everyone who didn't hate their work situation did little to make me the friend, mom, wife, human being I wanted to be.
There's no choice between being awesome and sticking it out here. I am apparently making a choice between being miserable and desperate here, and potentially happy somewhere else. I may not like that choice, but there it is. Welcome to real life, in which no one is ever exactly the way you want them to be. Including, as it turns out, yourself.
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