Coming up for air.

Sometimes we get a wake-up call in our life.

Since January, I have been working in a school that demands extremely high levels of planning paperwork, which undergo constant monitoring. The workload is demanding, the management style highly critical and perfection-oriented, and 100% commitment is expected.

And I've been giving it, more than I ever have before.

I've been working 9, 10, 11 hour days and more. Plus hours upon hours on weekends to do the stuff I just can't fit in during the week. I've dropped out of a sport I loved because I had no energy for it, stayed in when I needed fresh air, given up opportunities for socialising, sacrificed sleep, dropped the housework ball more times than I can count, grouched at my family, and felt like an escapee whenever I found five minutes in which to pursue my own interests. My life these past few months has been a work-induced blur.

I thought it was the right thing to do, because this job was important. It was my key to ongoing employment: getting it right, showing my commitment, being the best I could be might lead to a permanent contract, and thus stability and financial security.

So, last week it came to crunch time. I interviewed for my own position along with potentially 1-2 more positions in Key Stage One. My lesson was good. My data analysis task was rated excellent. My panel interview went as smoothly as you could hope. I know the kids, I know how the school works, I have the knowledge and experience to make this work.

But they said there was someone better. I will not be needed next year.

Oh no, feel free, I'll just stand here while you punch me in the gut.

I got the call very late at night, and my deputy head - who had said that she wanted me in the job - sounded as gutted as I was. But that's as may be. I went quickly through the stages of grief: only a little denial before anger set in, barely a moment for bargaining before I hit a huge pile of depression. But after a good night's sleep and the first few conversations in the morning, I'd made it to acceptance.

Thursday and Friday were hard. In fact, they sucked. People were either shocked, or consoling, or avoided me. I was disconnected, suffering resurgence of the cricked neck that had plagued me earlier in the week, and feeling rejected and wistful and exhausted.

On the weekend, my body asserted itself, and gave me a sore throat and lost voice: the one complaint that can truly keep me home from work. Go, body. Today (Monday) was spent largely in bed.

The upshot of all this is that it's time to take stock. I've allowed myself to be overcome by this school's demands, which are far in excess of any other school I've taught in, and do not necessarily serve the needs of the pupils any better than systems at other (often much better) schools in which I've taught. There's only so much I can do to reel it in - as long as I'm there and needing a reference when I leave, most of their demands have to be met - but I'm going to try.

I'm going to leave early enough to see full daylight every day.
I'm going to source plans where I can and quit re-inventing the wheel.
I'm going to make sure I have the energy to go to gymnastics.
I'm going to get home early enough to have some alone time every day.
I'm going to use that time to do things for me.

and...

I'm going to start working towards what I really want in life - which is not to be a slave to an education system that lets down its staff as much as its pupils. I have some dreams and some half-formed plans, and I'm going to do at least one thing every day that is a step on the road to getting there. I got out of mainstream education once, and fell back into it... time to look at getting out again.

Changing body, fixed image

My job is eating my life at the moment - 11-hour days are the norm (not counting time spent working at home in the evenings) and I still feel like I'm not getting everything done. It's intense and not leaving a lot of time for anything else. Nonetheless, I'm stealing a half-hour for blogging.

This is a post that has been nagging away in the back of my mind for some time. I spent Christmas with E's family at a wonderful holiday park which included a "sub-tropical swimming paradise" - ambient temperature 25 C inside the dome - so we all brought our swimming gear along.

My swimsuit is a simple name-brand racing one-piece, bought because it was cheap and it fitted and I had to have *something*. It's not designed to be flattering or concealing. I was hesitant about going in the pool at all, for a variety of excuses, all of which boiled down to "I don't want to be seen in a swimsuit".

On the last day, when my cold had finally subsided and I'd run out of excuses, I finally went with E to the pool. In the changing room I freaked out briefly, not sure I could actually walk out there with my arms & legs on show. E looked at me as if I'd gone a little mad, and pointed out that I was wearing a size 12 swimsuit and had just changed out of size 10 jeans. "YOU HAVE BELOW AVERAGE THIGHS! STOP WORRYING!".

She's right, of course. I may not have a super-toned body but once I looked around - really looked - I could see that it was true. For the first time in 12 years, I'm below average in weight & width. But when I look at myself in the mirror, I still don't see it.

Since late 2010 - my last recorded peak-weight measurements - I have lost 12.5cm off my waist, 18cm off my hips, 10.5cm off my thighs, 7cm off my calves, 3cm off my ankles, 4.5cm off my upper arms, and even 1.5cm off my wrists. Size 10 tops fit me comfortably, size 12 slacks fit me with room to spare, and size 10 jeans with a gentle waist are just perfect. I'm only 6.5lb away from a healthy BMI. I am doing very, very well and I'm not ashamed to point it out.

So why do I still look at myself in the mirror and imagine that my naked body is so much bigger than it actually is? How is there such a disconnect between what I know to be true about it and how I perceive it? Why do I look out of a size 10 body and see size 18 thighs in the mirror?

It's sad to think that perhaps I've become programmed to think the worst of my body and to see its most negative attributes so clearly. What is it about our minds that denies us the triumph of seeing what we know we have achieved?

Food for thought...

Pain

Who remembers those magic eye images that sprang into popularity in the early 90s? I had the original book - still do somewhere. You see what looks like a chaotic, repeating set of colours without meaning, then suddenly, after staring hard or going unfocused or wiggling the page in and out, the thing springs into 3D and suddenly you can see the raised image superimposed on the collage. Magic!

The point of this analogy is largely that I like analogies ;)

But more to the point, sometimes things that occur in our lives are like background colour, meaningless and unconnected until someone points out what's really there, and the real image becomes starkly obvious.

I have struggled with recurring neck/shoulder/upper back pain since I was a child. As a 9-year-old I was tested and prodded over bad headaches which were eventually cured with some physiotherapy on my neck. Not long after this, I suffered my first frozen shoulder, a condition that was to recur regularly (I can't think of a year that went by without at least one - some so bad that my shoulders were at uneven heights for days, this still in primary school!). I can remember from this age also having trouble adopting relaxed postures when sitting. I was stiff, I couldn't just flop without getting sore.

In my late teens I began supermarket checkout work to fund my uni years, and the problems moved from occasional to perpetual. Frozen shoulders, deep pain in my shoulder and neck joints, aches and pains. A hand injury when I was 20 exacerbated this with six months of slings and awkward postures.

Since then it's never got any better. A decade of struggling with pillows, trying out ergonomic chairs and always facing the speaker with my body because turning my head to look would get me painfully stuck that way. Dozens of attempts to sort out conditions that would soothe rather than inflame. I had physio from time to time when it got particularly bad, but with health insurance that only covered part of the fee I was never able to pursue this for very long (and besides, regular readers will know how good at asking for help I'm not). Last year a particularly bad flare-up during more supermarket work led me to spend several hundreds on physiotherapy gap payments, which made some progress with that particular crisis, but did nothing for the overall ongoing issue.

Recently, I had another bad episode, and woke up suddenly to the fact that most people aren't in constant shoulder and neck pain. They actually aren't. And maybe I shouldn't be either. Maybe I could not be.

So, I went to the doctor and got a physio referral. This physio took a proper history, felt my shoulders and neck and back, and was somewhat horrified. The soreness and stiffness is more widespread than even I'd realised, and is in the joints as well as the muscles. From the base of my skull to my waist, from one shoulder joint to the other, the whole thing is sore.

The physio sent me away with exercises, but said that if they didn't work I should come back in a few weeks and he would refer me for blood tests to look for inflammation markers; he believes that given the widespread nature of the soreness this might be something medical rather than mechanical.

This freaked me out somewhat, but I realised that since it's been ongoing for so long it's unlikely to be something that's going to progress to a serious illness. Then again, that too is daunting - if it's a chronic illness of some sort it could be grimly insoluble in its own way. But I swallowed my panic, and went off and dutifully did the two simple exercises prescribed as often as possible each day. And for a couple of weeks all was going well - my shoulders actually seemed to be getting better. Then, 12 days after the appointment, I had two days of severe headaches, and the next day got another frozen neck. Since then I've been back to square one - ongoing pain and stiffness at all times, burning pain in my shoulder, stiffness in my neck. :(

The follow-up appointment is tomorrow, and I'm trying to feel calm and reassured about what I'm going to have to do. I need to be my own advocate tomorrow: to make sure the physio understands that I did do the exercises and that the problem recurred regardless; and that I want to pursue the medical avenue, even if it comes to nothing, so that I can be sure. I will need to be firm, not be bullied, stand up for myself. This isn't easy for me.

However, I think I've reached a point where I'd prefer the emotional trauma of sticking up for myself to the ongoing pain. I can't keep living like this. I can't keep putting up with it. I can't live the life I want to live with a complex and debilitating set of muscle problems. It has got to stop.

So, wish me luck for tomorrow, as I tackle the medical profession head-on and give myself half a chance at a pain-free life.

I couldn't see the chronic pain for what it was until I looked at it from a different angle. I'm determined not to unsee it again.