What can I say except I was wrong? And when I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.

I was so certain that I could do it- have a life AND be a teacher. I was mistaken. I am the master of tweaking things. When I don’t like the way things are going, I continue to change bits and pieces to see what I can do to get it right. This is in tandem with doing the inner work because if anyone knows that your poop will follow you no matter where you go, it’s me. Once I’ve exhausted my options, I start to look elsewhere. I have made every tweak that I can in my education career to make it right. I’m finally giving up the ghost and looking elsewhere.

It’s done.

Today, my resignation became official, and in one month my ten-year teaching career will come to an end.

I can already hear people telling me I’m crazy for leaving a secure position without a safety net in this job market, nothing lined up. But I would tell them that I would be crazy to stay feeling the way that I do every day. To me, it’s totally worth the risk. I have no idea how, but I know I’ll land on my feet. It’s what I do. I don’t know what that looks like or what’s next for me, but I’m ready for it.

Sometimes you have to completely separate yourself from everything that’s familiar in order to see what really matters to you. In doing this, I start to see options that I threw off the table for one reason or another and start to really look at them again in a new light. Perhaps the reasons I started with no longer apply and maybe they do, but I work through each one to know for sure. And sometimes it helps you see that maybe it wasn’t as much the place but more the person you’d become within it. I won’t say the place doesn’t play a role because it does; it absolutely does. However, it may not play as big a part as we sometimes think.

At the end of the day, the questions I have to answer for myself are “what do I want my life to look and feel like?” And “which of my available options will provide that or get me as close to it as possible?”

I’ve never regret a risk I’ve taken or a move I’ve made even if it didn’t turn out because I tried, and there are some things I’ll never know until I try. There are some things I could never have figured out as long as I stayed in the same space. It was Einstein that said “We cannot solve problems at the same level of thinking that we were at when we created those problems.” But until you’re forced out of the box, it’s really hard to think outside of it.

I’m throwing myself out of the box. Can’t wait to see where I land.