Glowing Expeditiously

Last year was the hardest time of my life thus far and this year is shaping up to be the best. This time last year I was finally having the first REAL summer I’d ever been given because I never had to go back to school ever again. I had just quit what I thought would be my life-long career as an elementary art teacher. And now I am celebrating the first fully profitable quarter as a self-employed artist. 

I spent the last week of my June 2023 using every sick day I’d saved up to quite literally expel the years of trauma I’d acquired as a teacher. Aka pooping my brains out, crying out every remaining drop of hydration left in my body, and screaming into my pillow countless times.

I remember screaming to my mom through a fog of depression and anxiety that my body was giving up on me. I was terrified that I was finally quitting and wouldn’t be able to LIVE the life I’d put off for years. I had just come back from the ER because I went to urgent care thinking I caught a stomach bug from a student, they told me I had appendicitis and sent me to the hospital where I learned I had stress-induced colon inflammation and ulcers.

If you don’t know me well, I am an emotional sponge. I absorb others’ feelings and am constantly seeping tears when I am overfilled which is often. My personality is exactly what the American school system thrives on and devours whole. I was an art teacher at several public schools and one private preschool for over 6 years. 

My first year teaching there were 3 different lockdowns caused by gun violence on our block alone. Not just the vague “dangerous person in the area” narrative we teachers so commonly are told and regurgitate to our students. Those events left bullets on the sidewalk outside my classroom window, a dead man on a riding lawnmower across the street, and an entire grade level evacuated off the playground as bullets flew through the air. 

In the years that followed at different schools, I locked my students and myself into dark closets or barricaded corners for countless lockdowns and drills where we whispered prayers to different deities, hugged, shared our hopes for the future and sometimes never even heard the reason why we were hiding. Honestly, I don’t want to know now. I don’t need more stories or reference points. Our souls already have enough scars.

I taught at 2 of the 3 schools in the tiniest school district in my home state where my salary and supplies were almost entirely paid for by a grant and I had to prove to the board on a yearly basis why those kids deserved to continue having art education. 

I taught 9 3-year-olds by myself through the height of the early pandemic, through endless policy changes, pre-vaccines, pre-mask mandates, and had 8 different bosses in a year. 

And lastly, I taught in one of the most rapidly gentrified neighborhoods in Seattle. Our school had homeless students learning beside students who slept in multimillion-dollar mansions. 

I knew around 1,500 children’s names, stories, strengths, weaknesses, drawing styles, preferences, dislikes, favorite colors, favorite animals, voices, faces, laughs, hugs, fashion styles, interests, fears, triggers, stories etc . I loved them all like my own and I was a damn good teacher. I taught farrrr beyond the national standards. (I bet 90% of y’all didn’t even know there were national curriculum standards for art) I taught art lessons for my students that highlighted their interests, showed them mirrors and windows of diverse successful artists, and provided extra context for the lessons they were learning in their other subjects at school. I encouraged them to follow their own ideas and passions, required them to collaborate and communicate respectfully, gave them boundaries, pushed them to try new things, and watched them flourish in a post-COVID world. And I did all that as an island for years with and without adequate funding. And I loved teaching. I still do. But I couldn’t do it anymore. 

It was the lack of communication from administration, it was the lack of response or investigation from police, it was the lack of understanding or involvement from parents, it was the lack of empathy or respect from fellow staff members, it was the insanely fast-paced days with little to no pee breaks, it was the unrealistic expectation to be every kid’s mother/therapist/educator/friend/nurse/disciplinarian, it was the far too frequent staff meetings about policies and curriculums that had nothing to do with me, it was the politics, it was the limitations, it was the box they put me in. It was the toll it all took on my spirit and my body and the panic attacks at the end that forced me to step away and save myself. 

It mostly was the overwhelming lesson that no one was going to care more than me and none of the authority I was supposed to trust were worthy of trust and they were never going to provide adequate support. I could no longer live the rest of my days in the in between of what it was supposed to/should/used to be and how it actually was. 

For the past year I have been resting, unpacking, creating, nourishing, frolicking, and HEALING. Now I am a profit-making self-employed artist and I am the happiest I’ve ever been since childhood. My personality is back. I’ve made friends by myself for the first time since college, I’ve made art that feels deeply authentic, and I am a whole person again. 

I just spent this past week sleeping in a Campervan by the river at the foot of a mountain, making tons of art, having tons of brie and sangria, and chatting with a colorblind artist who had a soul-level connection to my art (me! My art!? The technicolor rainbow landscape lady!) 

I hope so deeply that if you are going through a similar job or season of life you get to have a complete 180 like I have. I hope that you have the community, resources, and time required to be you again. I want so badly for you to ✨glow✨ expeditiously!