I’ve been overwhelmed with the emotion of it all– realizing i’m officially going back into the classroom as a full time special education teacher, the beauty in the entirety of the story, and finally being able to close a two year run-on chapter. Trying to put pen to paper has been hard because every time the journey replays right before my eyes in the best possible way.
January 28, 2021 was the first day I entered a classroom since having been in my classroom in June of 2019– two months before my second involuntary transfer and PTSD diagnosis. My first day back I wrote a blog post about it here.
Little did I know that classroom would end up being my classroom for the 2021-2022 school year. Them. My new students. They are one of the reasons. I knew the minute they started walking in there was something special about them. It was like the weight of the last 18 months had been lifted off my body and I could breath for the first time in so long. I felt a purpose again, I felt peace, I felt like I was at home. I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be. They were the first of all the reasons that I found in searching for the light in the darkness. Their teacher is the second.
Back in August 2019 at my high school reunion, I connected with one of my classmates who was also a special education teacher. We hadn’t talked much (or at all) in high school but were in the same friend group from our tiny little small town… one of us use to be much quieter than the other 🙂 We spent most of the night of our reunion talking about education and my current experience… He had moved back to our hometown and just been hired by the district. We exchanged numbers and e-mails and I had agreed to help him set up his new elementary EBD classroom. He e-mailed me a few hours later and I had planned on responding once I got home from Hawaii. I was so excited to help him get every thing set up. During my Hawaii trip was when I read the e-mail about my 2nd involuntarily transferred. Short story short, I never e-mailed him back. We hadn’t talked since the night of our high school reunion and a lot had changed in the next 18 months.
Faith allows me to wrap my head around the idea that I was always suppose to be connected with these kids in some way or another. If I was never involuntarily transferred, their teacher and I would have met up and set up their classroom and we probably would have collaborated together the entire year… but since that’s not how the story goes, instead, they became the first classroom I taught in after my life fell apart… and my students going into the 2021-2022 school year. I’m officially the K-4 EBD Special Education Teacher… I’m their new teacher.
Their “former” teacher is now officially teaching Life Skills at our high school. He’s also the Varsity Football Coach and my classmate, teammate, teacher bestie, best friend, and boyfriend. Plot twist.
Finally a plot twist filled with nothing but light and the second reason that every thing had to have happened just the way it did.
But these two new truths are not the only truths in my ever constant developing story called life. Another truth is: I am not living the life I had imagined for myself… in fact I lost the life I had imagined (minus the whistleblowing and retaliation… that I was never planning for). I am not living the life I had spent 18 years dreaming up and working so hard towards building. This is far from that life. This is the opposite. This is better. Better than I ever could have imagined– better than anything I could have ever fit on a dream board. Letting go of what I thought things were suppose to look like and embracing my true feelings has been one of the best life choices I’ve ever made. We always know the answers deep down, but logic and expectations and others opinions get in the way of living the life we know is most authentic for us.
I share that paragraph above because I didn’t know which end of this journey I would make it out on. There were so many nights where I said, “this is too hard. I don’t know if I can do this.” I tried to brainstorm different ideas for my life, my career, and my world. I cried countless nights over all the things I had lost and wrote about a hundred pages of heartfelt poems and journal entries questioning the purpose in all of this… and if it was actually a necessary part of my journey. The women who had been living through the trauma and pain… the author of the journal I wrote in all of 2020, could see that a future was there but couldn’t see what it could hold. True safety, acceptance, and belonging was already in the process of entering my life, I just couldn’t see it and didn’t know where to look in order to find it… and truth be told, I wasn’t ready on most of the days I thought I was. There’s a time for every thing and the time finally arrived in January.
If you’re going through a period of loss and constant state of unwelcomed change and feel as though your world is falling apart– hold on. Sit in the storm, let it pass, and see the beautiful backwards rainbow that forms after the clearing. It will happen for you. The light will shine again– 100%. It will. You won’t know when or how it’s all going to play out… and your new journey may have already started, you just can’t see it yet. “Believe and hold tightly onto your faith and you will gracefully arrive exactly where you’re meant to be.” It’s only after the storm has ended when you can see the path clearly– where you can find reason in what you’ve experienced. Someday every thing will all make sense and you will be so glad you chose faith over fear.
with kindness | ashley