End of an Era: On Leaving Teaching (and Jack Daniels gawd gross) Behind

If you are an OG here (thank you ILYSM) you’ve seen some of this. If you are new here, well, just, thank you ILYSM. Being a writer is sometimes cannibalizing pieces and reshaping them into something more whole, something that tells a different story. I had so much fun reading this piece at Generation Women NJ last night — was buzzing so much with that unparalleled energy that comes from community and connection — that I wanted to post it here as well. xoxo EMG

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It is 7AM and I am on the Q train heading into deep deep Brooklyn. I am running on three hours of sleep and I am deathly hungover. In my left hand, in a rigor mortis vice grip, I clasp a brown bag containing my foil-wrapped everything bagel, toasted well-done — because maybe the charcoal will like detox me or something. My right hand, propped up on the window, holds a coffee that I won't be able to stomach sipping until it’s stone-cold with its slick sheen of left-on-the-counter-all-day bodega milk oil-spilled on its surface. With each stop that brings us closer to Sheepshead Bay, my students trickle onto the train, abiding by the unspoken rule that you do not talk to Ms. G. until we are in the confines of the classroom. It is a porous boundary but it is the only thing enabling me to keep it together. My first period class will draw their favorite scene from A Wrinkle in Time, getting themselves lost in colored pencils and construction paper, while I will wait for the Advil to kick in and the Jack Daniels to work itself out of my blood stream.

I am 22, miserable — and wondering how the hell I ended teaching middle school in the ass-end of Brooklyn.

While I was a decent student in college, I lacked direction. I bounced from major to major, went to parties, ate burritos, and forgot to give much thought to what I’d be doing after those four years were over. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to be a writer with a capital W, but I lacked the confidence — and the trust fund — to ever consider that as a viable career choice. Dabbling in journalism, I attempted to Venn diagram passion with profession, but after a summer internship at the New York Daily News left me with a binder full of clips and zero interest in being a journalist, I found myself alarmingly close to graduation with zero jobs to speak of.

Around the same time, a friend of mine asked me to get involved in a mentoring program that he had been running at an elementary school. I wasn’t really interested, but ultimately agreed mostly because I did not want to seem like a degenerate who wouldn’t agree to help kids. At some point during this tenure as apathetic mentor, a synapse misfire in my brain caused me to look around the school and see a solution to my whole not having chosen a career thing. Reneging on years of vehemently swearing up and down that I would never ever ever become a teacher, how lame gross, inexplicably there I was at the 11th hour submitting my application to become a New York City Teaching Fellow and pursue the path of alternative teacher certification.

From the very first moments of joining the Fellows program, I was plagued with a baseline thrum of unease that had nothing to do with my harried two month crash course in How to Be A Teacher, in which our professors basically approached teaching as trench warfare. To be fair, some days it was.

Teaching came very naturally to me and I was very good at connecting with my students, but I could never shake the feeling that something was missing, that I had settled for this day-to-day existence purely because I needed to have a paycheck and health insurance and had failed to do any real Life Path due diligence.

At times my way of coping with feeling so out of alignment was perhaps not award winning. There was the time I threw away a bunch of book projects and blamed it on the custodians because it was June and their report cards had already been finalized and I just could not bring myself to apply a rubric to 150 dioramas on The Giver. There were the days I loudly extolled the virtues of deodorant while dousing children with excessive amounts of Bath and Body Works’ Coconut & Lime Room spray because the BO of 33 post-gym 12 year olds in one room is enough to institutionalize anyone. There were the Fridays I wheeled in the Big TV and threw on School of Rock, the thin veneer of “reading and interpreting film” giving me the freedom to sit at my desk and furiously plan my escape, or happy hour at the very least.

Listen, in the end, just, well, no one died ok.

At the time, I did not have the language to name what I now know to be raging anxiety and impostor syndrome. So I just chalked up my professional misery to my inability to get on board with adulting and apply myself to having a career.

In my 20s, I was able to displace my malaise by burning the candle at any end possible — flirting with boys, eating cheap noodles, and dancing my face off at dive bars until ungodly hours.

In my 30s, settling began to catch up to me. Settling is insidious precisely because it is gradual. As I aged out of drinking Jack Daniels until 3AM on a school night, I aged into feeling lost and even less confident about myself and my abilities than when I started. But Goonies never say die. I took on freelance journalism gigs, I got multiple graduate degrees in literature. I joined one million writing classes / workshops / critique groups all in the hopes of defibrillating a creative spirit that was professionally flatlining — each byline, each acceptance, each “OMG I loovveee this line!!” a jumper cable keeping my writer’s heart alive.

Year after year, I’d psych myself up, telling myself I could do it. Year after year I’d do anything and everything except the thing I needed to do: take a real chance on myself.

Your truest, most authentic self — the woman you are destined to be — is an irrepressible, sassypants minx, a legend, really. She will sit on the sidelines for a bit, humoring you, rolling her eyes knowingly, as you ignore and deny her. But her patience is limited. Because there will come the day, when you have played small and gone through the motions for far longer than is cute or acceptable. Your true self, she will get fed up, fired up. She will channel Cher in Moonstruck, she will smack you upside the head. You will snap out of it.

It is 9AM and I am walking into the lobby of a 5th Avenue office building. I take a sip of shitty bodega coffee and time travel twenty years. There I am hungover on that Q train, in that classroom, in that place of clawing longing — of feeling like there has to be more. I push the button for the elevator, wishing she could see me now, wishing I could tell her that she will finally quit teaching and that she will successfully career transition at 40, in the middle of a pandemic and become a Senior Copywriter for an international marketing agency and that she had just successfully pitched a client for the first time. That even though sometimes I wonder what the hell took me so long, that 18 years of angst, and drudgery served its purpose in its own way — that it taught me how to set boundaries, how to bet on myself, and the myriad reasons to never drink Jack Daniels again.