It's nothing immediate either. Nothing horrific or tragic or even sudden, but that doesn't seem to matter. Instead, I'm going about my daily life just like I did a year ago, but everything is different.
A year ago, I was struggling. I'd been dealing with anxiety basically alone for close to six months. I was grieving the death of a student. I was trying to work through the semester without breaking, and I was trying to take classes to become a counselor. It was a lot, and it was a lot I had never expected.
Now, a year later, I'm still struggling, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
In less than five months, I'll be leaving my current job. I won't be a teacher anymore. I realized last spring that I didn't want to be a counselor, and I finally (after months of fighting it) figured out a few months later that I don't want to be a teacher anymore. It's not the place for me. It likely never was -- I choose the degree as a fall-back, because I was an English major in college and had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with that.
Six years later, I was finally ready to acknowledge that, while it had been a good starting point, teaching was never the place I wanted to end up.
Now, more than six months after figuring that out, I'm at peace with it.
Instead, a month from today, I take the first of my A+ certification tests. A month after that, in March, I'll take another, and then in May I will walk away from the classroom I've occupied since I was 23.
I'm unbelievably excited.
I think (believe, hope, know) I have a job lined up already, from an employer I've known for years. I am ready to move into the IT field, ready to embrace what I spent years fighting.
It's hard, almost painful, to think about now, but I originally went into college planning to study computer science. As a high school student, I'd always thought computers were interesting. My older brother was a programmer, and while I didn't really get that part of things, I found the rest of it fascinating.
But I'm a woman. The world wasn't really prepared to help me embrace that interest.
There was no huge push for women in STEM ten years ago like there is today. Oh, sure, the movement was starting, but it hadn't swept through my traditional Catholic high school, nor my traditional Catholic family. My dad was on board with me studying whatever I wanted, but my mom always pushed me toward fields that would enable me to have a family one day. I can still remember the conversation where she tried to convince me to become a pharmacist, because they could potentially make good money and work a regular 40 hour/week schedule. The fact that I'd never in my life wanted a family didn't factor in.
I ended up sliding into English as a default when my parents divorced and I transferred schools. I wanted something safe, something I knew I was good at, something where I didn't have to break free of the comfortable boundaries of my life. Too much else was moving too fast.
I forgot about computers entirely.
Two years after we graduated, Bishop moved into the IT field, and he's skyrocketed ever since. He loves it. And as he learned, he taught me. I've always been fortunate in that I love to learn, and I learn easily. The effort I'd so feared in college wasn't overwhelming because I was doing it for myself. No tests, no grades, nothing. It was awesome.
When my carefully constructed fall-back plan imploded under the realities of just how stressful, time-consuming, and frankly not fun teaching really is, I wasn't surprised that I eventually came back to IT as the right place for me.
This is not to say that it has been easy. I've been reading a textbook for the last six months -- it's 1500 pages long, full of charts to memorize, acronyms I don't understand, terms that are as unfamiliar to me as calculus would be to a dog. It's dry, boring, and more than once, I've found myself in tears, head in my hands, as I contemplate the enormity of the task I've set for myself.
But I'm learning again, and as I go, I'm remembering why I liked computers in the first place. I get to problem solve, and use all my creative and critical thinking skills to find those solutions, and I see all the tiny details of how this world works. It's so much more intricate, and amazing, than I ever knew.
So no, I haven't been writing much in the last year. I haven't read many books, or played many video games, and goodness knows, I miss those things. I want them back. Very soon, I'll have them, but right now I am changing my life, and there is no better feeling.
