glum

Half past seven, driving peak traffic, hire car full of MM boxes, dodgy back, guts roiling. I’m about to present six hours of professional learning to eight people, not one a secondary teacher the presentation is designed for.

My mind should be rehearsing the tricky parts of the day. Instead I feel depressed, inadequate, my mind focused on anything but the odious task I confront. I’ve lost my passion for a my job. Much of the professional learning I present now seems embarrassingly crass. MM has great intentions but is badly conceived and written, twelve years old, in need of total overhaul. Like me.

On 1 January this blog is about plotting my pursuit of meaning in a year starting with me aged sixty and jobless, recording events and circumstances as they unfold, their effect on me. I want to reflect on the changes in me over a year. I totally underestimate what life has in store for me.

Now, on the twelfth day of the tenth month, life has  become a very thick shit sandwich. I fell completely out of kilter, my life utterly awry. I work too hard, barely ride at all, my back is wrecked, and I have lost my good woman, my best friend, the person I want to tell when I have news.

I feel dejected and depressed, not lie-down-and-do-nothing depressed—I’m busy as—but incapable of finding the upside of anything. I’m glum; the mask of a frown shades the inquisitive look I always wore. How the fuck did this happen?

I think about my mother telling me my father retired too early, has had little meaning in his life since. She’s delighted when I get the MM job, the ‘dream’ job I struggle to find any passion for six months later.

I seem to be out of step with colleagues. I’m too frank, too old to be bothered to toe the line, to buy into the political correctness demanded by managers, government funders, and partners. Am I imagining things, being paranoid, when I feel I’ve become an inconvenience to my colleagues? I think it is better that I do nothing than open my mouth or make a decision.

 

Work equals stress. I wonder why I’m separated from my best friend. I should live with her, write and edit for my business, maintain ‘our’ house, clean, cook, garden, attend to my health and fitness. I want the world of work behind me.

This is what occupies my mind on the way to the professional learning. I arrive, unload, set up, run my session, eight punters, four primary teachers who have enrolled by mistake—they think it’s KM, not MM. I modify the whole learning module on the run.

The punters do their best to get something out of it. To me it’s the worst PD I’ve ever presented. Several times my back grabs and I gasp in pain. I’m unable to sit down for six hours. Sometimes the pain concentrates me on the task; at others I have no idea what I’m doing.

Rock on. Not.