Rebuilding Rob

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What is a risk you are glad you took?

One of my all-time favorite quotes is “Fortune favors the bold”. I believe that, and I like to think I live by that statement. In fact, that’s one quote I would probably get tattooed somewhere on my body. I’m may have written about this topic before, but one risk I am glad I took was moving South almost twenty years ago.

X1 and I moved there for work. Teaching jobs were difficult to get where we lived at the time so we out our proverbial feelers out there to see where we could get work. One school district needed up calling me, and they offered X2 a job as well. They offered her a job because she was a strong candidate. But I like to think they offered it to her in part to get me to come done as well.

The job didn’t go too well for me and I left the school after 3 years. This happened, I think, for a few reasons. One, I sucked at my job – as most teachers (and most workers in general) do in the first few years of their career.

Because I didn’t pass my teacher evaluation, and my third year of teaching, the state would not turn my provisional, teaching certificate into a “professional” certificate. And since I was no longer certified, I couldn’t get a job at a public school in that state. I was thinking about trying some other stuff so this gave me the opportunity to look at other jobs. But the truth is, I needed to get out of teaching for a little bit, in order for me to decide how badly I wanted to stay in it.

I was also dealing with the two-headed dragon being away from everybody and everything I knew and starting to tackle the mental health issues I’ve dealt with for most of my life. This was, likewise, the first time that I had ever taken any medication for my anxiety. And anybody who has struggled with mental health knows that medication can be a matter of trial and error. Sometimes, finding the right medication or even the right dosage for you is a matter of trial and error.

X1 was about as supportive as she could be. The truth is, she was just as ill-equipped to be supportive in this endeavor as I was at trying to get my anxiety under control. I don’t say that as a slam against her. We were just people trying to figure things out. I think in a lot of ways so me losing that teaching job was kind of the beginning of the end of our marriage. We made it about another four years after that.

I said before how I’m moving back home while kid wants to stay there with her was the hardest thing I ever have, or ever will, do in my life. In a lot of ways, I think it’d be really easy for me to look back on my time down south as an object failure. Losing my teaching job really broke my spirit. Moving 800 miles away from kid one very nearly killed me. But I think I needed those experiences. I needed those proverbial ass kickings too figure exactly who I was and what I wanted.

A lot of people talk about moving across the country, and starting over in a brand new place. For most people, that’s just talk. They never really pull the proverbial trigger on such a life-changing experience. And as I mentioned above, a lot of people could probably look back on their time as a negative for me. But I have no regrets about it. As I would say in Hamilton, I shot my shot.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, 👍 comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Teacher Armor and the Saturday Clearing
• The Extra Day: A Ten-Year Memory
• Of Training Wheels and Christmas Lights
• Charity Starts at Home (And I’m Back in My Childhood One)
• The Muscle of Empathy

The article “A Grateful Risk“ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob