The Longest Journey To Happiness

2015

It was late September 2015 and I was in my director’s office, sitting directly across from her, palms sweating, stomach in knots, waiting for a third person to join the meeting. Lisa tried to make small talk, keep things light, but it was awkward. I’m not sure how much time had passed and I wasn’t sure what was about to be said. I had been walking around that place feeling defeated for the past six months and I didn’t have the energy to believe this meeting was going to change anything.

A moment later there was a tap on the door. Danielle was here and I felt those knots in my stomach tighten.

“Come in,” Lisa’s voice was annoyingly cheery.

Let's get this over with, I thought.

Danielle walked in stone-faced and took the seat next to me. She was pissed and it was written all over her face. Meanwhile, I’m sure I looked like a scared little kitten. The conversation was a blur of words. All I remember is my heart sinking. Danielle sat there and proceeded to name everything that I had been doing wrong. Some of them were minor offenses, some of them were things she’d done herself, and some of them were bold-faced lies. The gist of her argument was that I was a terrible teacher that did nothing but twiddle my thumbs all day.

If I had the energy to care, I would’ve defended myself, but in that moment I knew I was absolutely done with that place. Replaying it in my mind, I wish I would’ve quit right then and there. But I could almost hear my mother and aunt telling me that I should've waited until I had another job. That was the rule that had been cemented in my head for years, you don't quit a job until you had another one lined up. I had been trying to push myself to make it to the one-year mark in that position before I left, but enough was enough.

I had been working there for two years. Originally I was hired as a teacher assistant. It was a new school and there were some issues that staff complained about, things that didn't bother me much, but I did like to be part of the conversation. To me everything was just fine until I was promoted to head teacher. Then the conversation switched from including me to being about me. It wasn't hard to detect. The air of negativity, the whispers, the distance. I felt it. They didn’t have to tell me to my face, I knew they hated that I got the promotion and instead of offering support and ideas, they sat around talking about how bad I was.

The truth is I was set up for failure. From day one I was on my own with a brand-new group of two-year-olds. I felt the pressure to act like I could handle it. I’d already heard how they bad-mouthed Julie whenever she called for extra help in her classroom. But terrible two's is no joke. They were a tough group of kids and I struggled to manage the class on my own. I struggled just to get through each day. I was overwhelmed, stressed out, and miserable.

Danielle started in my classroom in May, two months after I'd gotten the promotion. At first, everything was fine, we got along okay, but eventually, things changed. Our relationship became strained as she became close friends with the teacher next door to our classroom. I could feel the hate emanating off her body. It was suffocating to be around her. At one point she must’ve made a complaint about me and so they temporarily took her out of my classroom. My new assistant was actually a friend and somebody that I loved working with, but parents complained about the change and soon Danielle and I were right back together.

It was that day in the office listening to her complaining about things that I either didn’t do or things that she did herself on multiple occasions, that I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.

I was lucky that by mid-October, I landed another job in a different preschool. It was better but I still didn’t like it. It was too professional and I didn't connect with any of the teachers, but I could breathe better there. The air wasn't laced with hate and negativity, it was just a bit dull.

***

Soon after getting that new job, a week before my 30th birthday, I ended my toxic relationship. Derek and I had been together a year and a half. I’d been unhappy in the relationship for a while and knew I didn’t want to enter into my 30’s with him. It was a relationship I’d entered into because I had been disappointed by too many men before him, my self-esteem was in the gutter, and he was there, giving me attention and being nice. I overlooked the fact that I wasn't attracted to him and told myself to give him a chance because he was nice. It wasn't even that he was nice, he was attentive, made me feel seen, and his interest in me didn't feel like it would waver. Up until that point, I'd only been able to keep a man for three months at a time. I thought something was wrong with me and so it was easy to just give him a chance. I felt confident knowing I was "out of his league", no way was he going to leave me. I was right, he didn't. On the outside, Derek was cool, down-to-earth and nice, but he was also manipulative and a pathological liar. He made up stories for attention and he wasn’t even good at it. He always went too far with the lie and gave himself away. For a while, I ignored it, told myself I had no proof he was lying and ignored my gut completely. Around the time I was promoted, he had lost his job, and I wound up spending much of my hard-earned money supporting him. The relationship became a burden.

A few weeks after we broke up, he casually mentioned a suicide attempt. I knew it was a manipulation tactic to get me back and it almost worked. I contemplated going back to a relationship that made me so unhappy because I didn’t want to be responsible for his death. How could I possibly live with that? Fortunately for me, he gave himself away by saying he'd been released from the hospital the next day. There it was the pathological liar I knew and never loved. Had he actually attempted to take his own life, they would’ve put him on a 72-hour watch. It was the thing I needed to hear to break free from his attempt at pulling me back into his life. I never called him out on any of his lies. I didn’t want to stir the pot. I didn't want to deal with whatever new lies he would come up with to cover up his old lies. I just didn't want to hear it. When we broke up, I only told him I needed to take time to work on myself. This was in fact true, as I’d been losing myself in all the mess for months.

***

By the time December rolled around I was single and jobless. I was let go from the new job because of an incident with a child getting hurt. It was a misunderstanding but again I didn’t defend myself. I signed the papers and left without any resistance.

I spent the next two months in bed, utterly depressed. I didn't even realize how depressed I was. I had been distracted and faking the funk for so long I ignored what was going on inside me. It wasn't until I had nowhere to be that I felt it. 2015 had been a lethal combination of a toxic work environment mixed with a toxic relationship and both of them worked together to kill my spirit. I had become a person I didn’t recognize. I'd once been a happy, positive, and almost annoyingly optimistic person. Now I stayed in my room, lights off, with Netflix on, unwilling to move out of my bed for any reason other than to use the bathroom and eat. I had no desire to shower and had to truly force myself to do it every few days. I wasn’t one of those depressed people that lost their appetite, no, I welcomed food. It was my comfort.

2016

By the time I decided I needed to do something to change my life and try to find the happy positive person I used to be it was February 2016. I stepped on the scale and was utterly shocked to see 301 lbs. I knew I'd gained weight, but I had never expected to reach more than 300 lbs. I had always been overweight, being on a diet was a way of life for me. Before my relationship, I had dropped down to 230 from 272. I could not believe I gained so much weight back.

My best friend became my workout buddy and we started going to the gym regularly. I was working out, I was tracking my food, but by the end of the month, the scale hadn’t budged. None of my efforts had helped my depression. I hated myself for allowing my weight to climb so high. I needed to talk to someone. My best friend didn’t see the depression eating away at me, I hid it. It had been there for majority to 2015 and nobody really saw it, including myself. At that point in my life, I had frequently put up personal ads on Craigslist when I wanted someone to talk to and so that’s what I did. I don't remember his name or even the details of the conversation, but I ended up emailing a really nice guy for about a week who gave me a lot of encouraging words. It was that slight push in confidence I needed to finally see the scale move from 301 to 297. Finally, something. Now there was the slightest bit of momentum for me to work with.

***

The Start Of Something Better

In April I started a blog to document my weight loss journey. It was then that something started happening. That old girl who was happy and full of positivity was starting to surface. My blog gained a small following and I absolutely loved writing it. Happiness-- it was happening again. This was the way I wanted my life to be. I wanted to focus on getting myself healthy and write in my blog and communicate with this small group of writers who were also on their own health journeys.

That blog reunited me with a love that I never had a real chance to focus on-- writing. I discovered that love back in 2011 after taking a creative writing class, but once I started teaching I never had much time to dedicate to it. I kept up with that blog for months, documenting my ups and downs, being supported by beautiful strangers. It was the first time in over a year that I truly felt good. By the end of August, I was down 40 lbs.

The problem was my family. They’d asked a few times, “Are you looking for a job?” “Have you applied to any jobs?” “When are you going back to work?”

I knew my hiatus from work would have to end.

***

And Back Down Again

In September everything changed. I had worked so hard to find that happy woman again. The woman who smiled at the little things, who loved hard, and who genuinely wanted to see others just as happy as she was. She was finally back, but unfortunately, it didn’t last. She started to disappear again, this time in tiny, almost unnoticeable increments.

I finally gave in and started a new job. Another teaching job, in a tiny daycare, not too far from home. It would’ve been perfect if it wasn’t another toxic environment. This time instead of teachers that hated me, it was a boss/director that seemed to have split personalities. She communicated in the language of screaming and sarcasm, with moments of normalness and niceness sprinkled in. There was no way to know ahead of time, which version you were going to get. But that experience in no way tore me all the back down to the person I was in 2015. I was somewhere in between, not depressed, not happy, just living in the land of okay.

In 2018 I finally found a school that I loved. Teaching was still hard. It was still stressful. But the thing that made this school different was the people. I was finally working with teachers and administrators that were amazing to work with. There was no drama. Life became very routine, and I got comfortable with the level of stress associated with the job. It was so comfortable, I hardly noticed that I wasn't living, I was simply existing.

***

Ephiphany

The feelings of happiness and freeness, I felt in 2016 had always remained distant memories. The real lessons from that year, came later, much later. I had been so fixated on pleasing everyone else, that I never stopped to really learn who I was and what I really wanted. It had been ingrained in me from childhood that I needed to go to college and get a good job. The problem is I was expected to decide on a career as a child, without having time to learn who I was, without having any time to explore what truly made me happy. I chose to become an early childhood teacher because I like children. I love so many parts of teaching but it’s a hard job. It’s not for the weak and in many ways, I think I might be too weak for it.

I had my aha moment in 2020. I was reliving the feelings of 2016 all over again. I was consumed with that happiness and freeness all over again. My school was closed due to the pandemic and I had complete control over how I spent my days. The two years, 2016 and 2020, seemed to mirror each other so perfectly. I was again documenting my weight loss journey. This time I was doing it in video form on YouTube. I loved it. The thing that changed was how I worked out. In 2016 and pretty much any time I wanted to exercise I would go to the gym. But due to the pandemic gyms were closed. I was forced to workout outside, walking around getting my steps in, running laps on the track, playing basketball at the park with my cousin. I didn’t know how much I would love working out outside until I didn’t have a choice. I felt stronger, healthier, and spending all that time outside in the beautiful weather really amplified my joy.

I knew going back to work was inevitable. Once back at work, after five months of freedom, I made a desperate attempt at holding on to all those good feelings. It didn’t work. As I walked into an understaffed and more stressful environment, I was reminded of the lack of support I had in 2015. I felt the depression slowly creeping back in. By February of 2021, I reached my last straw. I knew I wanted to live my life for me, on my own terms, where my happiness was a priority.

A few months later, in May I took a leap of faith and left my job. My plan was very vague, and I had no idea what was going to happen. So far it hasn’t worked out as planned, but I’m keeping my faith strongly intact. In a perfect world, I’d be making $1,000’s of dollars a month as a writer and getting paid to lose weight as I document my journey on YouTube. It hasn’t happened yet, but I believe wholeheartedly that my success and my dream life is inevitable.

'The new goal: Happiness first, everything else is secondary. With that in mind, my objective is to do what I want unapologetically. To make sure the things I'm pursuing in life, whether teaching, writing, selling insurance, make me happy. But not just for myself, I want that happiness to spread into something positive that helps, inspires, and brings value to people's lives. I've had a hundred different ideas over the past two years of how to do this and I'm sure more ideas will come and go, grow and evolve. I just want to make sure before I leave this Earth that I've made an impact, that I leave a mark big or small that contributes to making this world at least a tiny bit better. "- written by me, from my article Making The Most Of Life After Death.

I couldn't have said it better myself. My life centers around this goal of being able to live my life on my own terms, happy, and free. This is why it continues to come up in my writing.

After four short months of being on my own, I’ve already had to re-evaluate the plan. I’ve applied to be a part-time assistant teacher in a school near me. This is something I can do. I still love children and this will give me the opportunity to play, teach, and generally be around children again in a part-time capacity, while I continue to pursue my dreams. I don’t know what the environment will be like, but I’m going into it knowing that I have bigger plans for myself. It doesn’t feel like a step back at all, just a small detour. As long as I hold on to the vision I have for my life, I won’t be stopped.