Leaving Happy

Cold but happy...

Leaving is no fun. Even if you’re unhappy. It still isn’t fun. I once left a job that made me feel terrible about myself but even leaving that wasn’t fun. It was just painful hard work.

And recently, leaving a place that made me really happy was definitely not fun. Or enjoyable. And also really hard. So I am

concluding that leaving is always hard, regardless.

But I think the big difference in leaving this time, is that I was happy. Even though I cried a few times for the things I have left behind, I’m now going a little bit crazy in isolation in England and have a lot of quiet time to reflect and look at how leaving this time was different to all the others.

Now not everywhere I’ve left before was preceded by unhappy times. I loved London. The colleagues, the students, the friends, the meeting of boyfriend and the gym (obviously). But I’d grown tired of the pace, the weather, the workload and the lack of nature. I didn’t leave unhappy, but it was time, and had been that way for a little while. Boyfriend made the cut and I convinced him to come along for the ride.

Auckland was different. It was an adventure, it was exciting, it was new and it was never meant to be forever. And on reflection, I think the ‘not forever’ thing is what made it such a happy time. I lived each day as it came, only planning for the next trip. I FINALLY managed to rehab my shoulder, realised Charlie (boyfriend) was my best friend, and slowed down and saw the detail in so many things that I would never have noticed before. Tonga has my favourite clouds. I like climbing mountains. Snow on mountains is like a little hat on each one. Charlie thinks I take too many photos. etc..

Apparently I'd taken a few too many...

What was only meant to be one year turned into an unspecified amount of ‘more’. The friendships I had begun to make were slowly getting real (I’m just not a fast friends kinda person). The atmosphere at work was so different to previous jobs and this really moulded a different lifestyle. The workload was less, and I am sure that this made me better at my job. I had more patience because I wasn’t tired which brought more creativity to my planning and energy to the classroom. And more time to plan trips. Obviously. For my teacher friends – I got laughed at when I brought piles of exercise books into the workroom, I voluntarily went into other classrooms for interest’s sake and learning opportunities (I had time!), and I only marked work I thought would be useful. Nobody questioned my work and I began taking a lot of input for ideas from the students themselves. It really felt like students and teachers were a team in the classroom. Maybe this is more for another blog….

So it was a happy time. And whenever I thought about going back to the UK I felt resentful as I really did not want to ‘waste’ all this effort I had put into creating a new life by just leaving. It’s hard to make friends. It’s difficult to adapt to a new (and really complex) curriculum. Our gym was really great (important things). Though I’m hopeful that in actual fact, it was not a waste and that it will be even better this time around (like that finished geography project that the floppy disk deleted in year 9 and I had to do it all again).

I was also concerned that coming back to the UK would mean reverting to the ‘less happy time’, as everything gets compared to the Gold Standard happy time now. Maybe it will be ‘less happy’. Starting again is overwhelming. But I think that leaving happy has meant I am coming back with a different perspective than before. Leaving a place happy, when I know it’s the right thing to do in the long term, has meant that every single memory of my time away is a positive memory. There is no resentment. There is no tiredness. There is no negative feeling because it went on too long. I learnt so much and for that I will always be grateful.

There is a book called ‘Love it or Leave it’. I’ve not read it, but I like to think you can love it and leave it and take a little piece of it with you.