Life After Full time Work Two Months On

So, it’s October 31 and I am marking two months since I finished full time year round teaching. Time to reflect on what I have achieved, learnt and thought.

So, what have the last two months been like in terms of ticking off achievements or landmarks? Quite low key if I am being honest. I have ticked off the ambition of visiting the Stone Circle at Stonehenge and that was an amazing experience. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t stepped back from full time teaching. The blog is making a slightly bigger impact now that I am posting every day. The project to analyse Christmas magazines is going nicely and I should have some really interesting articles for December. Job wise I have signed up for work as a TV and Film extra, but unfortunately have not been able to take the two jobs offered due to them being the other side of London with such an early start that I couldn’t get there using public transport. I have registered availability for Action Challenge to help set up their charity challenges. I have also started the process of training to help young people develop their reading skills.

What have I learnt? First of all, how much 30 years of teaching has taken out of me! For the first couple of weeks I felt like I had way more energy, and I could feel myself relaxing day by day. However, with that relaxation and that unwinding process has come bouts of irritating infections, increasing rather than decreasing tiredness in the mornings and a lack of energy to enable me to push through it. My old joke about work used to be that it was only tension holding me together! Well, there appears to be a certain amount of truth to that. I compared notes with a former colleague who underwent the same process a year or so before me and he confirmed that he found that first few months exactly the same. He started off with a burst of energy and then ‘hit the wall’ in running parlance. I think that what has happened is that I, and most other people in this situation, feel the necessity to immediately replace work with something else that is productive. It seems to be a case of running before you can walk. I have accepted the fact that my family history projects are going to be postponed until early 2026.

What have my thoughts been about these first two months? I have a certain amount of discomfort, not to say mild guilt, about being a non contributor to the household in terms of earning. This is something I can’t yet get my head round. I think that if I am to make more sense of my new normal I need to try to find my inner Swiftie and shake it off! I feel like I have fairly successfully been able to do much more around the house and basically act like the house husband I was 20 years ago when Janet was working and I was looking after the children. However, I perhaps need to be able to accept that there will be days when I don’t do as much, and that is OK.

So, there you have it. I am a work in progress and I need to accept that. I never expected to be the finished article within two months of taking a new job, so it was unrealistic to expect to be the finished article within two months of completely changing my way of life. I need to recalibrate my goals and I need to be more accepting of slower progress. Things will improve, I just need to be patient.

See you in two months time when 2025 will be on its final day and I will be four months into my new life. Wish me luck!