On Helping Myself Be Okay

This time last year, I was a shell of a person.

As a Special Education Instructional Assistant at an elementary school, my days were filled with endless Zoom meetings, trying to support kids with their online learning. I loved the students, and getting to see their faces was often the best part of my day.

But, my mental health was a fucking mess.

I’ve always been at war with my mind, but the pandemic and my job amplified everything. I’d find myself throwing up, as if my body was trying to purge the anxiety that lived inside me.

On top of that, my asthma had become unmanageable from all the stress. I spent everyday wheezing, and managing a violent cough that left me physically exhausted. I felt hopeless.

I couldn’t breathe. 

Despite this, I showed up to every class meeting with a smile on my face, and pretended to be okay. 

They didn’t know I was barely a functioning person.

I never even meant to be working that job for as long as I did.

I started after college, when I desperately needed to start paying back my student loans. I had always loved the idea of being a teacher. I figured I’d get a year, maybe two years, of classroom experience, and then get my teaching credential. 

As I became increasingly disheartened, and frustrated with the education system, and many of the people working within it, I wasn’t sure anymore.

I wanted out.

But If I wasn’t going to be a teacher, then what would I do with my life? I felt like my options were limited by my lack of experience in anything outside of education.

I longed to explore other options, give myself a shot at trying something else, something new, but I didn’t know what or how. I stayed for 7 years.

Unhappy, and unfulfilled.

I didn’t think I would ever find the courage to quit.

The uncertainty around if and when our school would reopen was overwhelming. I didn’t want to put my family or myself at risk by working in-person, but I didn’t want to lose my income or health insurance either.

Even though I always had one foot out the door, I was still scared of fully heading out, and officially closing that door. I had no sense of what was possible for me.

But my only options would be to return to work in-person, take an unpaid leave of absence, or quit. Taking an unpaid leave of absence during a pandemic wasn’t ideal, but I decided it was the best choice for me when the time came because it meant I would still have a job.

When I took my leave, I spent the first couple of weeks wrangling with the feeling of guilt. I felt as if I had abandoned my coworkers, but mostly, the students. 

I was left with so much free time to think and sit with my feelings. Overthinking about what I should ultimately do weighed heavily on me. 

Would I return to work once my leave was over, and continue with the life I was living, or finally quit for good? 

But one morning, I noticed something about myself.

I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, and I began to listen to my breathing.

In this quiet moment of pause, it hit me. I could actually breathe okay.

This was weird. I had gotten so used to waking up each day wheezing, with anxiety sprawling  in my throat, chest, and stomach. Constricted, but also like my insides were made of spaghetti. 

But, on this day, I felt different. 

No constriction, and a little less spaghetti-like. This was unfamiliar to me. It was better. I felt more okay. 

By this point, I truly thought I had lost the capacity to feel that. I immediately fell in love with this feeling, and I wanted to feel more of it. More okay.

But how?

I’ve never known how to help myself. 

I don’t think I even knew I could. I decided that I would use the time I had away from the stress of work to try and change this. To commit to myself and honor my needs. 

I started doing all that good shit people talk about. 

It started with walks. Every morning, I’d head out before the sun came up. I’d witness the darkness in the sky shift to light. The quiet soothed my chaotic mind. It sounds silly, but with each step, I felt like I was coming back to myself. 

These daily walks gave me hope and the momentum to keep going.

I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and found myself doing Morning Pages every day. These three pages of stream of consciousness journaling gave me a safe place to dump all my thoughts, and a way to work through my troubles. As someone who lives inside their head, I needed that. 

But I needed more than that.

Eventually, I started therapy.

For a decade, I thought about trying therapy. Yet, I could never bring myself to actually do it. I had begun to think the only way I would ever get around to seeing one, was if someone booked the appointment for me and dragged me there.

I had always been overwhelmed by the process of finding a therapist, the cost and dealing with insurance. Then there was the terrifying thought of opening myself up to a complete stranger. 

After I chatted with a couple of friends about considering therapy, and hearing about their own experiences with it, I felt ready to take the plunge. 

A few days later, I booked an appointment. I was terrified, but proud of myself.

I was beginning to see that I was capable of helping myself and getting the help I needed.

Then, I opened myself up to meditation. 

Well, not at first. When my therapist encouraged me to try meditation, I shrugged it off. I tried meditating in the past, but never consistently enough to experience the power of it.

However, one day, I went to my local rose garden, and I decided it wouldn’t hurt to give meditation another chance. With no expectations, I put on some headphones, and pulled up the Headspace app. I sat on a bench in front of a water fountain and closed my eyes. 

With each breath, I felt a gentle shift in my body, and mind. Ease.

I slowly found myself feeling more emotionally regulated over time. The most regulated I had ever felt.

That isn’t to say suddenly life was all good.

But, making the effort to take steps to help myself allowed me to feel a little more equipped to move through the bad days, instead of drowning in them.

I wish I started sooner, and I struggled with feeling ashamed because I didn’t. But I have gratitude for my time away from work, and that it allowed me to find it in me to start. 

By this point, a few months had passed, and I needed to make a decision about quitting. I feared the uncertainty, and the possibility of people judging me if I became unemployed. 

My therapist encouraged me to journal about what good could come from me choosing to make a change in my employment, instead of focusing on the bad. 

As I wrote down the possibilities, it was clear.

I knew deep down I couldn’t go back to my job, or the old me.

With or without a plan, I couldn’t let fear stop me from moving on. I gave myself until the end of the week to inform HR and my coworkers about my resignation.

I went back and forth about the best way to do this, and what I should say. I decided I had to stop wasting more time, and just rip the damn band-aid off.

I typed up the emails, and hit “send.” 

I shut my laptop. 

I was finally free.

I never thought I’d get to this point.

I thought I would be stuck forever, and never feel okay.

I’m still figuring shit out and there are still times when life feels too heavy, unclear, and uncertain. 

But I’ve realized that even when we feel completely hopeless, broken, or stuck, things can and do get better. And while it may not always feel like it, we’re all much more capable of helping ourselves than we sometimes believe.

Special thank you to Dustin Spencer, Rik van den Berge, Adi Verma, Anthony Lepore, Tommy Dixon, and Philippe Izedian for their valuable feedback on this essay.