Returning to work

As a teacher I returned to work today after two weeks Christmas holiday. I know many people's reactions when they hear that I am teacher go along the lines of "Wow, you lot get so much holiday every year!" and "What do you do with all your time off?" While it is admittedly lovely not to have to set an alarm every day and to be able to be in your own home and not in a work environment; the holidays for the vast majority of teachers are spent working, be it planning lessons or marking students' work. I am not planning on using this post to defend teachers and the holidays they get but rather to look at returning to work; whether you are a teacher, receptionist, lawyer, software engineer, health care assistant, optician or you work in HR; after a break.

I have been doing my job for nearly eight years and I still feel the same after every holiday. I always have a very poor nights sleep the night before, with a million things whizzing around my brain. I am a compulsive list maker and I try to use lists to ease the anxiety but no matter how many lists I make I still can't stop my mind going into overdrive. I am always so tired when my alarm goes off the next morning but I very dutifully haul myself out of bed and launch straight into my usual routine. There is comfort from having an established routine and it makes me feel better able to face the day. When I arrive at work I always feel extremely unprepared no matter how much preparation I have in fact done. Whether it is an inset day full of meetings or a day full of lessons, before breaktime I have always made another new list as long as my arm of things I need to accomplish before I leave work that day. It is a day of hitting the ground running and trying to catch up with yourself and chasing your tail and any other cliche you can think of. Whenever I get home I always feel exhausted, as if I have been back at work a whole week, but feeling a lot better having got the first day back out of the way.

These feelings of anxiety and panic never change, no matter how long I have been doing this job or whether it is returning after a one week half term or a six week summer holiday. When I returned from Maternity Leave these feelings were hugely magnified. I spent at least six weeks before my scheduled return feeling increasingly depressed, overwhelmed and terrified. Think extended Sunday Night Blues! I am very fortunate to work with lots of very lovely and very supportive people and they were wonderful as usual, helping fill me in, providing me with resources and putting up with endless questions. I felt like I was completely out of the loop on most things but at the same time, strangely, that I had never been gone. It took more than a day for those feelings to begin to disappear. At times they are still there and I still feel like I am catching up with everything and returning to work today I felt a small amount of the feelings that I had then. It got me thinking whether it is human nature to feel this way upon returning to work or whether it is just a part of the teaching profession.

Still, another day of work tomorrow and I have a mountain of things to do. I just wanted to write this while the feelings were still fresh.